What I learned about writing in November

See how that title works grammatically in two ways? Yup, it's time to sum up the things I learned while participating in my first NaNoWriMo.

1) I can write more than I thought I could. I can wake up early on my day off, just to write! And it doesn't suck! Some days I wrote 1,667 words. Some days I wrote two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand words. Some days my eyes burned from the screen so that I had to lie in a darkened room for a while listening to soothing music on my iPod. I'm what Big Chimp calls a "considerate" writer, so four thousand words a day is big stuff for me.

2) I can do this while still managing to have some semblance of a plot going on. Sometimes, in fact, the need to expand my wordcount left little time for sitting there wondering what happens next, or worrying over something that might or might not work. Sometimes I threw in unexpected twists just to have more to write about, and those twists, in retrospect, really helped make the story.

3) Turning off my Internet connection is very helpful. Especially when used in conjunction with goals: I will keep the Internet connection disabled until I've written two-thousand more words, and then I can turn it on for fifteen minutes and brag on Twitter about what a great writing day I'm having.

4) I may be starting to get the hang of this novel-writing thing. I had so many false starts and scrapped attempts with my first novel that it took me almost two years to finish the first (very rough) draft. With this novel, though it's obviously rough and will need plenty of editing when it's finished, the first draft is so much more confident. It's got some solid characters, it's got good direction, it's got plot...it's miles ahead of where the first novel was after the first month of work. Light-years ahead, in fact.

And on top of all of that, it feels pretty good to have written over half of a novel in 30 days (Laundry Mountain or no Laundry Mountain).