I came, I saw, and I got conquered.
Before committing to National Novel Writing Month, I sat down with the calendar and a calculator. Given my oddball work schedule and various and sundry commitments, my daily word count would have to exceed the magic 1667 per diem. I was looking at 2631 words per available day. Some days I just made the count, some days I surpassed it, and other days I fell monstrously short. In all, I wound up with just over 27,000 words.
Am I upset that I didn’t hit the magic 50,000? A little bit, but not much. You see, I had a secondary goal. I wanted to see what I would learn about myself as a writer.
My preferred format is the short story, and I was nervous about attempting a novel. Could I organize that much material? Would my fingers seize up from the typing? Did I have any ideas worthy of a novel length story? The only way to find out was to do it, so I did. Here’s what I learned:
I have a very short long term attention span. After two weeks, I missed my other activities. I like to keep up with technology and gadgets, dabble in a little coding, and muck about with new software. When I got my Google Wave invite, I lost it. Total geek-o-rama for 48 hours, and I loved it. From there, it was back into the neglected feed reader to get lost in bits and bytes about neuro-plasticity, artificial intelligence, my beloved Android phone, and cartoons. I thrive on switching gears.
I missed my reading time. All output and no input makes Trev a dull boy. Ideas beget ideas, and stories beget stories. If you want to stand on the shoulders of giants, you need to make the acquaintance of those giants. Around week three, I threw in the metaphorical towel and picked up novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and TIm Dorsey. I’m back in my happy place, and I like it here. I already have two new short story ideas & revisions for another existing project.
There’s more than one type of writing. The physical act of writing, putting the words on the page, is one of them. The other is the creating and organizing part, the imagination game, as I like to call it. The act of figuring out the who, what, where, when, and how of your story. The latter is my favorite part. I simply like making stuff up. NaNoWriMo’s emphasis on the former was a challenge. I found I squeezed out some interesting ideas under the weight of deadlines and daily word count, but I had to leave them unshaped and uncared for while I chased the mighty 50k. This bugged me. I felt a real need to balance the typing and the creating.
Along the way, I discovered some tools, some tricks, met some new and interesting people, and had some fun.
Was National Novel Writing Month worth it? Yes. Would I do it again? Maybe. Will I continue to edit, revise, and build on the 27000 words committed to the hard drive? Yes. But first, I am finishing my book.
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