NaNoWriMo is a Writing event that happens every November where the participants attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. It’s a great challenge for anyone who wants to finally get started on that book they’ve had in their heads.

I did NaNoWriMo for a decade and wrote over a million words in my time. This is my second year not doing it, partially because of the brain issues and partially because I just don’t need it as much to get things done. So these were some of the lessons I learned.

Getting it done fast meant getting it done

I had an issue before this where I would start a lot of projects, only write when I was inspired, and never finish anything off because something else would catch my attention. Putting the time limit of a month on writing meant that I didn’t have time to get distracted by an idea or anything else and I started getting things done! And realizing that was a great step forward for me as a writer.

I need to write out the whole story, beginning to ending

Some people can edit as they go, but I am not one of them. Getting the whole Story out and making changes as I go meant that I never lost the momentum and had more of a chance to experiment with things. I could make the change, try it out for a few thousand words, and then decide that I did or did not like it and make a note to adjust things as I went. It certainly made the rewrites a lot more cumbersome, but I enjoyed the process a lot more this way.

A loose plot outline is a girl’s best friend

I have tried going in with absolutely no clue about what was going to happen, and I have gone in with a strictly structured, chapter by chapter plot outline. Both extremes did not work for me at all. I have found my sweet spot is a list of really loose plot points that I want to hit to get from beginning to end, as well as a few really cool scenes. That way I have a lot of flexibility to change things as I go and don’t feel either lost or trapped by my choices at the start.

How to structure my notes

Because I tend to make mental updates as I went, I struggled for a while with how to keep track of the changes so that I could fix it all up and make the story cohesive when I returned to it. That meant that I had an opportunity to figure out what information I needed so that I could actually do that, from character details that I needed to remember for later to whole scenes that I wanted to include earlier in the story.

I made the workbook as a way for me to keep notes as I was writing for changes or things I wanted to get into the story when I wasn’t working on it at the moment, or so that I could remember details later.

You can make friends as an adult!

As a person who was growing into adulthood, I knew that making friends was going to be difficult the older I got. With NaNoWriMo, I was able to find people who shared my love of writing who all came from different areas and lives. It’s been the place I’ve gotten many of my friends as an adult, and I’ll always be grateful to it for that.