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On Reflection: My NaNoWriMo Experience

By November 8, 2016November 6th, 2017Literary Events

November is upon us and for many people that means frantically attempting to write around 1,700 words a day to meet the target in National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is a huge movement where writers can get together with other writers, receive encouragement and advice, and get the push to write 50,000 words in a month.

It’s four years since I took part in my first and only NaNoWriMo and on reflection, here’s how it went, where it went, and what happened to my 50,000 words.

Before NaNoWriMo starts, you have to have inspiration to write. I suspect that everyone has their own reason for joining in and for me it was a writing exercise, rather than the attempt to write a bestselling novel.

I write blogs and web content for a living, which means that every day I write several blogs and articles usually between around 500 and 1,000 words. A few years ago I read The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard, it’s a biography rather than an autobiography and in it it’s said that although Bernard wrote columns, they also trained him on word count. So although he could write and he could write well, he would also stall at around 1,200 words, the length of his columns. This whole passage spoke to me and I started to wonder whether I could write a book, or like Bernard I would stall at my word count.

With that passage whispering away in my mind, I decided NaNoWriMo would be a great exercise. Each day’s target wouldn’t push me too far past my brain’s ‘word count’, and the whole thing would string together in the end.

I read some NaNoWriMo advice before I started that stated editing is for later. I’ve written before, I have 38,000 words of a separate draft saved on my desktop, and 5,500 words of something else but I get really bogged down with it being perfect. Finished is better than perfect and for the first time with so many unfinished projects I started to understand what this meant. I started NaNoWriMo and my only personal rule was that I just write, I didn’t trawl back over the previous day’s writing as I’ve done previously and tie myself up in knots, I just tried to make the word count each day. This is great advice for getting finished, but as I’ll come back to later, it does leave you with a ‘finished’ but very unfinished 50,000 words.

Step one down, I am inspired! However, I’m also chicken so I decided to use my 50,000 words to write a teen story loosely based around my own childhood. After all I’m treating this entire thing as a writing exercise, and this way I won’t need to create a plot, or a storyboard, or even an ending. Using my own story as the backbone meant that I could just freestyle, and that’s what I did, I wrote freely every day and spent the rest of the time plotting the next part in my head. This method also meant I could tailor my story into a short story, in that my 50,000 words would be a complete story.

Here I am, doing NaNoWriMo and I’ve told all the Reading Addicts about it so I’m feeling a certain pressure to keep up! Here I can offer some advice, and it is, keep up. I fell 8,000 words behind on my word count by the final week and it’s very, very difficult to keep up. I felt immense pressure to finish, but it did at least allow me to prove to myself that I can indeed write past my mental word count. I can write thousands of words if I write freely and my mind is inspired and that in itself was a great reassurance.



 

 

Before you know it you’re on the home run, and as mentioned I was 8,000 words behind and trailing. The deadline gave me a great push, and while I got behind, the whole NaNoWriMo concept kept me on track better than any other writing experience has in the past. I did write almost every day, and I did finish on 50,082 words with about 32 minutes to go. I am a winner. I completed NaNoWriMo.

So what comes next? Well, thousands of people compete in NaNoWriMo every year, and while some fantastic and well known published works have come from the experience, not everyone ends up being a published author.

As mentioned, I prevented myself from editing as I was writing, so what I was left with was a 50,000 word manuscript that needed a lot of work. It’s still on my desktop four years later. About six months ago while chatting with Shan from the team we were discussing NaNoWriMo and I opened it up, the very first time I had even looked at it since I completed it. We read it together over the course of a couple of days and I spent much of it cringing.

It’s not a bad story but it would need a lot of work to make it a publishable novel, but that is to be expected at the stage of first edit, and that’s a lot of what being a successful author is all about. I suspect the success lies not in the writing but in the rewriting.

 

I didn’t start NaNoWriMo to write a bestseller off the top of my head, I did it for a writing experience and I’m very glad I did. It’s a great test of character, a great motivator, and a wonderful experience doing something with lots of other people alongside you.

If you’re trying to meet your word count on NaNoWriMo today then why on earth are you reading this? You should be writing!



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