Hie everyone!
Today I though I would talk a little about my NaNoWriMo experience. (If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is here’s a link to the site: https://nanowrimo.org/dashboard) Basically, during the month of November participants write 50k words of a novel, hence national novel writing month. I’d known about it for a little while and had done the Camp NaNo months in April and July to warm up, but 2018 was my first time participating in November.
I wrote a YA contemporary fantasy that I had started to draft by hand many times, starting when I was eleven, so it was a project I’d had in mind for a long time. This was also my first time typing my book instead of writing by hand and my first time using Scrivener. So, a lot of firsts. I’m happy to say it went well!
The first week was kind of rocky. I only wrote 800 words on the first day instead of the recommended average of 1,677. I was still adjusting to college and having been a homeschooler my entire life college was an entirely new experience for me. I’d never been in a classroom setting before so it definitely took some getting used to. Luckily I was only taking two classes so I had enough time to write between homework.
I managed to catch up by the third or fourth day, and then there was a family emergency on the fifth. That made it difficult to write for a little while as everyone in my household was pretty emotional, but then writing helped me to calm down and settle back into a routine and the rest of the month went smoothly. I hit 50k about three or four days before November 30th, and I was so ecstatic! I had finally committed myself to writing a book and I had established a habit that allowed me to continue my writing. I managed another 40k in December and then another 27k in January, finishing with 117k altogether.
One thing that really helped me was wordsprints. I joined my region’s NaNoWriMo forum and participated in a lot of wordsprints which allowed me to get a good idea of my writing speed and also improved my writing speed a lot. I’m not sure how fast I could type before November (It was very slow. I still don’t type properly as my right hand does almost all the work but I can type much faster now.) but I know that now that my best was 500 in 20 minutes and I can easily do 1k an hour. That helps a lot because I like to calculate things and hit my best word count possible in the time I have left.
When I started my book I knew 50k wasn’t going to be long enough. I was writing a fantasy, which I know is always longer because of the worldbuilding. I also have four MCs (main characters) and a I also just like really big books. Originally, I didn’t have a good idea of exactly how many pages word count translated to, so I decided to go for 150k. After I had written 50k though and figured out around how much that was, I decided that anywhere after 100k would be good, so I’m happy with my 117k.
Maybe I’ll do a post soon about my book itself! In the meantime, thanks for reading!
