I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo for several years now, and “won” all but one of them. And every year I come away with a new understanding of myself, my writing, or something else.

This year was unlike any year in the past. The words came easily most days. I would sit down at my computer, spill out my two thousand words for the day in an hour or two, and then walk away to do something else. Play games. Watch TV. Go out with my boyfriend. This year, for the very first time, it is December and I am not burned out from writing.

Here is December for the last two years. See how, after I write 50,000 words in November, the numbers are almost non existent? Many days with no writing, and on the few days I did write I didn’t write much.

I always thought this was the cost of NaNoWriMo… the December burn out. I thought that because I wrote so much in November my brain needed a rest. But no… this was the cost of not making writing a habit.

Think of it like swimming. If you are not a swimmer, and usually just dip your toe in the water, then take a day to swim across a lake, you’re going to be tired the next day. You might even fail in your swimming and drown on the way across the lake. If your only a part time swimmer then you’ll have a good chance of getting across the lake, but you’ll feel like “I’ve done my swimming for the month” and thew next month you probably won’t swim much.

But if you swim all the time, and your body and mind are focused on swimming, then you’ll just keep swimming. Swam across the lake yesterday? Okay, what about today. That was yesterday, this is today, I need to swim today.

Writing is something I do, almost every day now, and I am not slowing down because I swam across the lake last month. I feel like 1500 words a day is a great place to start, 2000 on days when I’m pushing myself. That’s another 45,000 words a month, every month. I’ll be happy with 30k for a while. But that is more than I’ve ever written in a month outside of NaNoWriMo before. And yet… it seems right to me.

Something’s changed in the way I think about writing. It’s taken a few years, and lots of encouragement from those around me. But I feel like a writer now. Like I’m incomplete if I haven’t written something for the day. And that attitude shift…THAT is everything. That is something HUGE and I can’t wait to see how it plays out in the next year.