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Is it just me, or did November fly by? It’s like I blinked at the month was gone. Maybe that’s because I spent the month doing NaNoWriMo and neglecting pretty much everything else in my life.
It was worth it, though, because now I’m celebrating!
I finished the first (very, very rough) draft of a book I’ve been thinking about for ages. Since the moment I first came up with the idea, years ago, it has been tickling at my brain. Finally, I got that idea out of my head and onto the page.
I’m not gonna lie, it feels amazing!
(Stay tuned for more details about this book in 2020.)
I know that not everyone is celebrating, though. Even though there are tons of authors like me who finished their drafts, there are way more who didn’t manage to reach that goal.
Writing a book is hard.
Writing a book in a month is way harder!
No matter how many books you’ve written. No matter how many years you’ve been writing. It’s always hard. Sometimes things don’t go smoothly. Sometimes things pop up—in your book, in your life, in the world. It happens. Things never go perfectly.
But just because some of us “won” NaNo, that doesn’t mean that others of us are losers.
We are ALL winners!
No matter how far you got into your book, you’re a winner. Whatever words you wrote this month are more words closer than you were before.
Whether you go close but not quite or you barely started or you didn’t get past the point of announcing your novel, you took a step forward. Maybe you said publicly for the first time that you want to write a book. Maybe you discovered something unexpected about your story or characters. Maybe you learned something important about yourself or your process.
It’s all a step in the right direction.
You made progress, and that is success.
Personally, this NaNo was a major learning experience for me. In addition to the first draft, I’ve come away with own very valuable lessons that are going to make my writing life so much better going forward.
And I want to share those lessons with you!
1. It’s Okay to Take Breaks
If you look at my stats from the month, you’ll see that I only wrote 22 of the 30 days. Sometimes I got to a point where I didn’t know what to write next, and I had to step away to figure things out.
It was definitely better to take that time off (even knowing that it meant having to make big word counts at the end of the month) than to spend 5 days writing in the wrong direction.
I would rather bust my butt to write a lot of words that I know are right than to waste my time on words that will have to be cut and will make the overall revision process way worse.
2. Little Things Add Up
I’ve always done word sprints to help get the words on the page. Usually, I did anywhere from 15- to 30-minute sprints.
This NaNo, when times got tough and I just didn’t feel like writing, I decided to try something new. I did 5-minute sprints. 5 minutes is, like, nothing. I can do that without even trying, without having to worry about the whole chapter or the whole scene ahead of me. Just 5 minutes.
Those 5 minutes were magical.
On the days of my 5-minute sprints, I got anywhere from 1500 to 3000 words!
Then, in the last week of NaNo, when I was way behind, I tried 10-minute sprints. A little longer, but still not very intimidating.
On the days of my 10-minute sprints, I got over 5000 words!!!
Just 5 and 10 little minutes at a time.
Those little minutes add up to big word counts!
3. It’s Okay to Go Off the Path
I’ve always been a very linear writer. I like to start at the beginning and follow my characters in the story scene by scene to the end.
When I started this book, I knew pretty much what every scene in the first quarter of the book was. So that’s how I started. But when I got to the end of that quarter. I had no idea where to go.
That’s when I took my first break.
I knew what the ending was going to be, but I just didn’t know how to get there. I needed to keep writing if I wanted to win NaNo. So I decided to write the last quarter next.
Then I got stuck again. I took another break.
I couldn’t figure out how to proceed in the middle, but if I didn’t keep going I wouldn’t finish.
So I made a list. I wrote down all the things that needed to happen or could happen or should happen in the middle half of the book. I made the list over a couple of days (and kept adding to it as I was writing).
In the end I had a list of about 40 scenes/moments that I could write.
Then I just started writing them. In whatever order I felt like. It didn’t matter if I hadn’t written when came before or after. I just picked one to work on, set the timer for a sprint, and started writing.
It worked better than I could ever have imagined!
I even think it let me write better, deeper moments and plot threads and character development than if I had been worrying about making everything fit in the linear story.
The draft is a disorganized mess, of course, but I’m excited to dive back in and put the puzzle pieces together.
So those were my big takeaways from NaNoWriMo 2019.
If you did NaNo, I hope you achieved your goals. And if you didn’t achieve your initial goal, I hope you at least made progress. I hope you learned important things about your story and your process.
Let me know below how your NaNoWriMo went.
I will definitely be doing it again next year (I already know which book I want to write!) and will be using all of the lessons I learned this year.