NaNo

This was my first year trying NaNo or National Novel Writing Month. The whole month of November all you have to do is write 50,000 words. The first two weeks, I worked hard then life happened. One word... KIDS. In the end I came up short, but I'm not discouraged. I reached 25,000 words in one month. I know it wasn't my goal, but I learned much about my story.

The idea is to write, not to worry about spelling, grammar, plot or anything, to just wing it. Now in the last few years, I have plotted the heck out of my stories before writing it then i found that I wasn't interested in the writing the story so i decided this would bring it back to the basics. Now I realize I need a happy medium. Half way through the month, I was missing structure in my plot line, I was missing characters... I missing character's base line. Details, everyday life and a thread throughout the piece of congruency. So then I started to write down notes, and more notes. I'm sure if I would have wrote those notes into my NaNo work I may have gotten to at least 30,000 words, but I didn't, I wanted only the story.

What I realized in the end, I know have a great base for a story, my characters are flesh out, (at least on pieces of paper around my house). Nano taught me, wing it with a simple blot line. A goes to B then to C then oh wow D came out of nowhere and it all worked out in the E end.

I recently did an Interview with Susan Wiggs, and I left the last question open up to her advice for writers. Her response was perfect it got me thinking about all those out there. Here's her quote: "Besides reading my books? (Kidding.) Seriously, read and learn. Like Maureen in Lakeshore Christmas, you can find the whole world in books. And then, sorry to tell you, roll up your sleeves and get to work. I've heard it said a writer's apprenticeship is a million words. So let's get cracking."

A million words and to think I did 25,000 in one month. I'm proud of what I did and what I learned. Perhaps next year, come November I will have a plan and I will meet the Nano goal of 50,000 words. Just write.