NaNoWriMo 2008 is - for all practical purposes - over, and I reached the goal: Write at least fifty thousand words by the end of November.

Back in September, when I first considered signing up for NaNoWriMo, I was really not sure whether I should. So was the effort worth it? Let’s review.

What went right

• I was able to stick to the schedule. I wrote the required average of 1667 words per day, every day, and exceeded it on almost all days. Consequently, I reached the target ahead of schedule. I proved that I can produce text, that I can force myself to write even when I really, really do not feel like it.
• I was able to shut off the “inner critic”. I did this by telling myself that editing comes later, and it worked. I edited the text a few times, once to remove a mistake I had made, and I back-tracked several times to add more text to support things I wrote about later in the story. I did not delete text, I did not get bogged down in permanent editing mode.
• I liked my basic premise and characters. While quality was not a goal of NaNoWriMo, and I will not claim that what I wrote is worth reading, I certainly enjoyed working out the problems my characters faced.
• I built the world. I created a map and various support material for the story. The map, especially, proved to be invaluable; without it I would never have noticed a show-stopped problem with my plot resolution.
• I had fun. Well, sort of - it got harder the further I progressed. But, yes, over all, it was fun.

What went wrong

• I did not outline enough. I had a rough plan and ideas for the novel, and a fairly detailed outline for the first third or so. Based on my experience I will say that complete, proper outlining is absolutely essential for smooth writing.
• I wrote too late at night. Sometimes this was by necessity, other times because I got distracted by other things. On some days I wrote until I literally fell asleep at the keyboard. Bad idea, don’t try this one kids.
• I did not complete the novel. I was not able to complete the novel to “The End” so far, and while I am determined to finish it, it is highly unlikely that I will manage this in November.

Lessons learned

• Build characters and the world. Have a sound design for your characters and world, including the overarching conflict, the themes, thematic subjects, premises, and so on. Without conflict, you have no story. Without interesting characters, nobody will care. Without a consistent world, things will fall apart and you will run into contradictions.
• Outline. Outline, outline, outline. “Just do it.” Writing a complete outline from start to finish needs to be done before you start on your first draft. The outline is not set in stone, but it needs to deal with all main questions, and, most importantly, bring the story to a resolution.
• Write consistently. The temptation to take time off must be resisted. I know from previous experience that, if I set something aside for n days, I will almost certainly set it aside for n+1 days. Ad infinitum. Distractions, such as competing hobbies, should be put aside until after the daily writing session - consider it a reward for hard work.
• I need sugar to work. This is an unfortunate discovery: I need sugar in some form, for example soda, or I will not be productive at all. I am not sure if anybody can relate to this, but when I had no sugar I was unable to write, or at least wrote very, very slowly. With enough “fuel”, I was able to write much faster. Part of this may be that the sugar offset my tiredness, but I am fairly convinced that this is also at least in part a body chemistry thing.
• I have more respect for professional writers than ever. I always knew writing was hard work, but I now know first hand!

So I learned a lot, and had some fun - the experience was totally worth it!

Will I do NaNoWriMo again, say, next year? I honestly can’t say - I rarely can plan a year ahead. I think it would be interesting to see how following the lessons from this year might change the experience. We’ll have to wait and see.

What did you guys learn from NaNoWriMo? Did I miss any lessons, what is the most important thing you take with you after NaNoWriMo? Will you go for it in ‘09? And… “Was it good for you?”

When I logged in to the NaNoWriMo website today to update my wordcount (only by a little, the evening is still young), I was greeted with a big logo:

I had expected to submit my story once more, to trigger winning manually, but that was not necessary.

So I won. I managed to write more than 50,000 words in under a month. Yay!

If you followed my NaNoWriMo diary, you know that my novel is still unfinished. I fully intend to complete it, but I think there is little point in posting about my updated word count for another five days. I’ll keep you guys posted on the progress, and on the eventual rewrite, but I think daily updates are no longer necessary.

Thank you for following my journey this month!

Update: Do check out the NaNoWriMo Post-mortem.

Word count: 55041 (+929 from day 23). (53397 after compensating for the OpenOffice word count bug.)

Today I failed.

I wrote a mere 929 words today, way below the NaNoWriMo “quota” of 1667 words. I know, I know - not only are 1667 words an average per day, I am also at 53397 words according to NaNoWriMo’s word counter. I can afford to slack off a little. I still wrote 929 words, which is, well, a whole lot better than the zero words I was tempted to write today. The energy and motivation was just not there, and again I feel it shows in the (lack of) quality of my writing.

Wordcount as of 2008-11-24

The temptation to just stop is quite big at the moment. I really do want to complete the story, though. I keep telling myself that the NaNoWriMo “victory” means nothing if I don’t make it to “The End”.

From the plot perspective, I got the first step of the resolution in place now. Today’s 900 words were the foundation of part of the climactic action, so it was progress and not just increased word count.

Word count: 54112 (+1757 from day 22). (52523 after compensating for the OpenOffice word count bug.)

