There are so many people on my social feeds right now talking about how much they miss writing now that NaNoWriMo is over and I know this is crazy but hear me out… what if you just kept writing?
Like, what if you didn’t stop just because we flipped the calendar page? Kept putting words down even though it’s not the special month designated for writing.
What if you stopped treating the end of NaNoWriMo as a finish line and instead as a door to the rest of your writing life? You can call it WriLi or NaNoLifeMo or something if it’s the weird acronyms you’re here for. You can even keep inputting your word count everyday if that’s your bliss.
No one’s saying you have to keep up the same pace year round. Or that you can’t take a break here and there. But there are people every year who write every day of November and make all this forward progress on their writing goals in those 30 days but then do absolutely nothing with that the entire rest of the year and it absolutely boggles my mind.
You’ve got this writing momentum right now… why would you stop?
I mean. You’re out there, complaining about it, sad because the writing is over and… the writing does not need to be over. The writing go on as long as you want it to. The writing can be all the time forever for the entire rest of your life because GUESS WHAT that’s what writers do. They write. Yes, even in months other than November. Shocking, I know, but true.
So, like…
If it feels weird that you aren’t writing right now…
If you miss writing since NaNoWriMo is over…
If you enjoyed writing last month and had room for it in your life…
Then why wouldn’t you just keep writing?
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
