My Experience At August Camp NaNoWriMo 2012

The adventure is over. We, writers, are back to our normal rate of a hundreds of words per day instead of the massive 1,600+ words that we’ve had to write everyday for one whole month to finally win this year’s August Camp NaNoWriMo.

Hey, that’s mine 😉

I was lucky that the first two weeks were relatively easy because I was in holidays so I had a great start (4000 words on the very first day!). And when I compare this year’s performance to last year’s in November, I can clearly see a difference: I improved at that crazy thing! Here are my statistics:

 

This is this year’s progress chart towards that 50,000 words goal. (I stopped updating it when I had reached 50,137 words.)

This one’s for last year’s NaNo, when I stopped at 50,042 words.

Indeed this year I was more stable – practice makes perfect, 😉

And that’s mainly because this year,

1. I made a complete plan of the story, a detailed one, chapter wise one, well before the competition started.

2. I already had a clear image of the ending in my mind. I think that’s important because in the story then all you have to do is to go towards this end, and not wander aimlessly wondering what would happen next. Yes I’m not a pantser.

The one main advice I’d like to tell you, for those who are inspired to enroll in this crazy NaNo challenge later/again, is that once you start typing, you should be totally into your story! Your characters become real people, friends of yours. The story becomes like a part of your own. It comes naturally in fact, so don’t worry. But that’s how I’m able to write everyday. Once I feel connected, deeply connected to the plot, I can’t stop myself from thinking about it and thus putting all on paper becomes an easy task.

Don’t worry, writers are weird… and lonely too. But the result is worth some insanity of ours! 🙂

Now, I’d like to point out two things about NaNoWriMo.

What I like about it:

It’s a challenge that unites all the aspiring or published writers of the world to do what they have always loved doing: writing. Many people dream of writing a novel, and this is their chance of realising it! Moreover, it motivates us to write, on a regular basis, a great training to kill procrastination. Personally it made me fall in love with writing once more. It encourages me to strive towards my dream since I’m 11, to become a published famous writer! It’ll take time and lots of effort but in the end I really hope to make it come true! For my younger self’s sake… 😉

What I dislike about it:

Oh yes, NaNoWriMo has not always proved to be beneficial. First of all, I realised that every time, for the two NaNo’s that I participated in, in the middle of my writing, I have done something wrong. In November, my format and technique were not good for the story. This year, I got a new idea to be implanted in my story. But I had to keep on writing, to keep updating the word count. What I mean is that, NaNo is quantity over quality, so it’s un travail bâclé, like we say in French. The story is written too hastily and in the end  we are left with a pile of not-so-good writing and thus there’s a massive editing to do, to arrange things… It’s also very tiring and when the challenge is over we have the tendency to fall back on our chair and relax… because we’re fed up. We’re tired of writing. It’s then later on that we finally summon the courage to have a look at our story.

Nothing is perfect… It’s your choice to embrace the challenge or not.

I’m going to do it in November too anyway. It’s too addictive!

What about you? Did you do the August one? Are you getting back into that writing adventure in November? 

An Evil Nymph.