More About NaNoWriMo

Hey guys! My name is Laura and I'm a new authoring librarian on this blog. I wanted to post about my experiences with National Novel Writing Month (I saw that Catherine brought it up yesterday) because this is my FOURTH year participating.

As you probably already read the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 175-page/50,000 word novel between November 1st and November 30th. Word count is the only goal. Unlike any other writing you've probably done, NaNoWriMo encourages quantity and that's it. So, as a participant you have to kind of train yourself to keep writing and stop worrying about what you write. In fact, Chris Baty, the director of the program, encourages that it's a stress-free thing, anything goes (content-wise).

Here's my experiences with it:

Year #1 (2006): I had just graduated from college and I was a pretty good writer from all of the creative writing courses I had taken (and got A's in, just saying) so I felt pretty confident and excited going in to this. I was awesome at developing characters (I had a mother character who was a police officer and was OBSESSED with her job and all things in life being aligned with the law) but terrible at keeping any kind of plot going for 50,000 words. The end product was okay, I wasn't about to go showing it off, but it was DONE. I had just written my first novel!

Year #2 (2007): This was my first semester of graduate school and I guess maybe my heart wasn't it because my characters were okay (not as good as the year before) and my plot literally didn't exist. My characters just kept doing things like going to work, having lunch, and hanging out with their friends. I would never let anybody even come close to reading this novel, but again, I finished. I wrote two novels!

Year #3 (2008): I didn't fully outline a plot but I knew I had to plan out some kind of direction for my story because I did not want a repeat of 2007. So far, this was probably the best of my 3 completed novels, but I hit a lot of road blocks along the way. I had good characters (based on people I knew in real life, which was probably the best thing I could have done) and a lot of funny scenes, but I had only planned out a basic, overall idea for the plot and I had trouble stretching it all the way to 50,000 words. Because of this, I wound up with a lot of silly and sort of random scenes for length. But again, I finished and was now a THREE-BOOK AUTHOR!!!

Year #4 (2009): Happy Day 2! This year I did so much prep work. I typed up a 10-page outline with every scene I planned to include and I also to decided change genres! I moved from realistic fiction alllllllllllll the way to children's fantasy (maybe because I just read The Golden Compass). This is the first year that I'm a bit behind where I should be on word count (I'm at 2,400 and I should be at 3,340), but I feel okay about it because I have so much direction. The only thing I'm noticing is that my characters and my writing just isn't as strong as they once were- maybe because I'm not in school anymore.

Anyway, I don't want to bore you guys with my whole plot summary on my very first post, but maybe I'll tell you a little about it next time I update you on my progress. Is anyone else writing this year? I'd LOVE to hear about your challenges and progress along the way. It's a crazy month!!!!