I Won! National Novel Writing Month 2012

My fifth NaNo win! I am so proud. This one rounded out at over 51,000 words, and I actually finished it off last night with an ending and everything!

And now, tonight, I feel lost and terrified. What will I do now? I just frantically texted my amazing NaNo buddy* the big question -- without the challenge of NaNoWriMo, will I be disciplined enough to finish editing together a real rough draft? Or will another year go by when I don't?

The pep talk from Nick Hornby yesterday gave me heart. My favorite bits were:

It’s a mess, the arts. Critics don’t agree with each other, readers don’t agree with critics. And real writers—if I may become definitive for a moment—change their minds about their own worth and talent somewhere between two and seven hundred times a day.

I’m trying to tell you that your own opinion of your work is entirely irrelevant, and so is the opinion of others. You have a job to do, and that job is to write a novel...You need a story and characters and something to say about them, although it’s possible that some of these elements won’t arrive until after you’ve begun. You don’t need an agent or a grant or a publisher’s advance, and you don’t need to know whether your book will be studied at university in two hundred years’ time.

(I never do that last bit. Nope, not me. Ha!)

One of the biggest things I learned this year during NaNoWriMo is that contemplating my plot and characters is all well and good, but actually WRITING 50,000 words of the novel will put me farther down the road than any amount of just THINKING. I also learned that writing in quick 15 minute sprints helps me put the pedal to the metal and just GO. At the end of 15 minutes, I have 800 more words than I did before.

As they say, you can edit a shitty rough draft, but you can't edit a blank page. Well, I now have 51,000 more words of a shitty rough draft to edit.

Here's to small steps after small steps!

*I also learned that having an equally-committed writing buddy, even five states away, is an enormous motivator and a ton of fun. Thank you, Cristina Pippa! When I was 500 words from crossing the 50k line, I had to post on her Facebook wall. It just didn't seem right to go by myself.