The Power of a Writing Community: NaNoWriMo Explained to Introverts

Sharing our writing journey with other writers is so empowering.

Writers — like readers — are introverts.

Right?

We spend a lot of our time with fictional people, so we don’t have to deal with real people. Writing is the best activity. It’s us, our computer, our stories, our characters. For hours on end.

Nothing else.

Errr, well…

I mean, you can choose to go this route. It’s perfectly acceptable. But honestly, it isn’t a way I’d advocate. Because really, mingling with people, and especially with other writers, is the best thing that a writer can do for themselves and for their stories.

It was NaNoWriMo that taught me this.

NaNoWriMo isn’t about the challenge. It’s about the community

When I discovered NaNoWriMo (like fifteen years ago, but don’t tell anyone!), I immediately fell for the challenge. That’s just me. I can hardly resist a challenge. So I want into it headlong.

By myself. I didn’t know any other writer who did it and anyway what was the point? The challenge was my challenge, right? It was my story.

It worked. I won the first two NaNos solo, writing my story in front of the computer and never looking up from the keyboard.

Then in the third year, I decided to go exploring the site a bit more — and I discovered the forums.

Now. I’m not a forums gal at all. I seldom frequent them. They usually don’t work very well for me. But on this occasion it was different. The forums opened a new door that allowed me to see other people who were doing the same thing I was doing at the same exact time. They weren’t strangers. They were travel mates.

It was a game-changer.

Community. Cheering. Sharing. Enjoying ourselves. That’s the NaNoWriMo experience.

It was an author friend of mine that pulled me in. We started out exchanging word counts and challenging ourselves to do ever better. Then one day, she mentioned she was doing sprints with other authors.

Sprints?

I went investigating, and that’s how I discovered the forums.

So I met other authors. Authors that were writing the same kind of stories I was writing. We start to talk. I saw that I could answer some of the questions other writers were asking. I could help, I mean.

It was in these forums that I first touch what a community of authors truly is

A place where you can ask for help

I learned a lot on these forums. Reading what other writers asked in my same area of interest and the answers other writers where writing, made me see the subject I was researching in a new way.

After a while, I thought I could ask my questions too and see whether someone could answer. I received information on the NaNoWriMo forums I have a hard time figuring out where else I could have found it. Sure, we could go off searching by ourselves, but talking to a real person, if only online, rather than reading some piece of info in a book or on the net it’s always much more enriching. The thing you can learn talking to people!

We can cheer each other on

Writing is hard. Writing a novel in thirty days is really hard. Everybody who tries it knows it (except those who reach the 50.000 words in three days, then go on to the hundreds of thousands of words… but then at least we learn it is possible). It involves all sorts of insecurities, tiredness, fears of inadequacy.

In a writer’s community, we can share these feelings and know that they will be understood. We can share them, and let them go, and by sharing, we weaken them.

Our writer’s community can be our courage. It can be the difference between finishing a project and abandoning it.

Competition, when it’s healthy, is a chance to grow

Have you ever tried a NaNoWriMo sprint? It’s great fun. A group of writers gather at an appointed time. We set a timer. And everybody tries to write as many words as they can in that time.

Quantity over quality? It may be. But it’s also a great way to motivate us. It’s a way to churn out words, words that then we’ll be able to edit. It’s a chance to make our story move when we are stuck. A to let ourselves write things we’d never write under our inner editor strict watch.

To me, it also means motivation because I’m competing against other writers like me and I’m unconsciously comparing me to them. Not to the mega-famous bestseller authors who are probably unreachable, but to other writers scrapping up their time to write in between work, family and social life. We are all doing the same thing, we all have mostly the same conditions and possibilities, and it’s warm-heartening to see what others can achieve. It means I can too.

Being part of a community of writers taught me that, as valuable as my time is, sharing it with other writers make it even more valuable and enriching. When we’re part of a community, we become more than we are when alone. We have a chance to absorb what others have to offer and to offer what we have.

If nothing else, NaNoWriMo has made me a happier author and in a way, a richer one.

Sarah Zama wrote her first story when she was nine. Fourteen years ago, when she started her job in a bookshop, she discovered books that address the structure of a story and she became addicted to them. Today, she’s a dieselpunk author who writes fantasy stories historically set in the 1920s. Her life-long interest in Tolkien has turned quite nerdy recently. She writes about all her passions on her blog https://theoldshelter.com/