So. I did nanowrimo in November. And although I didn’t win, I still ended up writing a lot, so here is my very late wrap up post. I want to be able to look back on how I did, what I thought of doing it, so yeah. I’m going to talk about what I got done, what I’m planning to do next, and really anything surrounding the whole experience!

Did I win?

No. I was less than a thousand words away, but in the end I had a little over 49 thousand words. However, that was much more than my original goal which was 30 thousand words, so I’m happy with what I did.

I did meet the goal that was most important to me: finishing the first draft. I really wanted to actually reach the end of the book, and even though there are about a million plot holes, and the first ten thousand words are in a different point of view than the rest of the novel, I finished the story, reached the end of the draft.

My original idea really slowed me down, because it just wasn’t fun for me, and I wasn’t enjoying writing it.

Because that was going really slowly, and I was struggling to move forwards with the plot. I decided to switch to fantasy, and added some magic to it. (And completely changed everything about the plot.)

Once I did that, however, the plot just flowed better, and I was able to push through the story and had a lot of fun writing it.

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What did I end up writing about?

I originally was going to write a young adult contemporary novel about a girl named Seph that took place over the course of a year, starting before the covid-19 pandemic, and ending in the fall of 2020.

However, I soon realized that I wasn’t having that much fun with it, and about halfway through the month, I decided to switch perspectives, to Penelope’s perspective. Penelope is Seph’s older sister, and as I was writing more about her, I began to like her a lot more.

So I decided to switch to her perspective, and I eventually went to 1st person because I’d originally being writing in 3rd person. And then, well, I just added in some magic and turned it into fantasy, and the rest of the month was really fun!

I think that what I learned was that it’s important for me to write what I want to write about. One thing that was really helpful for me during the month was also to just move forward, and not worry about making everything perfect, or really even having everything make sense.

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What will I be doing next?

I haven’t really done much on my nanowrimo novel for the last few weeks because I needed to step back and focus on some other things, but I am going to try and do a little writing over the next two weeks. I mostly need to rewrite the beginning because that is still in the other perspective, and doesn’t really make sense for the story.

In January and February I want to work on rewriting parts, really fleshing out all of the characters, and adding depth to the side characters. I don’t really have any meaningful side characters, and my main characters don’t have much that much distinct personality.

I also want to spend some time world building more, and really writing out everything I have figured out about the magic system and all that. I’ve written a fair amount down, but it’s kind of all over the place, and there are a lot of inconsistencies.

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Wrapping up:

I learned a lot doing nanowrimo for the first time! There are definitely things that I’ll want to do better next year, and I think that I’ll overall be more prepared having done nanowrimo once.

I’m really happy with what I did in November, although part of me wishes that I’d just written another 800 words, to reach my goal.

I think that I know what I need to work on with my writing, and that I really need to add more side characters, because I only really have four or five characters overall that mean anything.

Did you do nanowrimo this year? Have you done it in the past? Are you working on any writing projects right now? Chat with me in the comments below!