On crisp fall day in October I was sitting in a nearly empty room in Saint Petersburg’s CIEE study center, speaking with an amazing girl from my program about our artistic pursuits. At one point I brought up something that had been on my mind for several days, the upcoming NaNoWriMo. It was the first year I’d really thought about doing it, but I was unsure if I would have the time.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November. It's a huge challenge, well known throughout the online writing community. It asks you to commit to doing 50,000 words (around 100 pages in MS Word) of a novel and it asks you to do in one month, the month of November. The story must be your own, but you are allowed to do either an original project or fanfiction.

Despite being on a study abroad program halfway around the world, despite knowing I would be traveling the first two weeks of the month, despite it meaning I would have less than two weeks to prepare a project, I let her convince me to go for it. If I won, it would mean knowing I could do it. If I lost, well, that was however many words of a novel I hadn’t had before, contributing to my over-all word count goal for the year.

My novel was the first part of a fantasy trilogy I’d first thought up in high school, but never gotten around to writing. I knew the basic framework: the beginning, one scene from the middle, and the end. Everything else, well I would see what happened.

November 1st came around. As soon as I finished packing my suitcase for the next day, I began writing. I wrote at the airport, I wrote on the plane, I wrote on the bus to the hotel at three in the morning. I wrote in the hotel, my feet feeling as if they would fall off. I spent my birthday with bread, cheese and pear soda, sitting in a hotel room with two of my friends, writing and talking. Two days later, it was a 5,000-word marathon on a 22-hour-long train ride to Arkhangelsk. That train ride also gave me the map I still use for that universe to this date.

The inspirational view from the train to Arkhangelsk.

As I volunteered in Arkhangelsk, I spent lunches getting closer to another friend, who I will probably partially dedicate the novel to if it ever gets finished. Over lunches and dinners in stolovayas all over the city, Jelly listened to me as I spoke about characters and plots, telling her what I’d written or would write. She was patient as in this one little hole in the ground, I broke off suddenly and stared off into space as plot threads wove together in my head.

Yet I was behind on day 20 with only 19,400 words, far behind the benchmark for the day of 33,333 if I wanted to win on time. I needed to kick myself into gear. As the weather in Saint Petersburg turned frigid, I started writing close to 3,000 words a day.

On day 28, I had 40,558 words completed. I had two days to write over 9000 words. By the time the calendar flipped over to December 1, I had won. I finished with 50,078 words and a winner's badge to prove it.

Until the last day, I hadn’t believed I could do it. I very nearly didn’t. I skipped my afternoon phonetics class so I would have the extra time and ended up sitting in a café for several hours, just trying to figure out what the next scene would be. It was the same struggle that had gotten me behind in the first place as I wasted hours searching for inspiration in Revolutionary War movies and Youtube videos about swords. Writer’s block plagued me to the very end, when the final hundred words eluded me until after ten that night.

And yet at the end I had the beginnings of a novel and a long list of people to thank. But more than that, I had the confidence in myself that I could do it.

In April, I wrote another 25,000 words with Camp NaNoWriMo (a similar event with slightly different rules). I ended up writing 6000 words the last day, but I did what I had to do and finished.

Next month, I plan on writing for Camp NaNoWriMo again, shooting for the full 50,000 words I couldn’t do while writing several major academic essays. It'll be different this time. I won't have the same support, not the amazing people who listened to me ramble in Russia, and not the brilliant friends and fellow writers I had in Claremont this spring. Yet I'll have everyone electronically, and I have a few friends at home to complain to when my characters refuse to let me into their heads.

Challenges can be scary; they wouldn’t be challenges if they weren't. But when you have people around you to support you, when you have people who will tell you that you can do it, that you’re capable, it helps you get through it. Having other people to hold you accountable helps you get ahead. With the right people behind you, you can get through almost anything.

So do it. Do the things you don’t think you can accomplish, because at the end you can at least say you tried. You’ll come out of it with experience, even that which you might not have expected. I didn’t realize how much practice I would get explaining what I was trying to do in Russian to my conversation teacher and my host mom, who didn’t understand why I would spend so much time on my laptop.

For anyone who loves writing, I recommend doing Camp next month. You can set your own goal, work on any writing project you want, and you’ll have the support of the NaNoWriMo organization to do it.

You might just surprise yourself at what you can accomplish.