The final countdown (of NaNoWriMo)

It’s the final countdown. (Click it. You know you want to.)

Three more days of NaNoWriMo. 

Last year, I did not achieve the goal of 50k words. I wrote about it here. (TL;DR: there still was plenty to feel good about.)

Reading it again just now, I’m finding myself in a similar situation this year, teasing the lessons out of the experience to find what I can take forward into next year. Here are my takeaways:

1. I made a commitment – and I did it, even when I was having a hard time, because I said I would. Publicly setting an intention kept me accountable.

2. Some days, I didn’t write the thing I set out to write – but I wrote anyway, and sometimes I was pleasantly surprised at what I wrote, instead of feeling like I failed at the task of the day. 

3. What I wrote was not perfect on the first try. (Hello, Captain Obvious!) AND THAT’S OKAY. That’s NORMAL. That’s THE WAY WRITING HAPPENS. What’s important is that I have something to work with.

4. Some days the pressure of meeting a word count overrode the purpose of writing. I set myself an arbitrary word count goal for the month – 10k – thinking it would be low enough to not cause paralysis, but it did more harm than good to have a daily word count goal that I might not meet. Lesson learned: word count goals don’t work for me.

5. Some really interesting (to me) stuff came out during this month. Stuff I can explore going forward. Stuff I can revise and edit and submit. Stuff that may lead to something bigger. Or not. No pressure!

All in all, not a bad result for a month’s work. How did your November go?