How my NaNoWriMo 2020 Ended
How was my experience with NaNoWriMo 2020.
This article is the English version; if you are interested in the Italian version, you can find it here: Come si è concluso il mio NaNoWriMo 2020
In November 2020, I participated in the NaNoWriMo event (as written in previous articles) to write the 50,000 words in 30 days, for those who were curious to know immediately how it ended, briefly, well, I got to the bottom, and I managed to write them, but this is not the important thing, the experience that was around the event and what I learned with it was much more useful.
How I had organized myself
To participate in the best way, I had prepared the story’s outline, what I wanted to write about, a track to follow.
I had chosen to use Dynalist as a tool (a tool that I found very useful for outlines), preparing a sort of calendar with the three main time slot in which I thought I was writing.
In my ideal organization, to write the average 1667 words per day, I had divided the daily writing sessions into three time slot (so about 556 words per slot):
- in the morning (before starting work)
- towards lunch
- in the afternoon/evening (at the end of the work)
Finally, I joined the Italian group of NaNoWriMo both on Facebook and on its Discord channel, this was probably the best and most useful choice I made.
What I learned/need to improve
Timing
I thought I could write the three times a day I had planned. Still, it didn’t happen for various reasons (mainly business); I ended up writing only once a day, that one time, however, I imposed it every day, even in the worst days, I started writing even just a minimum. Unfortunately, it often happened, after the initial enthusiasm, not to get to write even the average number of words needed daily (1667) to be able to proceed with tranquility; in fact, then I had to recover everything towards the end by writing many words.
Planning
I thought I had planned the stories to have material and ideas to be able to write continuously for the 30 days without particular problems, I was wrong, and I had to go back to the planning part to adapt it (roughly what I had prepared it initially ran out between the second and third week of November).
To help me with the new planning (and related writing) in progress, the Fabula Deck cards were very helpful, cards that help to write based on the hero’s narrative structure journey, a structure at the base of multiple stories and of which Chris Vogler has also written a book about it.
Surely I will have to improve the planning to have a more solid and simple to follow.
Tools
The choice I made regarding the tool was not the best in the long term, this is because Dynalist was born for other uses for which it works very well (mainly outline), and instead, I wanted to use it as an editor; specifically, I found it wrong for me for:
- Word Count — did not update correctly / did not convince me, in doubt, I copied what was written in a new document to detect only the word count (which I then updated manually on the NaNoWriMo website)
- Repository — after writing for the NaNoWriMo, I will have to review and reorganize all the contents, and it is not easy for me on Dynalist; I made the first step of copying them to Google Docs, and then I brought them to Notion, a series of steps that I could have avoided by going to write directly there for the NaNoWriMo.
Probably for the next NaNoWriMo I will try to use Notion (on which I am writing this article right now).
Community
Joining the Italian NaNoWriMo community was probably the thing that helped me the most in this adventure; I probably wouldn’t have made it to the 50,000-word goal without them.
The initiatives they have undertaken have been very useful, such as:
- weekends with particular challenges
- sessions between users in which we “challenged” each other by writing together in a certain amount of time (the word war), it was a way to encourage each other to write as there is a sort of ranking.
Furthermore, when you had doubts of any kind, there was always someone who helped you to clarify them, both on the story itself (maybe you needed an opinion on a particular scene how to make it continue/make it more credible, or maybe you were undecided among more ideas), and perhaps also how to organize it or also to provide writing advice in general.
To register, you can search for the community that suits you best by searching directly on the NaNoWriMo site for your region (by connecting to the relevant site and after logging in, going to COMMUNITY — Find a Region).
Statistics
For those who love statistics below my daily word count for what was done in November, the same info is also visible on the NaNoWriMo website.
- As a graph
- As a number of words
You can see that I have often been below the necessary average (1667 words) but that I tried when possible (also thanks to community initiatives) to recover, and above all, I gave a good boost at the end. In the last two days of NaNoWriMo, I wrote almost 1/3 of all the words for the rest of the month.
Conclusion
I liked the experience itself a lot, and I met some people who helped me to carry it out in the best way.
I will try to convince other people to participate as well, both because I think they can enjoy writing and because participating in it together with a community is a very different experience than trying it alone.
I am sure that I will also participate in the next NaNoWriMo, arriving much better prepared than the previous one.
Thanks for reading; if you liked it (or even if you didn’t like it) or if you have any considerations about it, let me know in the comments.