Not much to talk about today. I had to force myself to actually write, and I think the quality of today’s section shows it. Never mind, that we can fix later. I really, really need to get this thing done in a kind of tour de force, I think, because it’s a real chore now and I want to work on other things again.

NaNoWriMo is over in a week, so an end is in sight. I think I will not do the rewrite / editing in December. I will not touch the story in at least a month. But first I need to get it done.

Word count: 52355 (+1998 from day 21). (50781 after compensating for the OpenOffice word count bug.)

Good news everyone: I officially made the NaNoWriMo goal today. (Yesterday, as I have done lately I write this posting the next morning, on the 23rd.) The NaNoWriMo website gives me a corrected word count of 50781. Of course I am not nearly done with the story, and so this does not really feel like a victory, but rather like a major milestone.

I am still glad I made it, of course.

I had some trouble last night because the way I approached the resolution to my plot turned out to be impossible. It was fairly easy to change it, however. Nevertheless it required me to backtrack through a lot of what I had written over the past days, and correct it to match the new version of events. That took up way too much time, and I probably introduced inconsistencies.

Time to remember my mantra: December is for editing and rewriting.

I have started to use the “correct” word count on my NaNoWriMo profile page, so you’ll actually see a drop in the word count there. I am now tracking both counts in my own statistics, and I added it as an extra graph in the chart:

Wordcount as of 2008-11-22

Word count: 50357 (+1896 from day 20). (But the word-count is slightly bugged.)

So there we go, including the Openoffice bug, I reache 50,000 words. It’s not quite the great achievement, because I know I am roughly two to three thousand words below it. But this weekend shall be my victory weekend. In fact, I will try my best to push ahead, because I am really, really tired of writing this thing.

Not much to say about the whole thing. My protagonists are on their way to the grand finale, but of course there’s still much ahead of them.

Wordcount as of 2008-11-21

I am glad I am doing NaNoWriMo, but I will also be glad when it is over.

Word count: 48461 (+1692 from day 19). (But the word-count is slightly bugged.)

I made minimum progress today. Part of the reason was that I had to clean up yesterday’s writing quite a lot. I should have just called it a day instead of hammering out words when I was clearly too tired to do so. Ah, well, at least I tried. The other reason for my slightly low word count today is that I was at an awesome point to break, and so I took this opportunity.

While I am closing in on the 50,000 I am actually only at a little over 46,000 words currently. The difference is something to keep in mind - damned OpenOffice bug! Still, 4000 words is about three days of work, so that’s quite okay.

I am however still very far from actually completing the novel. My protagonists are about to tackle the main problem (and the additional obstacles I have in mind for them), but today was low on action. I did set a few things up for later - if only I can make them work.

Wordcount as of 2008-11-20

20 days done, 10 to go!

Word count: 46769 (+1757 from day 18). (But the word-count is slightly bugged.)

This will be very short, as I do not have much energy left for a lengthy posting. I made the minimum, but just barely. Please excuse me while I fall asleep this very instant.

My protagonists have volunteered to help solve the main problem, and they have gotten on their way.

Again, my apologies for keeping this short, but my eyes are closing. 2am - bed time.

Word count: 45012 (+2128 from day 17). (However, see below for a problem with this!)

Uneventful evening. Made the 45k milestone. There’s pretty much no way I will conclude the story by 50,000. Wrote a lot of dialog / exposition today. Now that they have the necessary information, my protagonists will soon set out on their quest to save the world™.

Wordcount as of 2008-11-18

I did note that I work better when I have a certain minimum intake of sugars. Which is really not cool, but it is something I should keep in min for the future.

In more general NaNoWriMo news (ha, I thought I’d never include that again!), they brought their word count tool online for testing. Interestingly enough, it counts only 43678 words when I paste my work into it - 1334 words less than what OpenOffice counts. I am not too concerned over this (although it is good to know now rather than on the 30th…).

It was reported to be a bug with OpenOffice. I verified it, and indeed found the issue already filed at OpenOffice.org. That’s quite annoying, but since I used the “broken” word count, I’ll probably continue to do so as there is no way I can correct the counts of the previous days. Since NaNoWriMo verifies to the correct count anyway, I’ll just have to make sure to have a good many words more than I need. Considering how much I still need to write that should hardly be a problem.

If any of you do use OpenOffice you should definitely check if this problem affects you.

Word count: 42884 (+2338 from day 16).

Today’s writing session was much smoother again. The word count is still fairly low - I only wrote 2338 words - but at least I did not sit in front of the OpenOffice file torturing my brain for hours. Incidentally, my average is 2522.6 words per day.

My protagonists are out of harm’s way for now. They are about to receive a lot of information on what really happened; that will be tomorrow’s contribution to the novel, and will probably be one of the easiest sections to write.

Wordcount as of 2008-11-17

I am getting very close to 50,000 now. I can almost smell victory…

No real insights or “in other news” today. Sorry :-)

Word count: 40546 (+1783 from day 15).

