Sunday, December 4, 2016

Having Survived NaNoWriMo

We survived NaNoWriMo.

I mean, I hope we did. Hopefully we also hit our word count (or got to where we wanted to be).

I wrote 50,075 words, and aside from a few days where I fell behind, I kept up the pace of 1,667 words a day.

It taught me a few things, or maybe it reminded me of them.

1. I can write that much in a month. It's not easy and I couldn't do 50K every month (without dropping other things in my life) but it's not impossible. So maybe I need to aim a little higher with my word counts (especially during the winter).

2. There's more to writing than making words. Yes, I hit the word counts and finished the story, but is the story good? I'm not a strong judge of my own stories, so I can't say, especially right now, so soon after finishing it. But it does make me want to write a bunch of short pieces (5K-ish) and use them to hone my writing skills (through feedback from my writing group). Then maybe compile them into a book and self-pub them? I dunno, just a thought.

3. I really don't mind writing vampires. I wouldn't do it all the time, but it wasn't a bad experience. I liked being able to fiddle with the myth and add my own twist to things.

4. There is freedom in just writing and not judging. I tried really hard (and think I succeeded) in writing without thinking "Is this any good?" It let me tell the story. Now that it's done, I guess I can go back and fix things. HOWEVER, as noted above, I do want to improve my craft so that the first draft is stronger and requires less line-level edits (phrasing, structure, language use).

5. I still like writing :)

That's all. Hopefully this exercise will mean good things for my future writing!


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