National Novel Writing Month

In November, I participated in National Novel Writing Month.  In a nutshell: the goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days.  To do that, you would need to write 1,667 words per day on average.  And along the way, you enter in your daily word count, get inspirational emails from authors, and there are message boards where you can provide support to other people participating.

This was my first time to try this – I’ve never really written anything other than for school assignments (and those were not creative), or for blog posts.  But I’ve had this idea for a while and wanted to work on it last summer, but it just never panned out.  I decided that I would try NaNoWriMo about 3 days before November started and fully expected to drop out within a week.

And, I sort of did.  I wrote on the first day, but wrote nothing after that until the 7th.  But after that, I sat down and wrote a lot almost every day, and I WON!  I wrote over 50,000 words over 30 days and I couldn’t be more surprised, ha!

What I wrote is garbage.  Total crap.  My tenses are all wrong and I switch back and forth between first and third person because I can’t decide how I want to tell it.  Just glancing at it, I see a ton of words spelled wrong (because I was so zoned in on writing the story!).  But the story that I want to tell is hidden within it, and the essence is already in a Word document.  I just have to sweep away the dirt and it will be there.

My goal was to not erase anything that I’ve written.  Just put it on the screen and erase it later if I have to.  And trust me, a lot is going to be deleted, but that’s okay.  Because I actually wrote 50,000 words in 30 days!

And now the hard part is about to start: revision!