As you can see from the graph above, there’s a slight disparity between what I had to do to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November, and what I actually managed to achieve…
I hadn’t really been planning to enter NaNoWriMo ahead of time, but I just so happened to finish the outline of my first novel around the end of October, so I thought: why not give it a try? It could make things a bit more fun and give me a boost, tapping into the extra motivation to get the novel off to a good start.
The idea of NaNo is to forget about all the usual anxieties of whether what you’re writing is actually any good or not, and just focus on getting words down on the page. Quantity over quality is the name of the game, but… well, I kind of chose to ignore that part. A few times I found myself getting stuck, or not being entirely happy with a section, and thinking I could just leave it to come back to and fix later. But that’s just not my way of doing things. The more scrutiny you pay in the outlining stage, the easier your life becomes in the writing stage. And the more scrutiny you pay in the writing stage, the easier your life becomes in the editing stage. And I really don’t enjoy the editing stage! So anything I can do to make that part easier I’m definitely going to do.
Although I didn’t get anywhere near the 50,000 words needed to complete NaNo, I still probably wrote a lot more than I would have done if I hadn’t entered it. I beat my previous monthly record of about 8,500 words, coming in at 13,000 words in total for the month of November. And I am, so far, quite happy with what I have written. I will miss putting my wordcount in the NaNoWriMo box each day and seeing the pretty graph update – that was a good motivational tool in itself. But maybe I can find something else like that, which I can use all the year round.
So, I may have completely failed at NaNoWriMo, but I don’t think NaNoWriMo has completely failed me. Now to finish the novel, edit it (sigh), and then begin the not-at-all-daunting process of trying to get it published (eek!).
