Nanowrimo postscript
out but not down

So, November is nearly over. I didn’t think I’d be writing this post-mortem before the end of November, but I don’t feel like writing 5,000 words every day for the next 3 days will be at all valuable in my life.

I’ve written 35,000 words. It’s not winning Nanowrimo, and it’s not a novel, but it’s still a great many words.

You can read it here: https://gist.github.com/robotdana/7220779 (you should probably stop after part one)

What did I achieve?

1. One vaguely interesting ten thousand word short story.
2. A few other less interesting short stories, haphazardly connected on.
3. Lots of waffling and losing interest in settings and premises.
4. A few thousand words of user interface designing masquerading as a story
5. A large chunk of just writing for the sake of wordcount without any plan or goal.
6. A greater tendency towards the verbose.

I think overall Nano has made me (hopefully temporarily) a worse writer. I’ve become needlessly verbose and less careful, where I used to prefer to use less words I would now write more because all that mattered was wordcount, and it bled into the rest of my writing. On the other side of that coin it has made me a braver writer, in that I’ll just write without caring about what I’m writing so much as long as I’m writing.

Writing fiction seems less like a magical impossible skill now. And writing good fiction seems achievable, as it’s just like writing bad fiction but with hundreds of hours of revisions. And it turns out I can write bad fiction.

I feel more like a writer now. I’ve written a very many lot of all the words. I’ve been through a thing. I’ve survived.