Celebrating National Novel Writing Month

In early October, I decided to participate in the National Novel Writing Month - which is November. I started reading items on the web site. I had never written 50,000 words on a single topic before - and certainly doing it in one month sounded daunting. To make it even more of a challenge, I had guests coming for the Thanksgiving week.

I decided that my goal should be 3000 words per day so that I could cross the 50,000 word mark before my guests arrived on the 19th. I created a mind map of chapters that I thought would be about 3000 words each and a spreadsheet of character definitions.

So - how has it worked out? I past the 50,000 work mark yesterday and I still have quite a bit of the story to tell. The green on the mind map to the right is the part that is done. Writing the rest of the story is probably another 20,000-30,000 words.

I’ve already learned a lot from the experience and am more aware of what I need to do better. Things like 

• Realistic dialog
• Enough tension/release
• Narrative flow 

Are all going to be the challenge of the next phase - editing. That is going to be as hard or harder than the writing sprint of November. The novel may never turn into something to publish. Learning experiences have value of their own.

I am celebrating my 50,000 words today - knowing that it is not the finish line but a significant milestone along the way.