A Veteran’s Day NaNoWriMo Pep Talk from a Former Marine
By: Gray Miller
Tags: NaNoWriMo, Motivation, Writers On Writing, Writer, Writing

Listen To The Author Narrate This Post

Good morning, NaNoWriMo-ers.

I look out over the thousands of you here in this beautiful hell we call November, and I shake my head.

I shake my head because I see so many of you still shiny and bright with the feeling that you’ve written a few thousand words in a little over a week and you’re positive you’re going to make it through.

I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong. I’m just going to tell you that for this month of writing, attrition is the mission.

Everyone smiling here, thinking that reading this particular post is going to motivate them to do another couple of thousand words today, is not going to be sitting there looking at a pretty 50k word count on November 30th.

Casualties of the mundane

Let’s get this straight: nobody’s saying you’re not a writer. Of course you are a writer! That’s not what National Novel Writing Month demands of you. This isn’t some blog. This isn’t facetwit. Anyone with a keyboard and WiFi can be a writer these days.

This is NaNoWriMo. This is fifty-frikkin’-thousand words carved out of your skull with your own hands, pushed out into the world through tired fingers in the corners and edges of the day.

You’ve all taken up this challenge, but I can tell you now — with no malice, because no malice is needed — not all of you will make it. I know this because if you look around, you’ll see that not everyone out there is shining bright and chrome like you.

There are those who have tried to earn this badge and failed. They have felt the inexorable creep of time weighing down on them as it outpaces their word count, day after day.

They have heard the lamentations of the ones they love, crying out “What, you have to write again?”

They know the wounds of the spirit that will come no matter what choice you make when you hear those pleas, because there are two kinds of people in the world: nice people, and NaNoWriMo-ers during November.

I respect them, more than I respect you first-timers, because they know what’s coming. They have willingly put themselves on the NaNoWriMo path knowing what will happen.

They have a smile, too, but it’s grim. That mad look in their eyes? If you’re lucky, someday your eyes will look like that as well.

The few, the proud, the NaNoWriMo-ers

You may have heard that there is no such thing as an ex-Marine. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” At most, some of us begrudgingly acknowledge that we are former Marines.

You — you who brave the gauntlet of Thanksgiving with family, of the four-thousand-word sprint, of the 4am wake-up on November 29th because it’s the only time you have left — you will gain a similar title.

Some of you will earn it like I did, blearily typing an ending to your novel to the online cheers of friends who have watched from afar. Some will earn it like I did the second time, cruising easily into “The End” by November 25th, realizing that something in you has changed, irrevocably.

When you have earned the title of NaNoWriMo Author, no one will ever be able to take that away from you.

You don’t have to write another word in your life. It won’t matter, you are an author. You did National Novel Writing Month.

You pumped out fifty-thousand original words in thirty days, in spite of whatever obstacles, mundane or profound, you encountered.

It will change you. Permanently.

You will see strangers with a NaNoWriMo coffee mug, or a t-shirt that says “author”, or just a pencil icon on a baseball cap. They will see you with the talismans of this brutal month, and the two of you will share a secret smile, a nod, perhaps even trade stories of that one time you won that sprint, or how you pumped out 5k in one hellish day.

It will be something that you can share with your fellow NaNoWriMers for the rest of your life.

Semper scriptor. That’s why we keep typing, writers. That’s why articles and posts and clever hashtags aren’t enough for you. You want something bigger, something permanent, something transformative.

You are on the right path

But make no mistake: it is going to be a hard path. You will see friends and rivals both fall by the wayside, taken down by overtime or school plays or sportsball games.

Do not let them distract you from your goal. You can mourn them, but do it while typing. You can feel sorry for neglecting your friends and loved ones, but do it in December.

If you are going to join us here, with our tired fingers and our bloodshot eyes with that manic gleam of story shining in them, you must do one thing, and one thing, above all else, so that you can join our ranks come December:

Write.