I won NaNoWriMo!

For those of you who aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo, it is an interesting idea. The goal is to write 50,000 words in the month of November. Not just random words, but a story, and one that you think could go places.

I have tried to do NaNoWriMo many times in the past years, and never managed. My first year, I was in a national field hockey tournament during November, and although we won the tournament, my word count only made it to maybe 20,000. And in the years following, I always had to do a lot of school work in November, and I could never justify putting off homework to write.

Now that I work 9-5 and have a set schedule, I had a much easier time finding time to write, although it was still pretty stressful some days. I actually did about the recommended 1667 words every day, and just did extra some days. Today I had to write less than 500 words to finish my 50k goal for the month.

However, I realized from writing my story this way, that I need to rewrite my story. The story isn't told in chronological order, there are several flashback chapters that help clear things up. Trying to write the story in the order that it's read meant I made a lot of little mistakes that got very hard to fix. So what did I end up with, from this month? A story I'm going to throw away?

Not exactly. I learned a lot from it. I learned a writing style that doesn't work for me, I learned a lot about the way my characters feel and how they need to feel for the story to be successful. I learned that some scenes I had planned were just boring and not really necessary, no matter what I thought when I was outlining. Most of all, I learned that my story is going to be really, really long, if I only made it to chapter three in seventy eight pages.

Thank you, NaNoWriMo, for getting me off my lazy bum and working.

And now, in celebration, I am going to make muffins and BBQ chicken pizza. Sounds like a good day to me.