November is over, as you have undoubtedly heard by now. The fact that I'm here means that I survived it, so here's what happened to me during the 2012 National Novel Writing Month.
For the first time in the nine years that I've been doing this, I wrote every single day for at least three hours. In the past, I've always taken off Thanksgiving, but that's such a bad thing to do, because one little day away from the schedule leads to more days away from it. For me, this has not been about making my word count. I have that whole fifty thousand word thing down, I think. I'm not bragging, because we all know that quantity does not equal quality. My goal is to actually finish a story in 30 days, with the assumption that I will make my word count. In past years, I've written outlines, I've not written outlines, I've written character bios, I've not written character bios. You get the idea. What I did this year was write an outline that was broken down by days, well actually sessions, instead of by story. Some days had two subject areas, some days were the continuation of the previous day. This worked brilliantly for me. Mostly. There were a couple of days that the writing was just not flowing, even though I forced myself to remain at the task, and I got a day behind. I think I've stumbled on the trick for future NaNoWriMos.
I can't tell you if the book was good or bad. Seriously. I, somehow, managed to keep the internal editor off for the whole time I wrote, and he's still off because I'm still taking a break from novel writing. It turns out that it's much easier to write a complete rough draft if you are not spending the last ten or so of the 30 days second guessing everything you've written. I suspect I will be changing lots of things, especially since I haven't yet achieved a final draft for the manuscript that this year was a sequel to. The plan is to finish the current draft on book one, before starting the second draft on this book, so it will remain my Schrodinger book for a while. Until I read what I have written it will both be brilliant and shite.
Another first this November was getting up to write at 5 am on 29 out of the 30 days. Well, maybe 28. On the first, I started writing at midnight and wrote until I was too sleepy to keep going and then went down for a little nap and got up at five, at least that was the intention. I might not have. Let's say I did. On Thanksgiving, I definitely did not get up at five because I didn't set the alarm clock. The whole getting up early thing was brilliant and I am so glad it's over. It is much easier for me to get in that extra hour of writing on the top of the day instead of trying to make room for it at the bottom of the day.
Closely tied with my five am wake up calls, was a change in my radio listening habits. I only listened to NPR from five to six until the last five days when I listened from five until seven. Typically, I listen until 8:30 when I go on my walk. When I wasn't listening to the radio, I had prepared playlists for each of the narrators. They were somewhere between the music I thought the character would prefer to listen to and the music I liked that I thought best evoked the character. This is definitely a trick I will use in the future, with the exception of the classical music playlist. The classical music playlist was a fail, not because I don't like classical music, but because I hadn't listened to the music before. I checked out some from the library, put it on my iPod and let it rip. The music just distracted me. I know you must think that NPR would distract me, and it does at the beginning of the morning, but then I was still eating my breakfast. It's more of the hosts voices soothing me because they're familiar, not unlike favorite music.
I was the last person of those that I followed during the month to actually submit my words for an official count to be declared a winner. It seems to me that if your goal is tor write fifty thousand words, then as soon as you're done, sure, verify and win. But, if you're goal is to write a story, maybe not so much. Even if I had finished a day or two early, I would have gone back to some of the skimpy sections and added more.
I will do National Novel Writing Month next year. A friend and I had an exchange about doing NaNoWriMo and why we continue to do it, and I wrote that I will continue to do this crazy yearly writing rush until I am in a position where an editor has me writing something that keeps me from doing it. That seems a pretty fair trade-off.
