That collective sigh of relief and groan of frustration you heard yesterday came from the hoards of authors who met — or didn’t — their NaNoWriMo goals. Now they are looking at those 50,000 words and wondering what to do with them. Should they put them aside for a bit and then come back to see if they are anywhere close to a book or if they more resemble a cabbage. Others are wondering why they couldn’t meet the deadline and wondering how they can ever be an author if they can’t successfully complete NaNo. Then there are those who know they finished their 50,000 words, that they have a book (of sorts) as a result but aren’t sure it is worth the work they will have to put in to bring it to publishable standards.
All of those reactions — and more — are why I don’t particularly like NaNo. I’ve done it. I’ve failed more often than I’ve successfully concluded it. I’ve seen the faces of those in my writer’s group go pale, their features slack, when I ask if they are going to take part. I can’t blame them. For most folks, writing 50,000 words in 30 days sounds next to impossible. For a lot, it is. Real life always seems to find ways to keep them from the keyboard and adding the pressure of an artificial goal only compounds the pressure to write to the point that the muse not only goes quiet but she goes somewhere far, far away.
Still, I recommend NaNo to almost everyone, especially those who have had a dry stretch. However — don’t laugh. You knew there had to be a but to all this — I tell folks not to let the 50,000 word goal put them off. If they don’t think they can do that much, then they should set a more reasonable sounding goal. Then, during the course of NaNo, they need to do their best to stick to their goal (and be ready to tell the crit group how they did and what they think helped them meet their goal or what caused them to miss it). What I have learned over the last few years is that NaNo can and does serve as a good kick in the writerly butt for some of them and it also lets them see what sort of distractions they have started allowing into their writing time, many of which they can learn how to ignore or at least postpone until they get their writing in for the day/week/month.
I’ll admit, as I already have, that I usually don’t meet my NaNo goals. That’s because I know I can do 50k in a month and don’t adjust the word count. That is when Real Life tends to kick me in the teeth. Whether it is illness, either of me or a family member, or death or something around the house deciding to go MIA, something always seems to happen. It did this year. The difference was that I still managed to not only meet my 50k goal but I exceeded it.
So what was different?
So, what’s the purpose of this post other than to blow my own NaNo horn? Part of it is to encourage those who didn’t manage to make the 50k goal of the “official” NaNo rules not to give up. Adapt and adjust the word count next year to what you think you can do and then add a little to it. It is also to say not to get discouraged if you didn’t meet it this year. Real life happens and, as those of us who post here can tell you, it happens more often than any of us would like. NaNo is a great kick in the pants, if you let it and if you don’t take it too seriously. Just remember that there will be times when you meet the goal and times when you don’t, times when you blow past the goal and times when you don’t come close. It doesn’t really matter as long as you keep writing.
So, to answer my question at the top of the post. What comes next? Write some more.
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “NaNo is over. What now?”
A week of rest (or in my case polishing a story, doing covers, then going back to a story I just finished after it has cooled and doing some revisions). Then going over the NaNo manuscript (if you have one) or looking at other work to see what is needed. Or doing background reading for two novels you had not intended to write in a series you thought you’d wrapped up. (Mutter mutter sadistic Muse mutter mutter)
Well, I did not officially participate, but I keep records anyway.
November 30th, the 30 day total was 27,644. OK, that was better than the 30 day total on October 31st, which was 13,022. Worse than the September 30th for the 30 days, which was 40,151.
I keep a continuous moving 30 day total (and average). That is far more telling to me, when I look at the record. So – what is significant is that I had eight days of no production in November.Twenty-one days of no production in October. Seven no production days in September.
It is mostly those “real life” days, with no production, that kill me.
Eliminate no production days, and I’d just about make 50K without the pressure of a “goal” to push me. Looking at my peak 30 days (September 21st) of 45,806 words – I have only two days blank for word count in that period.
So my goal (for December) is “no empty days.” Now, that is not going to be easy, obviously – at least one of my empty days in November had 9+ hours of cooking and the associated cleaning.
So, let “DeNoEmpDa” begin… (So, Muse, awake yet?)
Yep. This year I did the Real Life Crisis right off the bat. No writing for a week and a half. Then I buried myself in NaNo to avoid the emotional adjustment and stop thinking about it. Barely pulled off the word count, but, holy moley. I described it as something the dog horked up, and I’m not kidding. I’ll let it sit six months and rip it apart and reassemble. I figure three short stories, maybe, if they’re not to depressing and pointless..
I didn’t NaNoWriMo exactly, but I did write 10,560 words on various projects, which is a record for one month of writing for me.
This year NaNo took the WIP from 70K to over 120K. I really needed that push to break the back of the thing, particularly since it’s still not done. If NaNo works for you, it really works. I’ve been doing it for a decade, and I always get something out of it, even though it does make me feel grumpy and pressured at times.
I used Nanowrimo as the “If I’m going to try writing a complete story, then I need to write every day. So this will force the habit of writing every day.” It did, too.
Right now, I’m completely ignoring the story written in favor of wrestling with a sequel. In retrospect, noodling around with ideas until they gel and layer into a rough plot took a month and a half for the first story, over and above the actual writing time. So trying to keep writing every day while still figuring out the plot and world has resulted in about 12K of blundering around, exploring the world, but very little salvageable as story.
I’m of two minds on the writing every day: on the one hand, it’s a lot of wasted words, effort, and time. On the other, it’s a very good work and production habit. (Like keeping to the LCHF diet and an effort to keep a house clean, this probably works much better if I put in time every day, instead of making occasional runs at the goal.)
Yeah. What I need to do is some editing this morning, and then some new writing in the afternoon. And then do it again tomorrow, and then the next day.
I was afraid I’d collapse after NaNo and have nothing left to say. I am pleased to report I went to lunch and wrote.
Awesome!
Here’s to getting some more writing in every day, until you have far more great stories done in a year than you expected!
I wrote yesterday, too. Chiefly on works other than the still incomplete NaNoWriMo novel.
I’ve discovered it gets better over time. I’ve got enough of a back log of nano projects I can let them stew and still have something to write on every single day. I just queue them up and off I go. Ones that need stewing I fiddle with while concentrating on a ‘main’ project. The bigger the ‘queue’ (at least for me) the better off I seem to be because even if I’m banging my head against a wall I can make forward progress on SOMETHING.
To mis-quote Mel Brooks (Gov. William J. Le Petomane) from Blazing Saddles:
Write, write, write, write, write!
November is a bad month to put off the real world up here in Maine, but I managed about 4,000 words. It got me over the hump of “just write it.” I’m very pleased with my progress. Once I’m settled in for the winter I’ll have a lot more time for it.
Finishing the story. 50,000 didn’t cut it.
As Mobiuswolf said, November is one of the worst times of the year for something like Nano. March, being the most worthless month of the year (with nothing to break up the winter fatigue, black ice and gray skies but St. Patrick’s Day) is a shoo-in. Move it to March, and I’ll do it.
Second choice: January.
11,870 words here. I was mainly working on an epistolary story that required looking up a lot of dates of fixed events and estimating mail delivery times. So it wasn’t really a good fit for NaNo. I did a little work on another story until one of the characters wanted a prequel, so I started that, too.