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Look, your writing doesn’t say anything about you.

I mean, it comes from you. But whether you write something good or something bad, it doesn’t mean anything. A story isn’t a sign. It doesn’t prove your talent or lack thereof.

A story is something you make, not something you are.

To return to a metaphor I used once: think about making pancakes. Sometimes you turn out an A+ pancake, and sometimes you burn the shit out of one. You make another one, they all go in the pile, and there’s always someone who enjoys the burnt ones. You would never take a single pancake and say it alone represents your pancake-making talent forever, or that it reveals how smart, interesting, or lovable you are. We can’t judge your soul by a pancake. It’s made of batter.

‘if you caress me, you win no matter what’

NaNoWriMo can seem like a daunting task sometimes, for NaNo newbies and veterans alike. Fortunately, author Carolina De Robertis is here to share her advice on how to overcome some of NaNo’s obstacles:

Something that never ceases to amaze me about writing: it can be our greatest refuge, and, at the same time, one of the most frightening things we ever do. It’s a space that, for better or worse, is entirely ours to shape, to define. The blank page can welcome and reflect us like nothing else in the world, and yet, at the same time, all that blank space can make self-doubt rise up and overwhelm us.

I’ve written four novels now, and I can tell you that this dynamic continues on, because even when you’ve finished a book before, creating a new novel means diving yet again into the unknown. I joined NaNoWriMo when I was already a published author, back in 2011, to write an early rough draft of my third novel, The Gods of Tango. Yes, it took me four more years after completing NaNoWriMo to expand, research, revise, and polish the book. Yes, those stages do come after the sweet thrill of crossing that 50,000 word finish line. But the power of NaNo lies, in part, in compressing time to make you swim forward even though you don’t know where you’re going, to make the voice of self-doubt shut up and let you write.

So, for now, be bold.

For many, writing is an art — but you can still use science to make the most of November and meet your word count goals (and then some)! Today, writer and engineer Benjamin M. Weilert shares how he used spreadsheets to become a more efficient writer:

I’m an engineer. While most of my colleagues use this as an excuse to keep themselves from writing anything, I argue it’s the reason they need to be the best writers. The concepts engineers can create in their minds still need to be communicated to the world, and they’re sometimes concepts never imagined before. 

Similarly, how many writers are out there with an idea nobody has ever read, just waiting to get it onto the page? As an engineer, I have a particular set of skills — some would say “quirks” — that have helped me over the last eight years of NaNoWriMo grow from just barely finishing to writing rapidly and voluminously.