A Family Against the Flow: A Year of Learning

Also known as, National Novel Writing Month. It's a whole community of people online who every November take up the challenge of writing a novel in 30 days. The exact format of the challenge is to write 50,000 words in November by writing 1,667 words a day, every day! It does seem like a tricky task, especially for me who has only ever written very short stories but I'm determined to give it a good try.

There are lots of resources for would-be writers on the site (https://nanowrimo.org/nano-prep-101) from quizzes to find out what kind of writer you are to forums full of other NaNoWriMo attempters to a mini course leading you through preparing for November.

I started preparing using the online course in mid September as I felt nervous about not being ready since it's my first time. There are some really great tasks to complete.

I especially enjoyed the character development. I had a lead person in mind but this task forced me to think about her a lot more and explore what kind of person she was. It's going to make her seem more solid to me when I start describing her in my writing.

The last 2 sections had some really helpful ideas for organising yourself ready for a large time commitment in November. Plenty of things I hadn't even considered so I feel more prepared definitely.

After the course I declared my project on the site and browsed the forums to check out what others were doing. There were lots of links to YouTube videos sharing tips for first timers which was very helpful and put my mind at rest on lots of issues.

Another thing I did was to get a feel for how much 1,667 words was. I sat down and wrote mostly gibberish about myself into a word counter until I got to 1,667. It was a lot more than I'd thought! Roughly 2 pages in Word. It took me about 40 minutes to write but I didn't have to think about what I wrote so I expect it'll take much longer when I'm writing a story.

Well, I'm all ready I think and November is almost here. I've finished tweaking my outline so I know mostly how the story should go. I'm nervous, this is the first thing I've done in ages that I feel likely to fail at. Yikes!

The day before I was a physical and mental wreck. I wanted to back out and do something else. I felt sure I wouldn't be able to do it and like I was setting myself up for failure. But not even trying is failure too so before I went to bed I pinned a word counting site to my browser and opened a blank Word file saved to my desktop titled 'Survival of the Fattest' which is the title of my novel.

November 1st at 8.09am I started writing and apart from googling how long the Great Wall of China is, I didn't stop until 9.32am. I'd written 1,882 words! It was such a relief. I'm sure not every session was going to be that easy but I've made a start. Thank God. I've no idea how good it'll be or even if I spaced out the dialogue properly, but I've written it. That's it done until tomorrow. I copy and pasted from the word counter into my Word file ready to start again on the 2nd day.

Now I'm a week in and it's going surprisingly well. I've written 11,920 words and earned some NaNoWriMo achievements. I've had to be strict with myself about getting my writing done first thing when I get up which has changed my daily routine a bit but I think it's best to write when I feel fresh (this hardly ever is me on a morning!). I spend some time thinking about how the story is going when I'm doing things like cleaning my teeth or washing up so that when I sit down to write I usually know what's going to happen next. I haven't yet sat down and got stuck with what to write but as the story progresses things build up as you have to remember perfectly everything that has happened previously. I've made a few notes about people in the book as I go to keep it in my mind.

Having JD around to ask for advice, talk through story ideas or just to tell what's happening is great. I feel nervous about him reading my writing as he's already written 5 books and they're great but I'll worry about that when it's finished. I'm putting all those kind of worries out of my mind and just getting on with telling the story for now.

I'm two weeks in and officially halfway there! This week has been more difficult than the first because I'm trying to bring the story along at a good pace and have it all make sense. I had a panic mid-week that I didn't have enough story to see out 50k words but I think I've got over that. I'd kind of hoped that I'd be a bit ahead by now but I'm pretty much on track with just 447 spare words! I think the next week will be ok but I'm dreading the last week. I think finishing the story will be the hardest part as everything else leads up to that point so it feels important.

The NaNoWriMo site has a nice statistic section too. Here are my my halfway stats:

Anyway, I'm proud of myself for getting this far so I'll just stick at it and see where it leads!

I've passed week 3 now and things are getting trickier.

I'm still on track but I'm running out of story faster than I hoped. I'm not sure I can stretch out my outline to reach 50 thousand words. I'm trying to think of another thing that can happen because other than that I'll have to work my way through the book and flesh out some scenes to give more detail. Writing this fast and to a specific amount of words daily seems an unnatural way to do it. If I ever write another book I'll be glad to do it in a more relaxed way and take my time!

As I get closer to the end the worries of whether my book is any good are starting to resurface. Is my dialogue too clunky? Are my characters believable? I'm not sure I want anyone to read it. I'm still enjoying writing though, it's a great feeling when you work out a solution to a plot problem and the words flow. 8 days left, I can do this!

4 days left and I've got less than 4,000 words to write. I've still been struggling with what to write but I'm confident I'll do it. JD suggested going through and reducing everything that happens to 1 sentence so I can see the story laid out clearly. I spent an hour doing this yesterday and it really helps. I spotted a couple of places an extra connecting scene is needed. Just one last push and I'll be there!

I'm not the most consistent of writers but I'm getting it done. My average daily word count is 1,730 :)

So, it's the 28th of November and I just finished my book! It's currently 48,000 words but without adding words just for the sake of the word count, I'm finished. I've decided to stop writing and use the last couple of days left to read through and make any alterations but for the purposes of my Year of Learning, I'm finished.

I feel like I've learned a lot about the mechanics of writing a book. in a lot of ways it's been much easier than I ever imagined and I feel like I should've done this years ago. In other ways it's been hellish with times where I've felt like I'd never get finished. Anyway, it's done now and hopefully after a period of reflection I'll be able to re-read and edit it ready for publication.

I wrote a book! :D