Lessons from NaNoWriMo

                I had an actual plan for a blog post, for once, but as usual, I forgot about blogging until the last minute, so another list it will be. Well, and I don’t have anything drastically important to say this week.

                What I learned from NaNoWriMo:

·         Save your document, unless you want to spend precious hours madly retyping from memory (not like I’ve done that, or anything . . . )

·         Sometimes, it’s helpful to know who your main character will be before you start (who’d a thunk? I know, I know—it sounds so crazy, doesn’t it? Well, it’s true. Take my word for it.)

·         Eat lots of chocolate, or drink coffee or tea, if you like that sort of thing

·         Write or Die is immensely helpful, although at times, I cheated, I’ll admit

·         Write. Whenever you have time. I routinely crammed on the weekends, averaging 3.5k for Friday-Sunday, because that was the only time I could write

·         Bask in your family and friends’ amazement, and remember you’re a writer

·         Don’t care if you have no clue where you’re going; somehow, it will be resolved, albeit it may be full of plot holes

·         Forego turkey and relatives until you’ve gotten your daily word-count done (at least, if you’re in the US)

·         You can always catch up. I never got behind, but I saw people who wrote so much in the last few days

·         Always add more conflict. Make up high-stakes scenarios. I put my MC captured, locked in a bathroom with a guy outside who wanted to kill her or something, but you don’t have to go that high. By the way, she got out by crawling out the window.

·         Word-count is important, but autocorrect is not your friend (read: guess who had an awful autocorrect mistake a few days ago? Yep, that’s me!)

·         Have fun. And eat more chocolate. Sleeping’s always an added bonus too

For now, I think that’s about it!

Some of my favorite NaNo quotes from family and friends include:

-“Katia’s writing a novel. (To me) Why are you writing a novel? If I was writing a novel, I’d fall asleep while I was writing it.”

-“Wow, I heard you’re getting published . . . ,”

I’m sorry, but I am so not getting published right now. I’m 14, with relatively little experience, and this is a bad first draft. Nobody would want to buy that, and I haven’t even mentioned to you that I’d want to get published.

-(I was complaining to my grandma about how I was having novel trouble and I didn’t have a plot, really)

My grandma: “Well, that’s okay. You’ll figure it out once you write six or seven!” Meaning, six or seven novels. I have at this point written two. She has never written a novel, as far as I know.

                Nothing much is new, really. I wrote like a fiend this past weekend, and sent my spell-checked first-draft out to my critique partners. It will get torn apart, so I’m going to have to deflate my glowing opinions. Of course, in time it’ll be better, I just know that for a certain amount of time, I will hate the anonymous beta readers. After that, I’ll get over it, though. I’m also going to do the Year of Writing Continuously, which I know little about. The most meager of details have been provided to me, but other than that, I’m not sure. I think it’ll be very fun, though. My personal goal for myself is 1,000 words per day, or 365,000 in the next year, starting from March 1^st.

Katia,

The writer girl