For the first time, I’m participating in the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge! The concept is simple: Each day in April I’ll be blogging on a topic starting with the letter of the day, beginning with A and progressing to Z by the end of the month. Posts will be short and will relate to my chosen theme: my new coming of age story, Rightfully Ours, released April 1.
N is for NaNoWriMo
For those who do no know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, which takes place annually in November. It was during NaNoWriMo 2010 that I wrote the first draft of Rightfully Ours, then tentatively titled All That Glitters. I hadn’t ever attempted writing fiction longer than a short story, and even that had been a decade earlier. Suffice to say, I didn’t really know what I was doing, only that I wanted to get 50,000 semi-coherent words written during that November.
I succeeded in doing that, making things up as I went along (writing by the seat of my pants, as they say) with only a small, old newspaper clipping to spur my imagination. That incomplete manuscript had to be finished and then revised so many times over then next five to six years that I lost count.
I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo twice since then, “winning” once more. The more experience I have at writing and the busier I’ve become with marketing books, the less valuable it’s become. Even so, had I not decided to give NaNoWriMo a shot, I may have never attempted writing a novel at all.
Have you given NaNoWriMo a try? If so, did you find it helpful and productive?
NaNoWriMo is tough! You should feel good about your accomplishment. Or maybe great! Because you turned your seat-of-the-pants writing into a fantastic story!
Thanks, Theresa! I almost wish I had the first draft so I could see how horrible it was.
NaNoWriMo boosts me when I get to that point at the end of the year where I’m not really in the mood to write. Finishing the first draft of a novel in 30 days is exactly the kind of accomplishment I like to end my year with 🙂 Happy A-to-Z-ing.
It does give a nice confidence-building boost with that push to just get words on the page already!