I'm a Winner!

If you follow me anywhere else and if you just take a look at my front page, you'll realize that I participated in National Novel Writers Month (NaNoWriMo for short), and that I wrote my 50,000 words in 30 days and though it was hard, it was SO satisfying.

My story was crap. It was supposed to be a young adult novel, but it turned into a romance novel combining some aspects of the YA novel I started. Once again, it was crap, so no one will be reading it. Yet that crap was the best thing I've written in a long time because it showed me something I've been trying to teach myself for some time now.

1. It showed me that the first step to good writing is crap writing. When I finished that draft, even though I didn't want to do anything with it, I immediately had ideas for what I would do to fix some of the more glaring errors. That's what I need to do for my script writing, just write the first draft and then figure work on the glaring errors later.

2. It taught me to sit at my desk at any point and be able to write, even if it's crap. It's the whole, if you do it for 30 days, it becomes a habit. Now that I'm not writing for this specific goal, I get to do more things out of the house, but sitting at my little desk in my chair is something I do every night now and doing that comes with some writing, even if there is more television watching going on.

3. If you tell people what your goals are, they force you to keep it. They push you when you need the push and poor the glass of wine when it's time to celebrate.

4. I can do more than I am doing, but I don't have to stress myself out trying to do it. My initial thought when I started the 50,000 words in 30 days quest was that I wouldn't be able to do anything other than write. Yet when I went out to drink, I was the nerd sitting in the corner writing, my glass of Guinness at hand. I went to live shows and hung out with friends with my phone's notepad application to catch every thought if I needed to jot something down. I was prepared to write at any given moment will still be able to enjoy myself. I buckled down when I needed to, but overall, I didn't stress myself out to do this.

This past November was exactly what I needed to further keep me on the road to becoming the writer I want to be. Yay me!