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This year marks my third consecutive year of participating in NaNoWriMo. I found out about it three weeks before it happened, way back in 2011 and decided ‘why the heck not.’ I wasn’t a seasoned writer then, I don’t think I’m that now, but at least now I know what to expect. I’ve won both times in my past attempts and I’m looking for this to be my third win out of three.
When I found out about it, I jumped straight into the deep end, with no plan in mind as to what I was going to write. I had a simple image that seemed to stand out and I ran with it. Of course, I wasn’t alone having managed to persuade my friend, Dominique, into joining me, knowing she had a book sitting that needed working on. Together we bounced off each other and kept each other going. I think that turned out to be one of the more important aspects of that first year – having someone to buddy up with, to keep you writing, to keep you going when you felt you couldn’t go any further. That first year, I was rather foolish, and crazy. I mean I would have had to have been if I managed to pull 50,000 words out of a hat within the first five days of the month without even knowing what I was writing at the time. Who does that?
Being published isn’t everything for me. It’s not the end all or be all aspect of writing, though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t write to be published. There is a difference. I write more because I have a story to tell, and because I give me a greater sense of freedom than I could possibly ever have in this world. It allows me to create my own worlds, and it allows me to have them run as I’d see fit. Basically it makes you feel like playing god, without all the hassle that goes along with it.
NaNoWriMo, I encountered by chance. I can’t remember where I saw from, or why I even jumped at the chance to participate and truly challenge myself. I must have been looking a query letters on an agent’s blog, or something like that when it came up. But I knew when I looked at it, that I wanted to see if I could amount to the challenge and to see if I could really do it for myself more than anything. I wasn’t doing it to prove a point to others; I was doing it to prove a point to myself. That point being that if we believe we can do it, and put everything into it, then there’s nothing to say we can’t achieve it.
And this year, I am continuing on with a series of books that I’ve started. I wrote the first half of book one during NaNo ’12 and having finished that completely only 5 weeks before the start of this year, I knew that continuing that series onwards would be the best thing. The chosen genre seems to have fallen into Young Adult Fantasy, and seems to be more of a coming of age type series of books in a Dystopian world setting. – All of which is new to my own style, but the challenge is what is needed.
My advice to fellow participants would be to always write for fun and pleasure. If you see those word targets as being something you must achieve, then you only put more pressure on yourself. If you reach them, then fine fair enough, but when you write for the love of writing and not for the words, then you may just find the stress vanishes and you slip into the story far easier than you would have thought possible.
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