It’s almost over!

NaNoWriMo is almost over for another year.

For many it’s been a mad rush of creativity that catapaulted them well over the 50k mark early on. For others, well, let’s just say that it hasn’t been quite that easy.

I’ve accepted that I’m not going to make it to 50k by Wednesday. I’m actually more okay with that than I thought I would be.

Don’t get me wrong, I loathe not reaching a goal that I’ve set for myself; I’m definitely an overachiever. However, I’ve learned a lot from this experience. Some of the things that I mentioned last time, like just writing and not worrying about little details. But there’s a lot more that I’ve learned.

DO

Write everyday. No matter what. I would skip days, because I was busy or tired from the other things that I had going on. Now, I know better and next year I will sit down and write something every single day, even if it’s only a paragraph or two.

Write what is in your head. Sure, you have an outline and a general idea where the story should go. Let’s face it though, that isn’t always the way that it works. Be flexible about it. This one was a tough one for me to learn, as I tend to be very orderly, but I’ve already told you folks how that turned out!

Be comfortable. If you need to have a ton of noise to tune out so you can write, crank up the music or have a movie marathon. If you need it quiet, shoo everyone out the door and drag something heavy in front of it until you’re finished for the day. I discovered that I can write just about anywhere, but that the noise level was a mood thing. There were some days when having a movie playing and animals wrestling under my feet didn’t phase me. Other days, though, every little noise threw me off my groove.

DON’T

Sweat the small stuff. The NaNo folks tell you this over and over again. Don’t worry if you’ve misspelled a word or dropped a semi-colon in the wrong place.

Think too hard about your word count. The theory is that if you write 1,667 words a day, you will hit the 50k mark on time. Ordinarily 1,667 words is a piece of cake. I can manage it in about an hour. Unless I’m thinking about it. I found that the more I worried about how many words I was getting down, the harder it was for me to write. My best day, I wrote about five thousand words. Because I stopped thinking.

Kick yourself for not finishing. I know that I’m not going to, but I’m going to keep writing up until the last minute. At that point, even though I won’t have won NaNoWriMo for the year, I will have definitely logged a personal win. I’ll have written more of a novel than I ever have before! More importantly, I’ll keep plugging away at it, until it really is finished.

That, is perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned from all of this. Don’t quit. Or, if you’re a Galaxy Quest fan: Never give up. Never surrender!

PS. I’ll put my final word count in the comments on Thursday, just in case anyone is curious about how far I made it! I’d love to know how everyone else did, too.