Today is the last day of National Novel Writing Month. I ended up with 41,230 words!
I’m using this day to reflect on what I accomplished this past month and also what I could have done better.
To recap:
I had planned out this year’s NaNo by outlining. I pretty much summarized what’s going to happen in each of the chapter’s scenes. I set up multiple trackers and joined some groups to help me stay motivated throughout the month! I also posted my word counts and how I was doing on my social media channels. This helped me stay accountable throughout the month because I had friends and family following along my writing journey.
What I accomplished:
My second accomplishment is that I wrote 10K more than I did last year! Last year I got to 30K and then I stopped writing. This year I made it to 40K. So hopefully that means next year I’ll get to 50K!
My third accomplishment is that this was the first time I wrote in three different point of views! I’d like to think I was somewhat successful in this. I have a couple ideas on how to tweak the Third Person POV chapters, but I feel like I’d be taking words out more than adding them in, so I didn’t really work on it during NaNo.
What I could’ve done better:
I started out writing a ton. I mean, 2-3,000 words a day. And then I don’t know what happened. I think as I started getting closer to the end of the outline and I realized I wasn’t anywhere close to hitting the 50K goal; I think my morale went down.
I should have kept it going and just continued to write after I finished the novel. But I didn’t want to do that because then it would just make the story feel like it was never-ending. I realize that I probably could just edit it out afterwards, but then it would feel like I was just writing to put in words instead of content.
What’s next:
Well, I’m going to put this story to the side for a few months and really focus on getting my short story anthology and novella polished and ready for publishing. Then afterwards I’ll give this another look through and work on editing and rewrites. I’m excited how this story turned out and I think it could be a really great book.
I’m really happy with what I’ve accomplished this year’s NaNoWriMo. I’m happy that I was able to work out a usable outline and finish an entire novel in 30 days. I think having that extra support this year helped me. So thank you for following along my NaNoWriMo journey.
I hope you were able to write along with me and learn a few things as well.
Did you participate in NaNoWriMo? How did you do? Did you accomplish a lot of your goals this year? Tell me in the comments!!
Thanks for reading!
-Emi