![\"\"](\"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/NaNo-2018-Winner-Badge.png\"){kind=icon}
<\/a><\/p>\nYay! I did it!<\/p>\n
It’s actually been about a week since I crossed the 50,000 word milestone with the novel\u00a0Synthetic Dreams<\/em>.\u00a0 I was hoping I’d finish the entire first draft before the end of the month, but I petered out last week.\u00a0 By Thanksgiving, I needed to basically stop doing anything for a while.\u00a0 This whole long weekend, I didn’t write, program, leave the house, or do anything that could in any way be described as “constructive.” I did laundry yesterday.\u00a0 That was the extent of my productivity.<\/p>\n We need to take breaks every once in a while, and my need crept up out of nowhere.\u00a0 Now it’s Monday.\u00a0 I’m writing this post during my lunch break at work.\u00a0 A few minutes ago, JPL landed a drill-bot on Mars and at the moment, I’m more excited about that little victory than anything else.<\/p>\n This is my last check-in for NaNo and I’m glad to report I now have a non-losing record.\u00a0 3 out of 6 of my NaNo attempts have ended in a success.\u00a0 Not too shabby.<\/p>\n I have a lot of friends that set out on this NaNoWriMo journey with me, and they aren’t going to hit 50,000 words by the month’s end.\u00a0 For them, and for my future self, I want to take a moment to talk about what it really means to succeed at NaNoWriMo.<\/p>\n First of all, let’s keep it real.\u00a0 I’m not going to try and cheer you up with a “participation is the REAL winning” kind of speech.\u00a0 That’s not what this is about.<\/p>\n NaNoWriMo is purely about adding one more motivator to your writing engine.\u00a0 That’s all it is.\u00a0 You’re a writer 12 months out of the year and not just November.\u00a0 50,000 words is an arbitrary goal during an arbitrary month.\u00a0 It isn’t real and it doesn’t mean you’re not a real writer if you’re not hitting the 50k goal.<\/p>\n Necessity breeds creativity, and deadlines create both necessity and motivation.\u00a0 When November started, we set for ourselves a deadline.\u00a0 Write so many words in 30 days.\u00a0 By framing the writing journey in such a way, we’re activating parts of our brain that we may not otherwise employ when sitting down to write a story.<\/p>\n There’s nothing wrong with that! It’s a good way to boost productivity.<\/p>\n Then there’s the competitive part of the experience.\u00a0 When you’re comparing your word counts to those of your writing buddies, there is a part of you that is cheering them on.\u00a0 There is also a part of you that really wants to win.\u00a0 To get to 50,000 words first.\u00a0 That’s another part of your brain that isn’t usually used during the writing process. While “winning” may not be the most noble of motivators, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.\u00a0 It’s all about digging deep and getting creative.\u00a0 The more of your brain you bring to the keyboard, the better.<\/p>\n If you wrote this month, you won.\u00a0 The prize is your collection of words, which hopefully resembles a story.\u00a0 The quality of the prize is directly proportional to the length and readability of the story you’ve created.\u00a0 If you vomited 100,000 words into Word and it’s incomprehensible… well, that’s your prize.\u00a0 If you crafted 10,000 words over the course of thirty days, but it’s exemplary writing… that’s your prize, too.<\/p>\n I reached 50,000 words in\u00a0Synthetic Dreams<\/em> and I felt great about it for a few minutes, but I’m not really ready to celebrate because the story isn’t finished.\u00a0 I’m in the middle and that’s a treacherous place where slumps happen and plot threads unravel.\u00a0 I love my characters, the premise, the world building, the ideas of the story… but what I’ve written is going to need a lot of editing.\u00a0 There’s a great story here, but it’s not leaping from my head fully formed like Athena.\u00a0 My story is an ugly duckling that’s going to need a lot of time and effort.<\/p>\n I’m going to keep going on this story.\u00a0 I’m going to try and get the first draft finished before the end of the year, but there’s no guarantee that will happen.\u00a0 Looking at my outline, I can safely say the end is still another 40,000 words away.\u00a0 Once I get the first draft finished, I’ll check what’s next in my queue.<\/p>\n Tying back to NaNoWrMo, the next novel I’m probably going to write is a fantasy.\u00a0 It’s basically The Bourne Identity meets Game of Thrones.\u00a0 It was the novel I attempted my very first NaNoWriMo.\u00a0 I wrote about 10,000 words that November, then another 20,000 words before I abandoned it to work on\u00a0The Repossessed Ghost<\/em>.\u00a0 I still like the concept and the characters I created.\u00a0 I haven’t given up on the idea.\u00a0 I just needed to grow as a writer before I could do that story justice.\u00a0 So, taking what I’ve learned over the last 3 or 4 stories, I’m going to write\u00a0A Clean Slate\u00a0<\/em>and it’s going to be great.\u00a0 It won’t be an official NaNoWriMo winner, but it will be a winner to me.<\/p>\n Whether you wrote 50,000 words or not this month, you still have a prize.\u00a0 Enjoy it!\u00a0 But also remember that it’s not done.\u00a0 No one wants to read your unedited first draft.\u00a0 The first draft is like a pencil sketch.\u00a0 You still need to go through and do the inking and coloring, shading and texturing.<\/p>\n A first draft is an important beginning and worthy of being celebrated, but switching from art metaphors to cooking, it’s not done yet.\u00a0 It needs to cook more.\u00a0 Don’t serve your guests something raw.<\/p>\n If you’re a writer, I hope you’ve had tremendous success this month!\u00a0 And if you’re not a writer, I hope you’ve at least done something creative that’s made you happy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I guess I’ll just put this here: Yay! I did it! It’s actually been about a week since I crossed the 50,000 word milestone with the novel\u00a0Synthetic Dreams.\u00a0 I was hoping I’d finish the entire first draft before the end of the month, but I petered out last week.\u00a0 By Thanksgiving, I needed to basically […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1102,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions\/1102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}