Brace yourself, I am going to pester you with my last post about NaNoWriMo. Are you happy? I bet you are.

National Novel Writing Month, the challenge writers all over the world launch in with the purpose of writing 50000 words in a month, is going to officially end tomorrow, but I reached the goal yesterday so….

I AM A WINNER!!!

(see the banner on the left) 

I am stupidly happy, but I can’t avoid to gloat over this a bit. Why I say stupidly? Because there is no prize, I didn’t finish the story, infact I still have to write some developments, I still have a lot of work to do and I’ll probably realise that the most part of what I wrote during this month it’s not worth reading as it is now.

So why am I happy? Because NaNoWriMo has been a very good experience and I learnt a lot of things about writing and about myself. For instance…

1. make plans, but be ready to abandon them if necessary: some writers make a lot of planning before start writing, others doesn’t plan at all and follow inspiration. I made plans for this NaNoWriMo, I planned my characters and a guideline for the plot. At first I sticked to my plan, but then the story took some unexpected turns and fortunately I understood in time that I could follow these turns without much damage. In fact probably I would have done more damage by sticking to my original idea, so I am glad I didn’t!

2. writing every day keeps you into the story: ask every professional writer, they would all tell you the same. Write every day, write if you don’t feel inspired, write even if you are tired. I believed in these statements before doing NaNo, now that I have a first hand experience I can assure you it’s true. If you want to bring your story somewhere, you have to write every day. I find that keep writing about my characters, keep moving them in their world helps me to feel for them and to see ways to bring them through the events.

3. is possible to write 50000 words in a month without much distress: ok, I know, this month I had time enough because I don’t have a full time job (believe me, I would much prefer to have a job), but actually I found out that I can write about a thousand words in an hour or an hour and a half. The average word count per day to finish NaNo in time was of 1667 words and it’s not impossible to find some time every day.

4. NaNoWriMo must be taken as a good occasion to learn an habit: writing is just like every other activity, it improves with practice. The more you write, the better you became at it, NaNoWriMo has been a good way to see what I can do if I train myself every day.

NaNoWriMo is over but I want to treasure what I learnt and keep my new habits, that means that I’ll try to keep writing with this pace both my stories and my blog but I won’t pester you anymore with word counts and NaNoWriMo posts.

Now you can breath easily.