It's that time of year again. Thanksgiving has passed and there are no more leftovers to make into sandwiches. Christmas music is on every station and in every department store. Everything is a stress-filled flurry of trying to buy Christmas gifts without putting yourself into debt.

November is ending, and Christmas is less than a month away.

This time is especially hectic for any writers who decided to take on NaNoWriMo. We're all racing to meet the word count of fifty thousand words by 11:59 p.m. on November 30, or anyone who has already hit that milestone is racing to finish their novel.

My first NaNoWriMo has been quite the experience, mixed with days where I excelled well beyond the goal, and other days where I struggled to make my word count for the day. Some days, words came to me as easily as breathing, and other days I would stare at my computer screen or my phone and consider screaming. My fingers would hover over keys for what felt like forever, and I'd wonder what I thought I was doing trying to tackle such a humongous task.

This is where the most important lesson of NaNoWriMo comes in: perseverance. The key to any project similar to this, deadline or not, is perseverance.

Those days that I thought I couldn't do it, I could have easily given up, stating that I'd tried and had just overestimated myself. I could have started something different, stating that this story just wasn't meant to work. I could have spent the whole month rewriting and revising the same scene.

I didn't do any of these things.

I kept my phone nearby whenever I couldn't be on my computer, including on bus rides and at work. I woke up early every day just to give myself the time to write, whether or not it was a successful session. I brainstormed whenever I couldn't actually type. I planned the following scenes while struggling to write current ones. Every time I sat down to type, I pushed myself to write even just one more word than I'd started out with.

No matter what, I kept going. I persevered, and it ultimately led me to a bigger success than I ever thought possible when I made my NaNoWriMo account.

This is a lesson that I plan to take forward with me for every project that I do from here on out. When I'm struggling through writing my thirty-five pages for my honors thesis, I will remind myself to persevere. I will remind myself to push past every rough writing session, always thriving to get just one more word down. When the going gets tough, I will remind myself to keep going. I will remind myself of how much I accomplished in thirty days, and I will hold myself accountable for the time that I wasted doing things I shouldn't have done when I could have been writing.

All in all, it's safe to say that NaNoWriMo taught me an important lesson, and I am so grateful.