30 days and 50,052 words later, NaNoWriMo 2019 is in the books! And has resulted in something resembling a book! It is always a grueling affair and I’ve lost track of how many times I wanted to give up. But somehow I survived.
Like almost every year I was doing pretty well in the beginning. I kind of had a little plateau around the 7th but I was still trucking along pretty good for a while. However you can clearly see where it started to plateau bad, with little, fairly useless jumps every so often. If it weren’t for Thanksgiving break I couldn’t have done my Hail Mary wordcount leap at all.
There are a lot of possible reasons why I struggled. I had my chapters planned out but I kept coming up with new questions that I couldn’t answer in the thick of writing. My characters might not have been fleshed out enough. It has always been hard for me to pound out words, it is a lot easier to let a story sit and finish it over months or years. I got…distracted by a certain boy that took me on an emotional rollercoaster. It happens to the best of us! But we learn from our mistakes and we grow.
If I could have changed anything this time around, I would want to have better carved out time for writing. It is ridiculously easy to get distracted, to convince yourself to do all kinds of random things to avoid that damned keyboard/pen and paper/cuneiform tablet. Most days I specifically told myself I would write before bed, or that I could just make up my wordcount on the weekends. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. It definitely led to more stress in the end and my last 15k words or so are pretty much unusable. When I return to this project I will just have to go back and add stuff that actually contributes to the story.
Even though my brain is basically goo at this point, I am still looking forward to going back and wrapping up this story. I only got about halfway through and the second half is where all the dramatic reveals were supposed to happen, so there is still a ways to go before the finish line. Writing is fun like that, it tortures your hands and your brain but there’s always so much potential just ahead. There’s a whole world of stories out there and all you have to do is start putting words down.
Overall I am glad I participated. This was my second time doing NaNoWriMo while working full time so it was nice to see that I still got it! Writing a novel in a month is always a challenge and I love it anyways. But honestly, this December I will probably get back into painting or drawing or music, or brush off my rock climbing gear…and maybe put aside creative writing for a bit.
Eunice Wang 