Week 3 is behind me and I’m staring down the end of my 30 days of National Novel Writing Month. Well, since I’m publishing this short post on Thanksgiving Day, I’m down to the last five days including today. And I’m going to make it.

What seemed like an insurmountable task at the beginning is about to come to fruition. Two things about this task made it daunting: the end goal of 50,000 words and the necessity to write every day.

I’m not sure which scared me more.

Would I have the discipline to get up at 5:30 a.m. to write every day? Would I have enough ideas for 50,000 words?

One of my favorite quotes on writing is from Anne Lamott’s excellent book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.” It is pinned on the bulletin board in my home office so that I can refer to it often:

“…everything we need in order to tell our stories in a reasonable and exciting way already exists in each of us. Everything is in your head and memories, in all that your senses provide, in all that you’ve seen and thought and observed.”

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

We have it in us, it’s just a matter of having the discipline to get it down on the page. 

I’ve also learned during #NaNoWriMo that the only way to write 50,000 words in one month while working full time is that you CANNOT edit as you go. On the days when I have let the editor in my head pull me back to completed pages, my productivity has suffered. 

Most books on writing stress that your first draft is just an effort to put words on the page and let the ideas flow, whether you’re an outliner or a pantser. Here’s Lamott again:

“Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages … There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or so wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go…”

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

So are all of the 42,119 words I’ve written so far this month pure gold? No, of course not; it’s the first draft. But there are passages that I love. I wrote a scene this week I liked so much I kept reading it over and over and smiling to myself. And there have been scattered lines that when they flowed from my brain to the page made me say “Yes!” 

It’s for those moments that I keep writing. Because, as Lamott said: “The thing that you had to force yourself to do – the actual act of writing – turns out to be the best part. … The act of writing … is its own reward.”

And being able to say that I’ve written a novel. That’s a pretty big personal reward, too.