NaNoWriMo and How I learned to Stop Worrying About the Words

blog-image

As previously mentioned, in this post, during the month of November, I elected to participate in the annual writer’s challenge called “National Novel Writing Month” where the goal is to write at least 50K words for a new novel. Everyone that crosses the 50K line is a winner!

Over the weekend I completed a major achievement and personal goal, to write a 50K+ word novel in one month. Saturday morning I crossed the finish line and announced my proof as a winner and Sunday after much personal anguish I completed the rest of the novel.

Screenshot from 2017-11-27 09-59-43

As I was working towards ending my novel, I became almost afraid to finish it. After a month of just smashing my keyboard and slinging this story together, I didn’t want to end it. I didn’t want the experience to end or the characters to stop. It took a very nice message from @Jon_Stone121 {.ProfileHeaderCard-screennameLink.u-linkComplex.js-nav} on twitter to get me past my own holdup. The lesson learned throughout the month is to let go of the importance of individual words and push through the awkward parts to accomplish your goal, then on revisions and nth drafts later you can have a polished pearl. Likewise, I can let go of this story and start a new one or continue old ones, keeping this forward momentum going. All that said there is nothing stopping me from mapping out a potential sequel 🙂

I have many delusions of grandour for publishing this story, but first I need to let it sit for a month or so then come back to it fresh. It might just be my pride talking, but I feel like this story has challenged me so much, why not go for another challenge and submit it to agents and publishers. Onward and Upward!

In the meantime, I’m excited to get back to STAR CX and get a few novellas out to all of you.

Special thanks to all the many twitter fellows that helped push and pull everyone to success during this month. It was awesome to see so many people come together and support one another. If you fell short of your goal, please don’t give up or stop. The only failure is if you decide you aren’t good enough to finish, do not listen to those lies. I have battled with them all month and for many years before and will likely continue to do so. It does not matter if it takes you one month or one year. You can do this! Make the story you want to read and do not be afraid of the end, let go of worrying about individual words and passages, just set it and move on. You can perfect it later once it’s on the page, but you can’t fix what remains unwritten.