What I Learned From NaNoWriMo

You know what that is? That's a certificate. It's a certificate I got for winning. Which is a thing I do, you know. Winning, that is. I do winning. Often. In fact, I do winning so much, I'm starting to get pretty good at it.

In short: BAM! I did it! 50,312 by the time I finished.

I loved NaNoWriMo so much last year because I learned so much from doing it. This year's project was pretty educational, too, although it wound up being something of a remedial course (for those who didn't save their notes, you can review them here). Still, I got a few new bits of wisdom from writing Alice and Wendy.

1 - Great Characters Write Themselves

I caught this happening a couple of times last year, but, since most of what I wrote last year was dictated by a meticulously crafted outline (re: something I wrote in pencil on October 31 while watching reruns of The Office), I didn't allow my characters the freedom they needed to react how they wanted to. Ironically, I feel like writing without an outline allowed my characters to behave more naturally than they would have otherwise.

Of course, I have to stress that it's not like this plot magically fell into place as I channeled some kind of supernatural energy into my laptop monitor. The plot is going to require a lot of ironing out. Which brings me to...

2 - A Good Writer Has a Plan

As fun as it was to just write without any idea of where my novel would go in the end, I'm pretty sure the novel's weaker for my lack of preparation. The exact timeline of events I've written is pretty unclear - I'm not sure what happens in flashback and what happens in the "current day." Heck, most of the time, I didn't even keep straight which day it was in the story. If the story were laid out in chronological order, every freaking day of the week would be Friday.

When I go back to revise, I'll make sure to have a freakin' calendar sitting on my desk.

3 - Miracles Will Happen As We Speak

Yeah, I noticed this happen a lot last year - connections I never could have made myself popped up in the strangest places. These connections will take a lot of cultivation to turn into anything meaningful, but they're the things that'll make the novel worth reading when it's all done.

This year, though, the surprising thing is that I came up with an ending to the novel literally out of nowhere. If you had asked me on Monday if I thought I'd have come up with a satisfying conclusion by Wednesday, I'd have probably slapped you (but I was in a bad mood on Monday).

I was halfway into Tuesday's writing, when I suddenly realized how the novel would have to end. There's pretty much NO OTHER WAY I could have ended this thing than the ending I chose. It's a sloppy ending right now, tying up loose ends more arbitrarily than the romantic leads pairing off in a Stephenie Meyer novel. That said, now when I go back to revise, I'll know what conclusion to work towards.

4 - Writing is the Only Way to Start Writing

Now that I've got 50,000 words of plot, I feel like I can finally start working on Alice and Wendy. It's like everything I've done up to this point was just preparation - I haven't really written a novel, but a 130-page working outline. And most of it is garbage.

Still, if I hadn't done all this writing all month long, I don't think I'd be able to come up with anything NEARLY as cool as the novel I'm envisioning in my head right now. Again, it'll probably be a lot of work to get this book to the point where I'm willing to show it to other people - probably even more work than last year's novel. But it'll be SO worth it if the final product will be as cohesive as I now think I can make it.

5 - Writing Sucks

The main reason I was behind so much this month is that, when I got home from work, I decided I wanted to do something OTHER than more work. There were several days when I sat down to write, and every word I pecked out on the keyboard felt like I was straining a muscle. I skipped several days altogether simply because I didn't feel like writing at all.

It may sound like I'm ending on a bit of a downer, but the truth is that I'm sure I needed to learn this particular lesson. I ended last year with a rush of euphoria, realizing that I really enjoy the process of writing. That's still true; however, there's not a CHANCE that I'll feel that way all the time. I have to accept - as I know expect most writers do - that the cool stuff in writing comes AFTER hours and hours of painful effort, and not always during.

Anyway, the goal this year is to use NaNoWriMo as a springboard. Last year, I took December off from dedicated noveling (it can be a word if I wish hard enough), and I never really picked it up again. This year, I'm not doing that, and I'll be pounding out another 1,000 words or so tomorrow.

The trouble is going to be in deciding what I want to do next: do I revise this year's novel, get back to work on last year's, or start a completely new project? Decisions, decisions.