For the first time, I have finished NaNoWriMo. This marked the tenth time I had participated and the first time that I had finished. The draft is saved in Google Drive and backed-up on my computer. I have not looked at it since it was finished in November but it is completely ugly. It is a mess and filled with holes, missed plot points, and poor characterization. It is repetitious and should never see the light of day. I am proud of it despite its flaws and proud of the effort that went into writing it.
Finishing NaNoWriMo was a personal goal that I had had for a number of years. I wanted to have a draft of a novel, just to see if I could do it. Each year, when November would roll around, I planned to participate but never finished. That may have been due to poor time-management and family trips out of town. That may have actually made it harder to find make the time to write. But this year was different. In October, I started thinking about what I wanted to write and even drafted an outline. I looked at my schedule and tried to find times when I could write for an uninterrupted amount of time. This idea, the idea of finding time to write was also mentioned in a podcast (Coffee Break 053: Grant Faulkner) about NaNoWriMo. During the interview, Faulkner described a time experiment in which moments of time are identified for writing. For me, the largest pocket of time was during the morning and evening commute by bus. This meant that every morning and every night, I would have a total of two hours a day to spend on writing. If traffic was bad, that was no longer an inconvenience. It meant that there was just more time to write.
I woke up early on the weekends to write too. This meant being more disciplined and going to bed early. Over Thanksgiving break, I woke up at 4:30 AM, made a pot of tea, and wrote until my son wandered into the kitchen at 6:30 AM. For me, writing first thing in the morning was the best way to start the day. Any anxieties about the story had not found a chance to become doubt. My internal critic was nowhere to be found. It also enabled me to get my word count in and not panic when something needed to be done around the house. I found that as I spent more time writing, I was able to write faster and more efficiently than before. When family started waking up, we would start our day together. I would let them know how far along I had gotten and how close I was to meeting the word count goal. I mentioned it when I talked to family over Thanksgiving dinner. I was excited and wanted to share that excitement.
About mid-way through the month, it got harder. I had a lot of difficulty writing where the story was going next. I developed a bad case of the “if-onlys” that nearly derailed the progress that I had made. I started thinking if only I had started sooner, if only i had not stopped and completed all of those earlier attempts. I nearly stopped writing because I felt sorry for myself. I mentioned feeling this way to my husband, who helped snap me out of that type of thinking real quick. Because the past and the past failures do not matter and should not prevent future writing. All that matters is that you are learning from the past and moving forward.
After finishing NaNoWriMo, I learned that I really enjoyed writing on the bus. At first, I felt a little self-conscious about and a little strange, but now that it has become a habit, it does not bother me as much. I look forward to writing sessions on the bus. The day has more structure beyond waking up and going to work, coming home, and starting the cycle all over again. But now that it is over, I want to take a break from keeping up a word count. I want to read; there is a stack of library books calling. I want to take some time to plan out the world of the story, its landscape, and to better define the characters that exist within it. And in order to do that, I need from distance from the story. Apparently, January is the right time to edit the NaNoWriMo draft. That sounds good to me!
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