In case you haven't heard of NaNoWriMo, let me give you a quick overview:
Basically, National November Writing Month is the Challenge of writing 50,000 words (a standard first draft of a novel) in just one month. Despite the 'National' part of the title, people undertake this all over the world and pull together online to offer support and tips to help everyone reach that magical first draft stage.
Just ten days ago, November clicked over to December and everyone participating in NaNoWriMo breathed a proud, collective sigh of relief as they closed down their pieces of work and reminded themselves what it was like to live in the real world again.
This year is the first time I've participated in the event and while it went better than I expected, it didn't go as I'd dreamed. As much as I tried, the days drifted on without giving me any extra hours in which to write leaving me sleep deprived or behind on studies every time I managed to get anywhere near the target. Add in that the beginning of the challenge collided with my first essay submission of the year and from the very off it was a much harder challenge than I naively assumed (1,666 words a day is nothing, right? Oops.).
Still, in my determination to keep up with the challenge, I barely noticed how much writing I was actually managing to fit in with my schedule! Unfortunately for the progress of my novel, I'm one of these writers that usually has fits and spurts of writing with long droughts in between but the creativity boost this challenge gave me by encouraging me to write every day was phenomenal. While it would be difficult to keep up daily writing without both sacrificing at least an hour of your time a day and having the discipline coupled with the creativity to schedule it, it is definitely something I aspire to tackle in the future and would encourage anyone else interested in writing to practise doing the same thing if they're not already.
Another great advantage to the challenge is that it brought a lot of creative people together with a common goal, which, in the mist of uncertainty we all have when reflecting on our own creative work, offers invaluable support. One of the best meet-ups I had was the Newcastle University NaNoWriMo Write-in Night, hosted by myself at the University's Robinson library. It was a brilliant night with a wacky group of people and 12 hours of beanbag slouching, writing goodness. I can't wait to do the same thing again next year, along with adopting a few other things I've learned in the undertaking of the writing challenge!
So, what to do differently for next year?
- Schedule like crazy: Finding time to write was so hard when I couldn't regularly fit it in with other commitments. I thought giving up reading fiction for the month would allow me enough time to write but instead, it made the process a lot harder and as it turns out, it didn't save me much time in the end anyway.
- Binge-Write: Binge-writing is great but with NaNo, I found that it became less of an indulgence and more of a panicked typing session as I saw my progress bar shrink away from the goal word count line. Next year, I'm limiting myself to only one binge-writing session per week for the sake of my sleep, sanity and word count...
- A Fresh Start: One of the hurdles I repeatedly tripped over was the problem of my novel not being fresh. It meant that I'd had so many different ideas and directions in which I wanted to take it over the hazy period of procrastination (roughly two years) since the beginning of the process that committing to just one path while under the immense pressure of rattling out a high word count each day was pretty tough going at times. The challenge would have worked a lot better on something entirely standalone.
- Slow and Steady...: Another error I made was in beginning the challenge full of bright intentions and eager-to-type fingertips but then hitting creative blocks and losing steam for a few days. Of course, taking a two day break in NaNo means you're potentially behind for the entire challenge which can be a real moodkill and can throw your motivation right out of the window.
All in all, I achieved writing just over 19,000 words in one month bringing my total words on my fledgling novel up to 34,000 words - just around half the Word Count of the average Young Adult novel and 1,000 words under the average debut Young Adult novel. The progress will definitely not stop there though, only 11 months and counting until 2015's NaNoWriMo, I hope to be seeing you there!
| Not a winner this year but definitely a NaNo enthusiast, bring on 2015's challenge! |
