To achieve victory during National Novel Writing Month, a writer must write 50 thousand words of a story within the month of November. I’ll be honest, I was sure I could get it done with time to spare. After all, I was prepared and churning out only 50k at less than 1700 words a day seemed like a piece of cake.
I started out strong writing more than the required number of words during the first week of November. In fact, I was on track to finish in half the allotted time! Of course life has a way of creeping in and wreaking havoc on the best laid plans. Commitments to family, friends, and church often pulled me from my keyboard and there were days where my word count was next to nothing. Never the less, I persisted!
From November 1st through the 29th, I made progress every day. Some days I had nothing but time and the words flowed effortlessly; others I had just a few minutes to sit down and craft my story and nothing sounded good. As the days and weeks passed I began to wonder if I’d ever get to the 50k mark.
I outlined my novel prior to NaNo. I had detailed character biographies and a thorough understanding of the story I wanted to tell. Half way through week two I reached the end of my outline and the end of my first pass of the novel. I had just over 23k words. How was I going to reach 50k for the month if I was already at the end and not even half way there? I persisted, and it wasn’t easy.
I went back to the beginning of my story and cleaned up the language, added more description, slowed some of the scenes down a bit so my readers would gain better insight into my characters. With pass 2 completed I was somewhere around 35k words. Still not at the 50k mark but getting closer.
With pass three I looked at every storyline to make sure each had the attention it needed. I added scenes to show insight and change as my characters went through their plot points. I think I finished pass three somewhere near 41k words.
By this time I was in the last week of November and I needed nearly 2k a day to finish on time. I slowed the action scenes down and dove into my characters heads so my readers would feel everything my characters were feeling. 48.5k. I rewrote a major plot point, 49k, I added a scene 49.5k. I went back to the beginning again and worked through each chapter looking for places to enhance description or add witty dialog. Finally, on November 29th I reached 50,006 words. I kid you not; I finished the sentence and closed the document. My creative brain was zapped.
This is not my process. This is not how I usually write my stories. I outline then I write the sections that are most fun for me. Sometimes I can write anywhere from 3k to 5k words a day and when I get bored or creatively tapped out, I step away for days, weeks, sometimes months or even years before returning to a story. When I come back to it, I get excited again and spend several days adding 15-25k more to the story and again I leave it to stew until I’m ready to return. My usual method doesn’t yield quick results and it also explains why so few of my stories ever reach completion.
NaNoWriMo was a struggle for me, not because I couldn’t discipline myself to write every day, that was the easy part. It was hard to stay in the same story for a full month. To not only write it but to revise and edit along the way to get to a solid first draft was more challenging than I thought it would be. I learned a lot about how I write, how I should write, and how I can make it easier on myself in the future! I’m not sure I will do NaNo again but I believe in this case, it was definitely worth it. I have a completed first draft of a novel and that’s something I didn’t have a month ago!
End Transmission