I ran a marathon almost exactly a year ago. Rather than spending Thanksgiving feasting on turkey and pie, I was stuffing my face with every carb in sight. It felt like the end of a long journey, like I had truly accomplished something. Even though I hadn’t even started the race, the training and journey always felt like the far greater difficulties.

A year from now, I’m not sure how I’ll view NaNoWriMo. Running further or faster than I could a month ago was an easy way to measure progress. But writing is a more subjective beast, offering no concrete evidence of growth.

My previous experience in writing muddies this further. It’s not as if I am attempting to start from 0, but rather from whatever point nearly 20 years of writing in school and work have dumped me off at. By the law of diminishing returns I would expect progress to be much slower than it was in a new field like distance running. In the course of writing 30 pieces I expect I’ll have written about 7.5k words at the end of this month- a sizeable chunk, but probably less than I wrote most terms in college. So a sharp improvement in skill feels unrealistic.

I’m skeptical that even doubling my word count would be fruitful in further developing my pen. Rather I think the unique feature of this month is the consistency of writing every day. Previously such stretches have been limited to a handful of days as I scrambled to start and finish final papers just before the deadline. But now I have maintained this pace for weeks. I’m honestly not sure whether this has benefited me, but at least it’s a different approach.