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5 Things I Learned from Dropping Out of NaNoWriMo

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Tuesday evening, thousands of people uploaded a file to the NaNoWriMo.org site and declared victory.  They managed to write 50,000 words in 30 days.  My hat is off to them.  What a fantastic accomplishment.

I didn’t make it, but I did learn some things along the way:

  1. I can write fiction.   I’ve always written essays and memoir pieces; I didn’t think I had the imagination to write fiction.  And while the biggest plot twist in my novel was Ben’s idea, still, I was able to make up lots of stuff on my own.
  2. I don’t like writing crap for the sake of writing crap.  While I get it that the point of NaNoWriMo is to turn off your internal editor and give yourself permission to write junk, I didn’t care for that part.  Which is strange; that’s the part I thought I would love. I came up with most of my good ideas before NaNo officially started, during the outlining process.  It was painful to write line after line I could never use.
  3. I can write a blue streak for two weeks straight.  It felt great to make my word count for those first two weeks.  And I have a story I can work with over the long term.
  4. A month is too long to ignore my life — and ignoring sleep is not an option.  In the days just before NaNo started, I scrubbed my house and stuffed my fridge full of pre-cooked meals.  The house got dirty again in a day or two, and we ate all the food the first week.  Weeknights, there is only time to cook, eat, play with Nora and get her to bed.  I am loath to trade Nora time for writing.  Also, I am incapable of staying up past 8:30pm.  Thus, I fell behind on my word count – hopelessly so.  C’est la vie.
  5. I love blogging.  While there were lots of little reasons I threw in the towel, blogging was a big part of it.  I missed my blog and all of you.  I kept coming up with great post ideas (you should see my drafts folder right now!) that I wanted to work on right away.

Yes, I will probably try again next year.  But I may plan to take some additional time off that month.  My goal for the next few months is to read some of my favorites novels to figure the elements I was missing.  For the few months after that, I’ll work on my exisiting draft of about 25,000 words.  The writing will not stop.