I’ve been writing since I was about five-years-old. It started when I was in the hospital going in for invasive hip surgery that would render me unable to walk for the next year. Writing was my escape — and it still is. It started with me drawing characters, usually with wild colored hair, and they would go on elaborate missions to save the world.

When I was finally able to walk and run and play, I would pretend to be those characters. My backyard was an elaborate universe for me; I had a year to create everything I would need to know. I swear, my neighbors thought I was crazy. My bike was a horse and I had an invisible sword and a sacred book I carried around in a ratty old bag and I would solve mysteries.

Flash forward thirteen years and I’m actually writing my first novel. I’ve taken three years of creative writing classes, college-level writing courses, and several English classes. I’ve gone from writing about those characters riding horses, fighting with swords, carrying a sacred book, solving mysteries to save their world from mass destruction to writing about a bunch of crime scene investigators solving a brutal murder in Maine. Watch out, Stephen King — I’m comin’ for you.

I’ve been writing the novel mentioned above since January 23rd, 2017. It’s November 11th at the time I’m writing this article, I’m just working on the third chapter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely proud of my progress; in fact, in thirteen years, this is the most I’ve written of any piece. I’ve been working so, so hard on this and the late nights are starting to pay off.I feel bad for my roommate, she has to listen to me pound on my keyboard late at night after all my coursework is finished. And I feel bad for my best friends who have to listen to me rant about my novel daily.

I’m actually thinking about posting it online when it’s finished (stay tuned!). But really, I owe all my thanks to it being National Novel Writing Month. National Novel Writing Month has pushed me in the best way possible thus far. I was so worried about my first drafts being perfect. I would spend so much time working on the first few pages of a piece and that’s all it ended up being. There’s time to edit later and now that I’m 23,000+ words into my novel, I’m really getting excited about what my novel is and is going to be. Right now, I’m really just focused on getting the material written.

I first heard about it on Tumblr. I have a writing blog which primarily is dedicated to writing prompts and pieces of work that probably isn't going anywhere. I decided to look into it — why not, right? It turns out, National Novel Writing Month is a big deal for a lot of people. The goal is to write a novel within the month of November, which is at least 50,000 words. Each day, there’s a word limit (you can set your own or there are some pre-made calendars floating around on the internet). If you stay true and write that amount every day, you should have your novel finished by the end of the month. That’s so exciting!

So far, I’ve written 23,117 words of my novel in eleven days; which is about 2,000 words per day. A lot of people might think that’s a lot of writing — and it is. But now that I’ve gotten in the habit of writing 2,000 words every day, I can do it easy peasy; in an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Once you get started and things start coming together, writing 2,000 words seems like nothing.

It took me almost an entire year to write the first chapter of my novel. I have friends who are doing NNWM, too; we check up on each other to make sure we’ve hit our daily word counts (which has been super motivating as well). But now that there’s actually substance to my novel, I’ve been more willing to share it with my friends; they think it’s good and want to read more. National Novel Writing Month rocks — and if you’re into writing as much as I am, I highly recommend doing it.

Before, writing my novel seemed like such a daunting task. I thought it was going to take years and years for it to be something I'm proud of. Thanks to National Novel Writing Month, though, I'm so proud of my first draft. I'm proud of my progress and I can't wait to start sharing it with everybody.