This is high school senior Celine Nguyen’s fourth year to participate in National Novel Writing Month. Here’s her week one recap:

The first week of NaNoWriMo is deceptively full of promise. I keep on thinking—it’s finally November! I have a purpose in life again! I have a much better idea than last year! And then I sit down to write and sentences have to be forcibly extruded from my thoughts. I start thinking I like the idea of writing more than the actual process.

Day 1 went well. I stayed up until midnight doing math homework, stayed up until one doing my first 1,667 words, and took a math test nine hours later. (I got an A.) Day 2 I made a half-hearted attempt to write and stalled after a few hundred words. I told myself I wouldn’t write anymore until the weekend, to concentrate on Very Important Events in my life, but then the weekend rolled around and I realized all over again that writing is, to employ the old cliché, like pulling teeth. And you know it needs to be done, but you try to avoid it by “warming up” and “starting slowly” and “mentally preparing yourself”. I holed up in my room Saturday afternoon with a cup of hot chocolate and 7,000 words to write to catch up.

I made it by Sunday morning, my sheer determination matched only by my massive reserves of junky writingfood. And my plot is—peculiarly but unsurprisingly—evolving underfoot. Ideas I had on October 31 have been abandoned. Characters have recused themselves or snuck in. Even with an outline, I’m writing blind—new ideas keep on cropping up, and the wonderful thing about NaNoWriMo is that I feel the freedom to take them and spend a few thousand words seeing if they’re keepers or not.