The problem with telling people that you are, or want to be, a writer, is that eventually someone will call you out on it.

I was walking away from my Gender Communication class one late and slightly chilly Stan State October evening when a peer approached me.

“Hey, you want to be a writer, right?” She says to me.

“Y-yeah?” I say, nervous but intrigued.

“Are you going to do NaNoWriMo?”

A pit opened up in my stomach. She had spoken the dreaded words. I knew what they meant too, and I’m sure she could see it in my widened eyes.

“I mean,” I stammered. “Like, I wasn’t planning on it, but-”

“Well do you want to be writing buddies? I need someone to check in on me, make sure I’m writing.”

“Um. I-, uh… You know what? Yes. I’ll try it. No, wait. Yes. I’ll do it.”

And thus, my fate was sealed.

NaNoWriMo is the biggest event of the year for writing nerds. It’s short for National Novel Writing Month. The goal? 50,000 brand spanking new words written in one single month. You start with a blank page, and if everything goes well, then you have the first draft of a full novel by the end of the month.

Some people stay up until midnight to welcome the New Year, or to eagerly await the arrival of Santa Claus. Some of us are such dorks that we get home from Halloween celebrations and drink coffee and tea so that we can start writing the very second the clock tells us November has started.

50,000 words is no small amount. For reference, The Great Gatsby, The Notebook, and Fight Club are all books that clock in at roughly 50,000 words. We’re talking about writing a real, actual, no-joke novel here.

But 50,000 words is also not as impossible as you might think.

I’ve been a self-proclaimed writing nerd for a long time, but for some reason I was too afraid to try NaNoWriMo. It seemed like an impossibility to me that I could write a book in one month. But I had a peer who was more confident than me, and she needed an accountabilibuddy to keep her honest, and wanted me to come along the ride.

So I said yes.

And every week after our gender comm class we’d walk to our cars and ask each other the hard question: “Did you get your words in today?”. We’d send texts to each other when we needed encouragement or someone to lament to. (At one particular instance she texted me frantically proclaiming that she “FORGOT TO INTRODUCE THE GNOMES IN MY STORY!!!” to which I had a hearty laugh about)

And you know what? It wasn’t so hard after all.

Oh it was hard, and it took actual dedication. I had a chart with color-coded word count goals and written, I blocked Twitter and other social media from my phone, I made myself read fiction at night instead of watching YouTube. It took effort.

But it was doable.

Come the end of November 2019, I had my very own new novel, and I loved it like a child. Oh, and I had a new friend too 🙂

As I’m writing this, it’s the 9th of November 2020, and I’ve written 19,750 words for NaNo 2020. And you can bet your darn patootie that I’m going to have 50,000 words before this month is over.

I had the potential in me, I just needed someone to come and call me out on it. College (and Stan State!) is a fantastic place to find likeminded people that will challenge you to become the you that you’ve always wanted to be.