Are you familiar with NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) is an annual writing contest where there are no prizes but a certificate and the only one you're competing against is yourself. The name comes from a contraction of "National Novel Writing Month" but has grown far beyond its bounds, with international reach.
Every November, thousands of writers and aspiring writers unite over the Web for NaNo. Each will write toward a goal of a written work of 50,000 words. In October 2016 (the last year for which data is available), almost 400,000 participants worldwide participated, with 34,000 people finishing the 50,000 word goal (Office of Letters and Light, 2016). The NaNo website provides blurbs of advice from writers, encouragement emails, and forums where people can ask for advice, seek information, and at times lament lack of progress.
The motto of NaNo is "The World Needs Your Novel", but that doesn't necessarily mean that the world needs your novel to be published. With Google making research easy and the boom in potential writers, those who seek an agent may never get one and those who self-publish may find their works mouldering in a corner of the Internet. Nowadays, having your work read may be more a matter of search engine optimization than the quality of your writing.
I struggle with this all the time. I do not write for the market; I write from my heart, which is deep and quirky. My heroes are pacifists and horticulturists. Nobody has rippling muscles; my sexiest hero is androgynous. I persist, however, in writing and posting some of my works on Wattpad and sending manuscripts to agents who tell me "It's not you, it's me".
I persevere because, deep down, I believe the world needs my novel. Not in a way that makes me famous (Fame actually makes me nervous). But in a way that makes people take a deep breath and think. And feel. And look at things like pacifism, environmentalism. and love differently than before. All I need to do is get my writing into their hands.
And there we are -- back to the hard part.
Office of Letters and Light (2017). Press release 2017. Available: https://nanowrimo.org/press. [April 14, 2018].
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