5 Books Written During NaNoWriMo

I’m going to let you all in on a secret – this year, for the first time, I am going to tackle NaNoWriMo. If you don’t know what that is, imagine an entire month of torturing yourself by trying to write 50,000 words of a novel by the end of it. The much lauded statistic is that you have to write 1667 words a day in order to make that target, a big ask for anyone, let alone a person who sometimes thinks that 300 words has been a good day (I write picture books, mostly).

It’s not that I haven’t tackled some big projects lately, the biggest being my 25,000ish word dissertation, which works out to about half of a children’s novel. The trouble with that dissertation was that I had to polish and make it perfect when it was still only half a story, which meant that I probably wrote about four times as many words as I actually used, and I still didn’t even finish the book. As you can probably imagine, I’ve had enough of that manuscript for a while, which is where NaNoWriMo comes in. I want to try something different, something new and I want to finish it. Even when it is inevitably a terrible first draft, I want to look at that document and know that I could now, if I wanted to, craft something half decent from it.

So in the spirit of encouraging myself and maybe encouraging others, I had a look at the Nano site to see some of the success stories, the real novels that have come out of the exercise. The results are very encouraging. According to their own stats, 449 novels have been traditionally published that originally started life as a NaNoWriMo project, along with 124 that have been self-published in some form or another. Here’s a few of those most successful books, which certainly encouraged me when I noticed them on the list.

The Darwin Elevator – Jason M Hough
Jason M. Hough’s first volume of his super successful The Dire Earth Cycle, The Darwin Elevator, began as a Nano listing, and has spawned two sequels to make up the rest of the trilogy. The Darwin Elevator spent quite a bit of time on the New York Times Bestseller List and, as well as the sequels, was successful enough for Hough to release an e-book only prequel.

Murder Most Unladylike – Robin Stevens
I’ll agree that this book probably isn’t that well known compared to the others, but it was an important one for me personally when I saw it on the list. Stevens is a first class purveyor of middle grade children’s literature, and one who is only getting better with every book that she publishes. Murder Most Unladylike is the first in a series about young detectives, Daisy and Hazel, a series that currently has six books and shows no signs of slowing down.

The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern
Morgenstern has been the huge success story of NaNoWriMo, with The Night Circus nominated for a slew of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award, and spending a significant amount of time on the New York Times Bestseller List. Morgenstern actually wrote the book over the course of three Nanos, which I think is even more of a commitment than doing it the other way; you have to be really dedicated to your story to spend that much intensive time on it over that stretch of time! Morgenstern’s success, of course, shows that all of her effort was totally worth it.

Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
I’ll be honest here – I knew that Water for Elephants was a moody looking film, starring Robert Pattinson, but I didn’t actually know it had been a novel first, let alone one written for NaNoWriMo. Looking it up, I’m kind of ashamed of myself for not knowing it existed; just like Morgenstern’s novel, this one was also nominated for a lot of awards and had that all important NY list time. The turnaround from novel to film was also pretty quick, at least in Hollywood terms, which suggests to me that it was insanely popular when it was released, and someone snapped up those rights as fast as they could.

Fangirl – Rainbow Rowell
Fangirl wasn’t Rowell’s first published novel – that was the adult novel Attachments – but it, along with Eleanor & Park, are the YA novels for which she is really famous. Fangirl was written during a Nano and went on to become, only a year later, named by the New York Times as amongst the best young adult fiction of the year. It has since spawned a standalone novel based on the characters that Rowell invented for her protagonist to be obsessed with, and continues to be incredibly popular. Rainbow Rowell is a buzzname on Tumblr, even now.

So there you have it, Nano-fighters. If these people can do it, we can do it too, right? Only one way to find out, I guess!