NaNoWriMo 2020–The Good, The Bad, and The Worse

The good news is: I “won”!!! That is, I–along with many others–wrote 50,000 words of a novel during November. Last year, my first year of making this attempt, I started off with enthusiasm, but with no idea what winning might take. I privately aimed for–I don’t remember–writing 2,000 words a week–or some such super low bar. I knew that 50,000 words was completely beyond me. My enthusiasm quickly died, and I think I reached about half my goal. But I started the habit of sprinting; that is, writing quickly for a short period of time. And I vowed to finish the novel over the next 10 months, in time to begin planning another novel. Those things were accomplished, and

I was ready to begin a new novel on November 1.

I started super-excited again, but this time I had an idea how long my sprints should be, and how many words I could put on the page with each sprint. Actually, both varied wildly, but I still finished around seven on the very last evening. Sometimes, during the latter part of the month, I got into “the flow,” the way I had years ago, when I didn’t have time to write but did it anyway. Also, I finished the novel. 

Now for the bad stuff. I finished the novel at 40,000 words. That is about half a novel in my genre. I’m an underwriter, but that is extreme–in fact, it’s not even a novel yet. So I went back and started following the outline more closely and adding scenes, but that process was slow. Eventually, I abandoned that effort until the editing phase, and began a new novel. I hadn’t outlined it, but I had thought about it a lot in the past year or more. I was back in business.

I used Save the Cat! Writes a Novel for an “outline” guide, and I have a love/hate with that method. For one thing, since I knew clearly what would happen later, I added a lot of juicy scenes early, which messed with the whole plot line set up in Cat! So now, all the neat turning points I had set up in my outline went to hell. I didn’t know whether I was at the mid point or the break into three. It was scrambled, and so was my mind. Now I have a mess to clean up that I just hope doesn’t involve rewriting the whole thing.

What’s worse than that? Although I did my best at self care, by changing from sitting to standing, changing to a different chair, changing to voice typing, and taking frequent breaks, I ended up with very sore hands and wrists, and a very painful back and neck. And this was with a week and 10,000 words to go. Then, illogically, I abandoned all pretence of self care, and just got the thing finished. Which is the point. However, fast drafting may not be for me; it’s not a good sign when your first novel (in a long time) had better structure than your second one. 

And even worse–the stress–the good stress, the stress that I wanted–caused my shingles to return. The shingles I had just had, that I had just gotten the first vaccine for. So I’m happy I did it, but I may have to take a pass in the future, both for health reasons and for the quality of my draft.