What I’ve Learned During 12 Years of NaNoWriMo

Everyone has a different NaNoWriMo experience. We’ve asked some wonderful NaNoWriMo writers to share theirs. Today, Brian Wakeling, NaNoWriMo participant, shares the tale of his twelve-year-long NaNoWriMo adventure:

It’s the 18th of November 2006, and I have just crossed the finish line of my second-ever NaNo, the first in what I am just realizing will be a series. I’m feeling pretty good: I was recently interviewed for NaNoRadio, and I think that the six or seven thousand words left in this story will be fairly easy. I plan to relax for the last week of November, while I mull over ideas for what the second book will be about.

It’s the 15th of November 2016, and I have just crossed the finish line of my twelfth NaNo, the ninth and final book of the series I started all those years ago. I am feeling pleased that I have done enough for my PDF certificate, but I am worried whether I’ll be able to fit everything the story needs in under another 15,000 words or so. In the end, my final word count is over 78,000 words, and I am wondering how the fish I got here.

In the decade I’ve been writing the Have Sword & Sorcery: Will Travel™ series, I’ve amassed over 600,000 words, accumulated about 300KB of notes (most of them in spreadsheet format), and around 20MB of maps and drawings (not including the cover art). I’ve also spent about £1500 on getting copies printed, publicity material, and going to places to sell the copies–and I’ve nowhere near made my money back. I never thought that when I started back in 2006, I would be sitting atop a pile of my own work wondering: What do I do next?

Good question.

There are any number of bits of advice about writing professionally out there, most of them including something like, “Write half a million words. Throw them away. Now you are ready to be a writer.” I’ve written my half-a-million words, and then some, and I don’t want to throw them away. Like them or not, good or not, those half-million words were an essential learning process, and if you don’t keep those around it’s harder to avoid mistakes. 

You can look at all those words you wrote to find out how you got out of a similar situation before, or to rewrite some dialogue that would fit another character better. Or you can bring them out occasionally to laugh at how clumsy your pen once was. Besides, I’ve been writing so long that HS&S:WT aren’t all my half-a-million words, and the last three books will all be after the magic 500K.

I wrote a pep-talk for NaNo on my blog last year (must get all the badges, y'know), in which I examined the idea of success and trying for it. I’ve gone through several degrees of success during the course of writing the series. In the process, I’ve answered questions like:

Can I get the characters through the book without killing all of them? (Yes.)Is it possible to write a book while your girlfriend is visiting from Ireland? (Yes.) Can you finish a NaNo book fresh from a breakup? (Yes, although it’s not pleasant and it does color your writing.) Can you successfully set up plot elements four books before they appear? (Given how much stuff I crammed in to the last three books, yes, apparently.) Can I set myself ever more ludicrously high writing targets and beat them? (Yes, to the extent that my stats for this year’s book are off the charts.) 

And it doesn’t matter if you can say the same to all those things or not. All that matters is that you succeeded in achieving your own targets.

So, what next? For me, edit and prep for publication, try to get a foot in the door of professional writing, and see if I can think of something for NaNo2017. For you? Only you can answer that. Good luck.

Brian Wakeling was born in the Midlands, bred in the Home Counties, raised in Yorkshire, and went to university in Edinburgh, where he studied fencing and drinking at QMUC, from where he was finally kicked out for the second time in May 2000. He has been writing in one form or another for most of his life–he also acts and spends too much time playing computer games. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in March 2009.

Top photo by Flickr user Susanne Nilsson.