Writing Lessons Learned from NaNoWriMo
I’ve won National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) multiple times, but this year was my first time tackling it since 2011. And I didn’t win — I only hit 15,000 words. (For those of you who don’t think in word counts, that’s just under 1/4 of the way through the novel I’m writing.) Here’s what I (re)learned… 5. NaNoWriMo is not worth killing your wrists over. I’ve had on-and-off wrist problems this fall, and as soon as I started to push for higher word counts, the problems flared up again. I backed off right away and wrote all of 300 words in the next five days, before cautiously starting up again. I’m still trying to pinpoint how much I can comfortably write without physical consequences (current guess is at least 800 words a day), but I’m in this for the long haul. I’ll do what I gotta do.