Category: NaNoWriMo

5 Thoughts from Winning NaNoWriMo for the First Time, and What’s Next

I did it! I started this month with zero words in my novel Alchemist of Heroes, and on Saturday, I finished with 50,076 words in my novel. A few notes from my NaNoWriMo experience:

1. Don’t quit, even if the book you are writing is terrible. I spent the second weekend of NaNoWriMo worrying about what to do about my novel. My plot was stuck, I had no idea where to go from here or how to make it believeable. I didn’t like my main character because she was too passive. I thought about just starting my book over again with a different angle. But I didn’t. On Monday, I just did a five year time jump and kept going. And I started to like my book again. But I got plot-blocked at least two more times during the month, where I had no idea how to write what my outline said I was supposed to write next. One of the most valuable things I learned from NaNo was to keep writing and not worry about how it would turn out and if the writing would be worth it. I ignored self-doubt and kept going, and it turned out better than I thought. By writing through to the end, I found that it is normal and expected to feel like whatever you are currently working on is terrible. Finish it first, then decide if it’s terrible.

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NaNoWriMo Week 2 Debrief

Been feeling pretty good this week. Got tired by Friday but a break all day Saturday has me fired up to go again. About 1000 words behind my personal timeline, but ahead of the NaNoWriMo website goal, so I’ll call it even. Notes from this week:

  • The details of my magic system are finally coming to me as I’m writing situations in which my characters have to use it. I guess discovery writing does work. I’m really happy with the way it’s coming together, as one of my biggest fears about fiction writing is not having any ideas.
  • Though I love my favorite writing podcasts, I found that listening to good fiction right before writing made it easier to start. I’ve been listening to Howl’s Moving Castle this week and I’ve been much more productive. (Also, incidentally, Dianna Wynne Jones is clearly a discovery writer with a meandering plot and she doesn’t explain tons about the magic and yet it works so well. Very heartening.)
  • For writing scenes with lots of dialogue, I have found it easier to spew out a lot of lines of discussion and ideas I want to include and then go back and add in the stage directions and who says what. As I do, the dialogue also gets refined.
  • Everyone has crappy first drafts. Even Brandon Sanderson. Keep going so you’ll at least have something to fix.

NaNoWriMo Week 1 Debrief

Well, I ended the first week of NaNoWriMo with exactly 10,000 words, only 400-ish words behind my personal timeline. Doing my first NaNo has been both easier and more terrifying than I thought it would be. Easier in that laying down a specific scene hasn’t been too bad, but harder in that making up the details of the world building is still really difficult for me. More short lessons from the first week.

  • It’s true that you can do anything for 15 minutes. Sprints force me to stop thinking about things and just put some words on the paper. I’m always surprised what ideas come up when I just press forward. Then 5-10 minutes of planning in between sprints let me recover and reincorporate those new ideas towards the original outline.
  • Writing with peer pressure makes a difference. The sprints channel in our Seattle NaNo discord has been a lifesaver for me for instant competition any time of day to push me to actually get to work.
  • I broke the outline again. And again. I’m becoming more and more of a pantser every day of this NaNo. We’ll see where this leads.
  • Listening to history can give you great ideas. I pulled a Great Courses lecture series on French Revolution to listen to during NaNo, since I wanted to base some of the overall historical narrative on it. The little details, though, are proving ridiculously helpful in sparking new scenes.
  • I should have spent more outlining time defining some settings. My story didn’t have a tight enough focus to be set in one place as originally planned. I should have spent more time on inventing locations rather than world-building countries. Visualizing things in my head is not a strong suit so the locations have definitely been a struggle.