What I learned from NaNoWriMo

And the winner is.......

Yes, me, and a thousands of other people! But I did it, I'm a NaNoWriMo winner. Over 60,000 words in a month. I can't believe it.

What did I learn from this experience. Gosh, so much.

1. If you sit your butt down in a chair, turn off your internal editor, it's possible to write, and write alot. Sure not everything I wrote was wonderful, alot of it was a load of crap, but as Nora Robert says, 'I can't fix a blank page, but I can fix shit.'

2. The act of writing can free up your creativity. I'd had such a hard time over the summer writing, due to my precarious financial situation, and fruitlessly sending out partials of Nearly Famous to unreceptive agents. I lost the spark. I abandoned the chick-lit I was trying to write because it just wasn't jellin' like Magellan. But writing during NaNoWriMo, I was amazed not only at how much I was writing but all the story ideas that were suddenly flowing.

3. It allowed me to try a new genre that I'd never written in before. I've read YA for years now, but I never thought that I had either the voice or that I could think of anything that hadn't been done before. Of course it turned out that my plot had been done before, but I managed to find a funky new way of doing it.

4. I'm actually looking forward to revisions for once, as I try to shape my manuscript into something approaching a book.

5. The 50,000 words, gave me a chance to try and shape a story that wasn't an epic for once. The book topped out at 225 pages. My very first manuscript that I ever wrote was 435. The last draft of Nearly Famous was 502 pages (it's now down to 440 and I still need to get it in under 400).

So, those are the 5 top things that I learned from this experience. Could I have learned the same things from spending the time working out the plot etc. beforehand? Maybe, but maybe not. My mind is not a tidy place. After I finished writing yesterday, I wrote the synopsis for the book which actually was only 3 typed pages, the shortest synopsis I've ever written in my life.

And now I have 4 ideas for YA novels.