NaNoWriMo Results?
We’re back from a wonderful (but cold) Thanksgiving in Minnesota. My daughter and son-in-law had dutifully checked out the local thrift stores for me and the quilt shops for Bev. We traveled there by train and flew home. On Monday we visited our friends at Bethany House Publishers. All in all, a great time.
I know some of you participated in NaNoWriMo and I’d love to hear the results. Did you start and finish a complete draft of your novel? Did you start, but not finish your novel? I’d like to give it a try sometime—I really do believe in the concept of getting a very rough first draft finished before polishing—but I can’t keep up the pace. I go home from work every day having expended quite a bit of creative energy on the manuscripts of others (authors we’re publishing at Harvest House) and I have very little left in me.
But what about you? How did it go? Fess up now. Who tried and what were your results?
In my next blog, I plan to announce what I hope will be exciting news for aspiring writers. Stay tuned!
Finished 50,000 late Monday night 29-november. Novel however needs many more words to see it completion. I am praying that I have the courage, boldness and tenacity to continue.
Didn’t officially do NaNo, but did 5,000 words before I realized it was futile…too much conference planning to get done. 🙁 But I want to say congrats to all those that accomplished their goals. It’s a great discipline that I hope to participate in next time. Welcome home Nick, and anxiously awaiting the exciting news you have!!
For me, November is the one month I have the time to write 50,000 words in 30 days – so I’ve jumped on the NaNoWriMo train these past two years! And it’s been a blast!
This year, I finished on Nov. 29th but like many of us, still have another 30,000 words to go before the novel is “completed.”
I love the accountability and excitement around NaNoWriMo, but I believe we can all make ANY month a “NaNo” month for ourselves and set those goals!
This was the second year I tried NaNoWriMo and this year I won! I (and my husband) are so thrilled that I “finished” it.
I guess the biggest thing I learned was to silence my “internal editor.” Of course, now that those 50,173 are down, there’s a lot of adding and subtracting to do.
Thanks for asking us to share. I totally understand how your day job can suck the creativity out of you. I was an instruction writer for years and it was so hard to think about writing my book when I got home.
For me the NaNoWriMo was painful. Although I was excited for my fellow writers who were doing well through the process, it was also discouraging as I was slogging my way through a heavy revision.
When you hear that someone pegged 5,000 words on the same day you managed to get only a few challenging pages edited, it can make you feel somewhat the tortoise.
However; it did manage to push me through the revision process because of my enthusiasm to get back in the word count game.
Most of all, I continue to find Social Media a tool of huge encouragement as it connects the many lonely, laboring souls across the globe who give each other that gentle push, while holding each other accountable for God’s vision with our writing.
I think it has the ability of extending the core mission of NaNoWriMo year round.
There is no way I could finish 50,000 words in a month, unless I didn’t do anything else but write non stop (which is a little hard with two kids ;))
However, I did write almost 20,000 words of my second novel and it was the fastest I’ve ever written. So in the end it did help. I wish the Nanowrimo software was available all year round! Now my goal is to finish the novel by the end of the year…
Looking forward to the exciting news. 🙂