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.
