I needed a change of pace for July’s Camp NaNoWriMo session after what I’d gone through in April’s session. I didn’t want to see anything related to my work-in-progress, The Magical Vessel (TMV), and I didn’t have any new story ideas to try out. So, I switched things up by writing a memoir.
Although there were a few rough days, I met my goal with relative ease. Yet, my least stressful session turned out to be my least satisfying session ever.
What I Wrote
I came up with the idea of writing a memoir from my current reads. If you follow me on social media, you know from the screenshots of my reading apps that I’m a big fan of memoirs and essay collections. I thought it might be fun to write something in that vein.
I already had a headstart on the memoir front. At some point, I wrote 26,000 words about my anime obsession and a few thousand words about my college years. Since I had nothing to add to the anime thing, I decided to write more about my childhood and earlier school years. I also wanted to write about random stuff like my chorus years and my pet hamsters.
I chose a modest word goal of 15,000 words (or 484 words a day). I flat refused to overextend myself again. I’ve learned that it’s better for me to underestimate how much I can write than to set a ridiculously high goal that will cause me nothing but problems.
The genre and goal weren’t my only changes for the session. Aside from creating the files for each section in Scrivener and writing daily tallies on my whiteboard, I did no extra preparation–no timelines, no outlines, no charts.
How the Writing Went
The session was very mellow. I set the pace by waiting until Day 3 to write my first 2,000 or so words. From then on, I would pick a topic from my list every few days and write 1,000-2,000 words on it. When I wasn’t working on the memoir, I was writing blog posts or working on my website. It was a good balance. I never felt tired or overwhelmed.
There was just one problem: I was bored! Half the time, I forgot I was even doing Camp NaNo until I happened to glance at my whiteboard. “Oh, yeah. I guess I’d better write something,” I’d say to myself.
The memoir wasn’t exciting. It was fun reminiscing about the past, but it didn’t scratch my creative itch. At one point, I was aching so badly to write fiction that I considered searching through my drafts folder for something else to work on. The reminder that I would have to write 6,000 new words to catch up was the only thing that stopped me. No, thank you.
So, I powered through with the memoir. I ended up with somewhere between 15,496 and 15,509 words (depending on which program you ask) on July 27th. I “won” again.
Conclusion
In retrospect, the July Camp NaNoWriMo session didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment.
I walked away from the session feeling ambivalent about the whole thing. That’s not good. I never want to feeling anything but triumphant after a session. If I don’t feel like pumping Fantasia’s song “I Made It” after I validate my novel, something went very wrong.
Maybe I didn’t challenge myself enough. Maybe nonfiction isn’t my genre. Maybe my life’s just not that interesting. Maybe my heart was still with TMV after all. I don’t know. All I can do is take the advice of the show Chicago Med and take the win.