Yesterday I printed the book, all 177 pages of it. Though this is small in novel terms, it looks big as a stack of paper on my desk. Double the length of my previous fiction writing record, and then some.
So here’s what I learned from participating in National Novel Writing Month 2014:
1. The project is a good idea, though the web site occasionally has problems.
2. Though my average for the project was just shy of 2000 words, I feel like my natural pace is a bit faster than that. When I could really sink my teeth into it, I cleared 2k easily and sometimes even topped 3000.
3. My writing is plot intensive. Actually I suspected that before I started. But most of my writing before this has been short stories, which by their nature tend to be mostly plot. This is something I need to work on for novel-length stuff. Longer form writing needs to have more character development. Or at least character descriptions. I know what all the characters look like in my mind, but I don’t think I described any of them.
4. I don’t need to fanatically plan every last detail in advance. This was a shock to me. I’m such a control freak, I was uncomfortable with parts of the story at the outset. I knew what points A and D were, but points B and C were unformed at best. By some miracle, when I sat down to write, those intermediate steps seemed to come naturally, popping out of nowhere when I needed them to.
5. I seem to be comfortable writing from beginning to end rather than hopping around in the plot. That also surprised me. I assumed that I’d write the big scenes I already had planned out and then fill in the gaps later. I’m glad I started at the start and motored on to the end. It worked well.
6. I write better in the evenings.
7. I write better at my desk at home.
8. I can actually do this.
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