5 Things I Learned from NanoWriMo

50,000 words. That’s how much I’ve written this month. Okay, actually it’s a little over 50,000, but still. As you’ve probably guessed, I’ve been participating in NanoWriMo and it’s been an enjoyable ride. It’s also been a headache, frustrating, and a tad bit stressful trying to keep up with the word count goal. But hey, that’s writing for you. Actually, NanoWriMo has been pretty enlightening for me. I’ve realized some things about myself as a writer and about writing in general, and I thought I’d share it with all of you. So here are five things that I’ve learned from NanoWriMo:

1.) I Can Write More Than I Think I Can

This was probably my biggest takeaway from this month. In order to get 50,000 words written in a month, you have to strive to get at least 2,000 words a day. Which doesn’t seem like a lot, but some days 2,000 words can feel like 20,000. When it comes to writing, there are days when it feels like there are no limits, while others feel like you’re walking through quicksand. Writing 50,00 words in one month seemed like a reach to me, because it’s taken me longer to write that before. But this month I got in a rhythm that helped me keep up with the goal, and I could reach the point where I could write 10,000 words in a week. There were still days where I wasn’t very productive, but I used my writing pattern to force myself to catch back up. I’ve realized from this if I can keep up with this schedule I’ve created, I’ll be able to finish my first drafts a whole lot faster than I would if I was writing at my previous pace.

2.) I Am Terrible at Following an Outline

I’m honestly not much of a planner, even though I try to be. For my Nano novel, I Choose You, I wrote out a general outline of what I wanted to happen in each part of the book. I figured that it would help me keep on track with everything and help me know what I should do in the story. And it worked. For the first little bit. As soon as I hit what I wanted to be Act 2 of my story, the outline pretty much disappeared. New events popped up, events that originally were going to be there never showed up. Oh and a character that was supposed to be a bad guy, pretty much just turned into a jerk who really isn’t so bad. Yeah, me and outlines aren’t the best of friends. That being said…

3.) Having a General Idea of Where a Story is Going is Extremely Helpful

This might seem like a bit of a contradiction from my last point, but it’s actually not. Part of the problem I had with I Choose You was that I really didn’t have a good vision of where I wanted the story to go. I knew how I wanted it to start, and I somewhat had an idea of how I wanted it to end. The middle was pretty vague. I had an idea or two of things that could happen in it, but nothing that really connected point A to point B. This kind of made it hard to write. Without having a general idea of how I wanted to connect my beginning and ending, this story was more difficult to tell than it needed to be.

4.) Taking a Step Back from a Story Can Be Good

While I was writing I Choose You, I took a break from writing Iridescent. Which was honestly a really good thing, because while I was working on something else, I got new ideas for it and realized some of my current ideas just weren’t going to work. I was getting into a little bit of a rut with Iridescent and now I can see what the problem was and how I can fix it going forward. And hopefully these new ideas will help me make it an even better story than it would have been before.

5.) It’s Not About the Results, It’s About the Journey

Okay, I’m going to be honest and admit that this sounds like a cliché, but honestly it’s the truth. For a first draft at least. This month, I didn’t focus on what the end result for I Choose You would be. I knew that the story probably wasn’t the best and that a lot of it would need to be changed if I ever wanted to do something with it. But I didn’t go back and try to tweak stuff – something I’ve been known to do in the past. Instead I just wrote whatever came to mind. I played around with my characters and wrote a story. When I go back and reread it, I’ll probably cringe at parts and wonder what I was thinking when I was writing that. But it doesn’t matter. I can spend time editing and rewriting it later on. Right now, the important part is that I finished it. That’s what counts.

So how about all of you? Did you participate in NanoWriMo? If you did, did you learn anything new while you were writing your story?