I find myself with some extra time tonight, so I might as well use this to blog a little.

NaNoWriMo is almost over (4 days to go), so I’d like to say what’s been good with this experience:

1 – I got to write a great deal more than I thought.

For my previous books, I usually wrote 1000 words on week days (and not even on fridays). I was lucky to even hit 5 000 words a week, so writing a book would take me between 6 months and a year. So, when I entered the contest, it was with a clear objective to write 1700 words every day and have a 50 000 kick-start on my third novel.

Well, I found out that I could consistently write 3 000 words between 8:30 PM and 11PM. That’s three times my usual wordcount.

After the initial weekend, I already knew I could do better than this. 50 000 words wasn’t really challenging, so I decided to step up and do twice that. Now, 3300 words per day, that’s something different. I had accumulated some advance on the first days (one time 7k and two times 5k), which meant that the daily wordcount to achieve 100k fell to about 3000 words, which I knew I could do.

Now near the end, I’m at almost 89k, thank you very much. If I don’t hit any snags (accidents or writer’s block), I know I’ll get my double nano, but it’ll be very close.

Yep, one bad day, and I won’t get it. One day isn’t very much.

2 – I got to find solutions fast

I’m a discovery writer, which means I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to write. I tried to outline a little for this book, but it was a half outline made in 10 minutes. As a result, I almost immediately diverged (when you do 7k words on the first day without looking at the plot, you tend to do that). I hadn’t a good enough outline to force my way back to it, so I let it go and looked ahead.

Now, I can’t write that much fiction in any day. I write some (usually in chunks of 1000 words), and rest for 15 minutes between, three times a day. This means that usually, I have time to think about the next scene during those breaks. I do the same for larger breaks, reflecting on what’s happened on the page and what I need to see happen next. The thing is I never commit to anything until a character has said or done it. I might think about some plot developments, but go for others because the character didn’t feel like doing the first.

Twice, I got in very bad writing positions. One a week ago when I began to see that my main character was ill-equipped to solve the problem, and one yesterday where nothing bad could happen to her and there was no tension anywhere. These are what I call plot holes, where I write myself into these, like I’m digging a hole around me.

What NaNoWriMo forced me to do was to find solutions to these, because I had a wordcount to keep. In the first instance, I asked myself the right questions during breaks and found a good answer. For the second one, something wonderful happened, because I was typing the scene, and thought at the same time that things needed to happen, and they happened.

I often say that discovery writing is a little like magic. In this instance, it was true. I began the scene with a cocky main character, and by the ending, she had gone through the burner, with considerable tension added to the book. Up to now, this is the best scene in the book, mainly because there is a very large contrast between points in the scene. Yep, NaNoWriMo allowed me to produce that.

3 – I got to meet some wonderful people

Writing is a solitary business. I sit there transcribing what characters do inside my head. I allow no music, no sound there. I hear only the characters talk and the keys I type.

The thing is, writing people aren’t really that common. I hear here and there that someone wants to do it, or has done it when she was young, but very few actually do write and are serious about this.

NaNoWriMo is not for the weak hearted, so people there are mostly serious about their writing, and I get to meet them. And I got to meet some english speaking ones, so yeah!

We’re trying to setup a writing group (a real one, where we meet face to face), starting this January. We intend to provide some mutual support as well as critique, which is a novel approach to writing groups, one I didn’t find anywhere else. We’ll see how it goes.

So, the contest is not over yet. I still have a few words to write to finish my double nano, and some more to finish this third novel, but for what I see, I can already thank NaNoWriMo a great deal.