For my school's "Interim" term, I was part of a class called "WoCoWriMo". It was our take on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). What it means is that everyone in our class wrote a novel in 28 days. The minimum number of words needed to pass was 35,000 and to pass with honors, you had to write more than 50,000 words. By the end of the month, I had written 50,093 words.
Despite being over 50,000 words and the final words of the document say The End, I nowhere close to being done with the novel. It is an extremely rough draft, something that I haven't even looked at since I finished it. It has sections that I've already crossed out because I know I'm going to remove those sections whenever I go back to edit it. I'm pretty sure that most of the scenes are in the wrong order and it's very likely there are paragraphs I never finished.
But that's not the point. Even though it's not anywhere close to being done, the point of the interim was to finish a novel. I wrote a novel!
I've never finished any of my writing before. Taking this class and making myself write every single day for 28 days (I finished early, so I averaged 2,500-3,000+ words a day, including weekends), was a game changer for me. When I was little, I told people I was going to be a writer when I grew up. Throughout the years, I never was able to complete any of my stories and I thought I wasn't going to be able to be a writer because of it. But this class showed me that if I put my mind to it and decide that I'm going to write a novel in a month, I can actually do it.
Of course, it helped that I really didn't have many distractions during this month. The two hours per day we wrote during class was great too. I was able to explore new areas of my writing skills and write things I never knew I could write. For the first time in my life, I didn't write a character that was 80 percent influenced by my life. I added some of my experiences to my main character's life, but I didn't make her the ideal version of myself, like I used to when I was younger.
I pushed myself to go past the 35,000-word count and reach the 50,000 goal. I wanted to prove to myself that I was able to do it. I'm not going to say it was easy at all. There were days when I just didn't want to write during the class time, so I watched Netflix and did my writing later in the afternoon. But I made myself write at least 2,000 words on the page every day.
Because of that finished novel that I have sitting on my computer hard drive, I know that I am capable of doing so much more. I know that I can write something long and finish it. I can create characters that have their own unique voices and characters that aren't exactly like myself or my friends. It was a learning experience for sure. It would take a lot of convincing to get me to do it again anytime soon, but I'm so glad I can now say that I wrote a novel.
