NaNoWriMo: Fin
I think this’ll be my last NaNoWriMo post for the time being. It was incredibly cathartic to type in “The End” to my tale, and just to know that it was done, I had crossed the finish line, and I could stop writing for now. Not that I didn’t love it, I did, but I was and still am wiped from the constant need to develop and write more story.
My wife’s still working hard on hers, approaching 60K words with no sign of stopping. As soon as she finishes and I go back through mine with a quick spell check and read-through for obvious errors, we’ll finally get to exchange works and enjoy the fruits of each other’s labor.
So what did I get out of this year’s NaNo? What did I learn?
- Out of all the friends, bloggers and other people who started NaNo with me, very few of them finished. This isn’t a black mark against them at all — NaNo is very gruelling, and there’s a good reason why less than 1 in 5 cross the 50K mark each year. In many cases it’s people underestimating the time and effort it takes, and they get snowballed with the wordcount by weeks two or three. Real life often intervenes as well.
- My wife is perhaps a much more creative storyteller than me, if what little snippets she told me are any indication.
- My book ended up being a highly fictionalized account of a personal return to college, a place that meant a lot to me and I miss deeply sometimes. At the end of my book, one of my characters says farewell in a way that helped me cut the last little cord as well.
- I genuinely cared about my characters. There’s a few moments — not tons, but a few — where they say something, or do something, or experience something that I considered to be great storytelling, and moved me in some way.
- Dialogue, for me, is tough, and I was dumb to have 11 main characters, who always had to keep chatting with each other for every little thing.
- An outline and notes helped A LOT. I kept revising the outline, mapping out future chapters, and when it came time to split up my core cast into branching stories, I was able to keep tabs on them and bring them back together without much difficulty.
- I had a lot of fun taking interesting and quirky experiences and places from college and revising them to be their own legend in the book.
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I’m still working on mine. I am right on schedule with 45,041 at the begining of today. My iPhone NaNo adventure is proving to be harder than I thought. Between loosing 3k words in a sync, my battery getting drained daily and the holidays it is exausting. It has been fun though
Nanowrimo is very subtle, I didn’t realize or understand how involving it really was, and had no idea on how to plot, map or any of the things you mentioned you had done in preparation.
Although being one of them who dropped out-essentially in the first 2 weeks, I did come away with a few bits of enlightenment of my own.
- I love writing and exploring where my imagination takes it
- That I’m going to sign up again this coming year
- That the few pages I did write and share with others, came back with great feedback and encouragement.
- That I love story telling in every form, and have a renewed spirit to pick up my photography career from the ashes
- and that this provided me with much needed bragging right over my brother; who only made it to the 94 words…lol after telling me he could/would write more in less time.
I hit 3k at the end of week 2. (weak I know)
Congratulations on the final product, Syp! Now on to editing.
This is as good a place as any to direct people’s attention to Duotrope, a compendium of 4,500 some odd publications accepting submissions of stories and poetry. Most pay, some well, and others not at all. It’s worth checking out though for any aspiring writer.
I’m curious though, what’d the final page count come out to be?
Will we ever get a chance to read your work Syp?
Obviously its a personal thing but I enjoy your writing and can’t help but think this would be much better than most of the novels at Chapters.
Congratulations! I got to about 30,000 mid-month but just had too much other stuff I wanted to finish more. So I didn’t finish this year (or any year yet) Good job on finishing
Ding? Grats!
Congrats on finishing, my friend. Now, get you a final product and send me a link to where I can buy it!
I’m at 46,894 and planning to spend the whole day getting to the finish line. I’d say sprinting, but at this point it’s more like gasping. MMO players have no idea what grinding really is until they try grinding out 1,667 words every day — more if you fall behind and keep getting a new 1,667 words plopped onto your stack while you try to catch up. But I learned a lot, most of all that I can do it. I jumped into it without a plan but a complex idea that my characters kept complexifying further, but in the end it kinda works out. So I’ll take the rest of December away from it and come back with an editing eye in the new year and see if maybe there’s actually something worth publishing there.
Grats, Syp, and thanks for getting me into this.
Michael
At about 47k with about 12 hours left. Will finish in time if it kills me.