So, my dear blog readers, National Novel Writing Month is over.
I didn't finish my novel, but I made it to 33,644 words in 30 days. That comes out to almost 80 pages, which is more than I've ever written in my whole life -- On all my stories put together! It was such a good experience and despite being stressful at times, I would recommend it to anyone who's ever wanted to write anything but can't just seem to get going. That was mostly my problem before, I would mull over my ideas, and say "Ok, I'll write a chapter tomorrow," but it would never happen because not everything would be outlined for me. For my novel in November, I had an outline at the beginning, but I was making up the actual meat of the chapters as I went along. That worked okay until I realized that my story was going to finish before I hit 50,000 words. To compensate, I just made up another character and dragged the story along in a completely different direction, which worked all right until I figured out that I had no clue where the plot was going to go. I kept making stuff up, and the plot got more and more ridiculous and unbelievable until I finally came to the conclusion that I was out of ideas completely. I stopped writing with three days to go. I had already been slowing down on my recommended number of words to type every day, and I had missed some days and gotten a little behind, so my goal was to make it to 40,000, but that wasn't to be.
Despite the struggles of lack of a good plot and the fact that all my chapters were kind of crappy, I had fun writing the first part of my strange, strange, novel. It's such a good feeling to be able to know that I hit almost 80 pages in something I made up and wrote completely on my own. I'm looking forward to taking a break from that story, however. The characters, sad to say, are boring me and I need to write something else for a while! I currently have a new story that I'm in the process of figuring out. It's there in my head somewhere, I just need to find it, dust it off, and try it on for size. I may need to make a few adjustments along the way, but that's all part of the fun.
I had some friends that were also doing National Novel Writing Month. Two of them finished, and I'm happy for them. I'll do it next year! (With a more detailed plot and a backup plan.)
My NaNoWriMo was a success in my book. I might not have crossed the finish line according to their guidelines, but I sure did for me.
:)
Story
Quote of the day:
"We are what we believe we are."
-C.S. Lewis
