Things That I (Should) Have Learned During NaNoWriMo

First of all, what is nanowrimo?  It’s a month long event—during November—where thousands of people across the world attempt to write 50,000 words before time runs out on the last day.  Some people are insane and write more than that—the most I’ve seen is 333,000, no lie—but others make their goal shorter, something they feel they can actually accomplish.

I won for the first time last year, and in doing so I learned several things, many of which I was too lazy to keep up on with my writing since then *cough*

The first thing?  I learned I have to have a plot.  A pre-determined one.  It can’t be too rigid or I’ll end up thoroughly hating it before I’ve even begun, but I’m not the kind of person who can just write with only the vague notion of an end-goal in mind.  Last October I wrote down most of an outline—all I needed for the 50k in one month—and it had me dancing with excitement in the back room of the sandwich shop I worked at, where (hopefully) nobody could see me.

The second thing I was fully determined to apply to my writing that month was not to go back and edit.  Even typos.  The first day nearly killed me because my OCD was screaming at me to go back and fix the comma I accidentally added at the end of the second sentence.  Now, I’m not saying you can’t go back and fix that, but if you’re in your first draft and realize that ten or twenty of your pages isn’t quite working and you need to alter the point of view just a tiny little bit… forget about it.  You’ll never get too far if you keep editing the same scene over and over again.  The little punctuation mistake really bothered me, but it did teach me a great lesson about moving on.  I pushed forward, resolved to ignore it, forget it, and push past it.  I actually exceeded the daily word count that day (the minimum you want to reach if you want to meet the 50k by the end of the month), much to my excitement.

The third thing I learned was part of the reason I exceeded that word count.  I went to the Nanowrimo Kick-Off party my local writers community/group put together.  It was awesome.  I learned about Moon Moon the Wolf, somebody bought me a smoothie at the café we gathered at, and I ended that day with 400 words more than I needed.  It was the thought of disappointing those people that helped me keep my resolve not to give up when I got behind a few times during those four weeks.  I even stayed up until two in the morning once, typing out the last sentence with my eyes closed and trying not to fall asleep at a dresser that was serving as my de facto desk at the time. 

Fourth?  I gave up the notion that I was going to write Shakespeare.  The fifty thousand words I wrote in November was never going to be worth publishing—even if it was a complete story—but it helped me a lot.  I fleshed out characters that needed more depth to them, I learned that the character I wanted my MC to fall for was not actually what she wanted at all (she needed someone a little bit less Captain America/Boy Scout type and a bit more of a recovered Winter Soldier kind of guy), and it forced me to create characters that just plain and simply needed to exist—though they got a lot more depth to them as well.

I’m not perfect.  I’m still working on following all of these lessons and applying these guidelines.   

But eventually I will get there.  I will finish my novel, and you will see it sitting on the bookshelf someday, and if all goes well, you’ll see it sitting on the bestseller list and it’ll get optioned to be made into a movie (that would be so epic).  

So try to apply these lessons, and hopefully I’ll see you sitting at the publishing finish line.  :)