It's been nearly a week since I completed my NaNoWriMo project and the thought of it no longer turns me into a mass of quiver goo which means it's time for a post-mortem of the whole experience. Isn't that what you were waiting for? Sure it was. So lets go!
This was my first time participating in NaNoWriMo, though I didn't sign up on the official website as I didn't feel it was necessary for me personally. I did see on a blog somewhere that previous NaNoWriMos have had about a 20% success rate, though I don't know what the results are for this year. Food for thought, I suppose, or some indication that writing 50 000 words in a month is no small feat. Anyway, on to my personal experiences.
As I said previously, this was my first writing project of any significance outside of FASS since... oh, well, I'm not sure, really. For my writing adventure, I picked an idea that had been rolling around in the back of my head since sometime in 2004. Overall, I enjoyed the writing process, though it definitely started to feel like a bit of a slog at the end. I think that succeeding in NaNoWriMo requires a certain amount of discipline and pacing; I was able to stick to my daily writing schedule and that certainly helps. Even though I never really wrote much more than the minimum each day, it was still enough to let me finish a day early - a nice reward for sticking with things, I guess.
A plan also helps. This is one area where I could have used a bit more work. I had done a little bit of background writing over the summer and made a short outline to get me started, though it turned out to be not quite enough. The outline got me through the first six chapters (about 38 000) words with the last two chapters being made up as I went along. Ordinarily, I'd have stopped, thought about things a bit more and then continued, but NaNoWriMo doesn't really accomodate that very well. Fortunately, by the end of chapter six, things had enough momentum to keep going. Though I'm not too sure how much a significantly more detailed outline would have helped as unexpected things kept happening, things happened in ways I didn't anticipate and characters developed in ways I hadn't originally thought of. But that's good! I like that about writing and I think it's part of how I do these things, so having an overall premise in mind (which I did) while coming up with an outline in chunks and then filling in the details as I go and changing the outline as necessary seems to suit me. Naturally, others' clickage will vary.
Of course, a lot of what I wrote was probably crap, but quality is not the point of NaNoWriMo. The point, for me, was just to force myself to write something, regardless of quality or anything else. I've been wanting to try to writing a novel for a long time; it's one of those things that I keep thinking that I should do but never get around to actually doing so NaNoWriMo was, for me, the metaphorical kick in the pants to do some writing. And I think that the ideas I came up with whilst writing are usable - it just needs a lot of polish.
So what's next? Well, I have to step back, look at what I wrote, and figure out where I want to take the story (I figure it's maybe a quarter or so complete, but we'll see). Assuming I decide to pursue this project further, I'll have to, obviously, do a lot more writing and a lot more polishing.
And I also need to make a map.
Freak Out,
-TFitC
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