What I Learned From NaNoWriMo

Before I had embarked on this crazy journey of attempting to write 50,000 words in 30 days, I thought that it was sheer madness. I mean, who would be that insane to forgo their lives, their free time, their jobs, outside forms of entertainment, reading other books and their insanity for 30 days?! And how would a person even get anywhere near 50K words in 30 days??

Last year, I thought it was impossible so I didn't even try it. I thought that those people were just nuts.

This year was different. I thought, "Why not? What have I got to lose?"

So, this is what I learned from National Novel Writing Month:

1. It is possible to start the contest with only having the main character's name and the tiniest idea of what the story was going to entail.

2. If my story starting veering away from my plot idea, I didn't care! I had no worries and no stress about the story flowing in any particular direction. If my main character wanted to fall down, I let her fall with the biggest bang possible.

3. Having a specific word count for the day made writing much easier.

4. Having the graphs and widgets available on the NaNoWriMo website provided a great visual and total awareness of how far my novel was progressing.

5. Week two was a little harder than week one because I really had no idea as to what direction my story was headed.

6.  In the beginning, I was averaging 2300 words a day. This made me ahead of the game and I hit the 25,000 halfway mark before November 15.

7. If I missed some days, it wasn't the end of the world.

8. If I missed a day of writing, I still recorded at least 1700 words for that day. That meant that I had to bust my butt the next day (or whichever day I started writing again) and tackle the days that I lost before I could tackle that day's writing.

9. It does not count as cheating!  :)

10. I could still sleep, watch my TV shows and function without caffeine during the writing month. Sadly, I could not read any other novels because I was afraid that I would be distracted from my own novel.

11. It really helps if you have no children and outside activities to distract you from writing.

12. It is very easy to get drowsy and pass out on or right next to your computer while typing.

13. It is difficult to shut off my inner editor while writing. I would correct any red, underlined words that would pop up and I would occasionally rewrite sentences or paragraphs. I would not, however, take out full paragraphs or scenes.

14. Having my novel filled with grammatical errors, punctuation errors and sentences with wrong words or missing words is OK! I'm not here to revise; I'm here to write as much as I can in 30 days.

15. Having other people reading my novel as I am writing it provides great feedback!

16. I really wanted to attend the write-ins but I couldn't, for three reasons: my laptop can only survive for an 90-120 minutes on a fully charged battery, I need constant internet access, along with my dictionary and thesaurus, I cannot write with a lot of distractions.

17. I do all my best writing in the late afternoon and in the evening.

18. It is possible to write over 8,000 words in one day.

19. I tried really hard no to get too distracted. I never visited the NaNo forums until I was almost done with 50K, I didn't delve too much into the NaNo website during the month (except to check out the important headlines), I didn't fool around with Facebook, Twitter and other known time killers and I didn't play around on the internet unless it was to look up stuff for my novel.

20. If I don't reread what I have frantically written during the past days and weeks, I will forget many things, which will lead to plot holes, a change in characters or impossible scenarios. ALWAYS REREAD YOUR WORDS BEFORE WRITING!!!

21. Fifty thousand words is not a full-length novel. It's barely even half a novel! When I thought that I would be done with this book by the first week of December, I was so wrong.

I have close to 60,000 words written so far and I am still nowhere near being finished with this thing. I thought I was going to write a simple little standalone novel but now, it has turned into a something completely different; it has a mind of its own and it keeps telling my fingers to add more, more, more with no end in sight.

22. I never knew that the NaNoWriMo challenge (for me) would not actually end on November 30. I feel like the Energizer Bunny!

I keep writing and writing and writing...  :)

Until next time ~