My friends, it’s been a long month. While I didn’t “win” NaNoWriMo in the strict sense, I did meet my personal goal of finishing 30K words while keeping up with the necessities of life, such as work and family, and managing an emergency or two, so I’m still declaring it a win. Here are five main things I learned during November, in no particular order:
1) Getting butt in chair and fingers on keyboard works. If you do that – you are ready to write; if you don’t, guess what, no words will appear on the page. Seems like a no-brainer, but for me it was doubly true because I work best while I’m working, and even if I’m stuck, being at that computer means that when the bottleneck clears words go right where they need to be. Walking away is just giving your brain permission to get sidetracked. Stay in that chair, folks, show your brain who’s boss.
2) The internet must be off. I love the internet and there’s always something that I want to look up or look into, so I had to make sure the internet was simply not available during writing time. I turned off Wi-Fi and very sternly told myself No whenever my brain started to look for excuses to turn it back on.
2.5) Same goes for anything that’s a distraction for you. Family members watching your favorite show without you or listening to the radio too loud? Earplugs work wonders. Your spouse opening the door to your writing space every five minutes to ask how it’s going or whether you want some tea/cookies/a hug/to pet the dog who’s oh so adorable? Tell them, very kindly but firmly, that you love them and appreciate that they want to help, but they’ve got to go occupy themselves with something else because you’re writing and you’re going to keep writing until you’re done with the daily goal.
3) Sometimes you need to turn on the Wi-Fi and do some research. Toward the middle of the month I got stuck, and even though I knew what the next plot landmark was I simply couldn’t move forward. It took a bit of thinking to realize that I couldn’t visualize my characters’ environment, and turns out I have to be able to imagine where they are, what they see and smell, what they eat and who they interact with besides each other. I put my writing on hold and turned to the Internet. Guess what, it worked. I was able to fill in the sensory details and the story started to move forward again.
4) If winging it is not producing results prepare an outline. I don’t know why I thought that I could wing it. Everybody who knows how much I love spreadsheets and how I planned for the last vacation teases me about it. The outline allowed me to not worry about the major events of the plot, and instead I could focus on my characters and on tying the plot points together into one coherent whole.
5) You’re probably underestimating yourself. Don’t. With everything that’s been going on I averaged 1000 words a day. I’ve never thought that I could produce that much in a month, under any circumstances. When I took the stack of pages that were the result of 6 months of work before November and the stack from November, and compared them, the difference was eye-opening. The November pages probably aren’t all that good, but you know what, they’re there, on paper, and the first draft is just material for the second draft anyway. So no more excuses, there’s proof that I can do it, tangible and undeniable, and if I allow for reading time I know I can manage 500 words a day, no problem.
So there you have it, some pretty good lessons to learn. Now let’s go write.
