NaNoWriMo: Debrief

National Novel Writing Month is over and I am a winner. Which is to say that I got the 50,000 words from scratch.

My thoughts about this process?

I’m glad that I made my personal goal much higher. As I strived for 80,000 words, it made it a lot easier to reach the official goal.

Despite a very detailed outline, there’s a lot of mess. This book will take a long time to clean up. However, like people say, I did find out new things about my characters and my plot as  I went. Struggling to get a scene to 1,000 words forced me to explore and test out some new ideas. For most of my books, those new ideas come from brainstorming and imagining, but not actually writing anything down until I know what I want. This time I made discoveries on the page, which is a bit thrilling.

I learned that I am capable of writing more words per day than I knew before. I don’t usually push myself to meet word count goals, and it was enlightening to see that I can easily do 1,000 words a day and with just a little bit of a push I can do 3,000 most days.

It was quite a challenge. It’s a lot of words to produce consistently.

Well, there will be plenty to edit when I pick this book up again in February!

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