Dear all writers,

It’s that time of season again. Halloween, Thanksgiving, various winter celebrations, but most importantly, NaNoWriMo.

While most people are off getting scared through haunted houses and Halloween tricks, the true terror for our bunch is the looming aspect of frantically writing 50,000 words in only 30 days. Nevermind the obligations of school, work, family, and your social life. Your work in progress is now your baby, and neglecting it carries the same guilt. Now is the time to enjoy your pumpkin spice flavored everything and ignore the fact that November 1st is tomorrow, and 1,667 words are due.

Non-writers will never quite understand the emotional exhaustion that comes with writing a novel in a month. And your journey doesn’t even end there -- after all, you still have to finish it if it hasn’t already been done so, and you have to start on the even more thrilling venture of revising (and by thrilling I mean utterly dull and frustrating). And what’s it all for? Will anyone ever read it? Is it even a story worth telling?

It’s easy to succumb to self-pity and despair, especially when you’re at that halfway point where you’ve already worn yourself out but it feels like it won’t end.

Worry not, however -- after all, just writing a few thousand words is better than writing, isn’t it? With each, a thousand words you write is a thousand words that have improved you, little by little, and a thousand words you have contributed to the world, regardless of the audience. That’s one of the beautiful things with NaNoWriMo. It makes people feel obligated to write, and the act of writing itself, whether it be the next War and Peace or fan fiction about Sonic the Hedgehog you’re writing as a joke for your friend, inevitably increases your ability to write.

Everyone stresses practice for every skill. The same goes with writing. And if you never allow or force yourself to write, you’ll never get better. That, in my opinion, is the spirit of NaNoWriMo: self improvement as an author, and, even if you don’t write 50,000 words, the sense that you at least accomplished something. 1,000 words written when you barely write at all due to whatever reasons is just as worthy of praise as 50,000 words.

So good luck. All stories are worth telling. You’ll only ever get better from here. And if you read this letter and found that you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about: consider yourself extremely lucky. Let the noveling begin.