I had a pretty busy November! Most of it was spent getting everything ready to launch Year of the Collage. But I also participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a “fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing” where participants from all over the world committed to writing a 50,000-word first draft of a novel in November.
My novel was called:
I didn’t write a novel. I don’t think I have one in me! But I have wanted to start writing regularly again, and so I took the challenge.
Since I haven’t written in awhile, I thought I would start out easy. I gave myself permission to just write nonsense. It didn’t matter what I wrote, as long as I got the words in, even if all I wrote was silly.
Well, a lot of it was very silly writing. I wrote sentences like:
“I don’t know what I need or what I’m doing,” “My feet are chilly,” and “Boy, I sure ate a lot of sweets today.”
I’m not kidding! My brain is mush lately.
But I did learn a few things about myself during the month!
- i learned that i have absolutely no problem typing things without capitalizing words. however, i’m super rigorous about punctuation such as quote marks, commas, periods, dashes, parentheses… i will waste a lot of time going back and fixing any errors. weird.
- I learned that having a visual chart of my progress each day really helped.
- I learned that I would sometimes write negative things even if I didn’t feel them. I caught myself several times during the first week writing things like, “Oh, I am so frustrated,” when in fact at that moment I didn’t feel frustrated at all. Or, “Argh… writing is so hard!” when, in fact, it wasn’t really, as I had given myself permission to just type nonsense, and I type pretty fast, so there should have been nothing hard about any of that! So after that first week I started watching what I wrote and making sure that what I was writing and what I was feeling were more aligned.
That last point was kind of huge. And even though I have 50,000 words of (mostly) nonsense to show for November, it was worth it for that reason alone!
Now that it’s December, my daily word count average has dropped, but I’m still writing every day. So… yay!