Another day of low output.

Wordcount as of 2008-11-16

I did not feel productive during the day at all, and spent way too much time procrastinating. It became much easier to write after I took a walk (in the rain, no less) in the evening, but I became very drowsy while I was writing. I vaguely remember going to bed…

I finished the scene I was working on this morning and reached a convenient break point. In total, it was only 1783. However, I did reach the 40,000 words milestone, and will definitely reward myself for that today.

Plot-wise, things are progressing in a fairly straight forward manner. I think I will have to change one aspect of what I wrote, however. We will see. My two main protagonists should find the main objective today or tomorrow (day 17 or 18, that is) and then it’s resolution time. As there are still several things I need to work out before “The End” I am absolutely sure 50,000 words will not suffice. As a rough guess, I will say 65,000. It will be interesting to see how accurate this prediction is.

Word count: 38763 (+1938 from day 14).

And so we reach the half-way point of NaNoWriMo. I made it to 38763 words today (yesterday, technically, as I am posting this on Sunday morning). Progress was slower than I had hoped. I am really feeling the chore of writing now. Words flow less easily. I have to pay more attention to steering towards the conclusion, and this limits my freedom. Instead of “this would be a fun obstacle to write about”, I find myself compelled to make sure than anything I add will get my protagonists closer to their goal. It does not mean they are having a free ride, of course. In fact when I left them today, they were in a life-threatening situation.

Wordcount as of 2008-11-15

As you can see, I slowed down a lot the past two days. This is a direct result from the lessened enthusiasm and fun. I still made the minimum quota on both days, and with over two weeks remaining I am still confident that I will make the 50k goal.

These past two days have re-affirmed my respect for writers. I was never part of the crowd who thinks writer have an easy life, but to actually be forced to write something on schedule, whether you like to or not, is a new experience for me.

Now I will take a break and reward myself with breakfast, before I tackle today’s writing session. I ended on a cliffhanger, so hopefully I will have more fun writing the narrow escape than I did getting my characters into the situation in the first place.

Word count: 36825 (+1667 from day 13).

My buddy Pedro made level 58 on World of Warcraft today, and so I ended up playing in the Outlands with him for quite a while. Yes, it was a lot of fun, but it also ate away too much time from writing.

Not that I really felt like writing today. I was tired and felt terribly ill, with headaches and the works.

As a consequence, I almost did not write, but I managed to do it. I only made the minimum word count, but that would be OK even if I was not way ahead of schedule. It does mess up my nice graph a little, but it would be silly to get upset about that.

I again went back to an earlier point and added some things in that I needed. It further shows that a decent outline would have saved me a lot of trouble, and did I mention that the whole thing will need an urgent rewrite / editing process - in December?

I am off to bed now, and hope that tomorrow will be more productive again.

Word count: 35158 (+3250 from day 12).

My two main protagonists are now on their way to finally tackling the main objective of the novel. And I do not mean that in a meta novel plot type sense; they are actually on their way to the location. The group of shelter survivors shattered today, as the character I do not like basically took control of it. What can I say, he is a jerk and an egomaniac.

I really did not want to write today. I had to force myself to do it. It was very awkward at first. Then I went back and expanded a scene much earlier by a short bit, and this laid the groundwork for a conflict I wanted to include today. After I had done that, those 3250 words came fairly quickly. Listening to good music helped too: I have several hours of DJ Risc’s now defunct Eve Radio show recorded. It’s really good music to listen to while working, in my opinion - not too aggressive, but energetic enough to keep you going, if that is the right term.

With 35000 (thirty five thousand!) words written in less than two weeks, I am starting to feel a little proud of myself. Sure, this ain’t gonna be a best-seller, and had I not promised at least one person that he could read it, I’d probably hide it forever. But it’s going to get done, and it’s going to get done in November, unless an Act of God prevents it.

But honestly… I don’t think it is so bad that I must be smitten with lightning.

Wordcount for 2008-11-13

Fairly smooth progression, eh?

Word count: 31908 (+3088 from day 11).

Woke up at 4am today, after I had gone to bed early, and so I did what any responsible NaNoWriMo participant would do… I began to write. Or so I tried. I failed miserably. I was stuck! I did not know how to proceed. I spent some time planning the future progress of the novel, and tortured my poor head all day. I finally began to actually write in the evening, and once I had gotten past 500 words, the rest of today’s output followed quite easily.

I am at a fairly convenient breaking point, so I decided to stop for today. I have a few more things I want to settle, before I approach the “grand finale”, so to speak. That is, where the protagonists tackle the main objective of the novel. I know I will hate the novel as I write it, and I know I will put a lot of garbage in it, but that’s okay. It will get done, it will have the two magic words on the last line: “The End.”

And then, in December, I will read it again, try hard not to throw up, and fix it.

In more general news, I think I have an idea for a fun project to follow NaNoWriMo up with. I’ll have to mull it over a little more, but I’ll post about it in due time.