I did it. I won NaNoWriMo. The official shebang. Not even the YWP thing, where you get to choose your word count goal (I was going to do 20,000, but then said, "why not just go for the big kill?"). I WROTE 50,000 WORDS that somehow resemble something that looks remotely like a very disorganized novel (seriously--I have the ending written out in the middle of the manuscript if you could even call it that).
I'm not really going to do anything further with my "novel". It's not my favorite story idea, and I don't really know how to finished fleshing it out. I wanted to do a different idea, but that would have required me starting the story all over at the beginning, and I already had a few things written out for that story.
I pantsed it this year. And here are a few things that I've learned along the way:
- Never pants a mystery novel. For me, anyways (tried that this year--yeah, didn't really work out). Always have an outline, and know who did it and all those wonderful secrets before you write the book! It will save lots of time afterwards, when you're staring at the screen and going, "Now how would my main character find out about...?"
- NaNoToons are really the most hilarious things to read when panicking about a flailing word count.
- Pep Talks can be fun! Except when they are from Lemony Snicket. Then they are exciting.
- Dares are there to be done. And to help you increase your word count!
- This can help a lot with your typing accuracy.
- Never procrastinate. This goes for school assignments and personally assigned things (coughNANOWRIMOcough).
- Do not neglect your normal life (aka school assignments and other deadlines) while attempting. Result could be fatal.
- I'm better at writing beginnings and endings than middles. Which is not that good, because the middles are the most exciting parts of the novel!
- Writing is awesome.
- Writing is totally epic.
- I love writing even more than I did before.
- I am going to write a novel about NaNoWriMo next year.
And if you want to know what my "novel" was about, then check out this word cloud (word size based on amount of usage) courtesy of Wordle.net:
It will tell you all you need to know. (click to make larger)
Bonus points if you can guess what my main character's name is! (ahahahaha) :-)
