New Year, Same Challenge, New Surprises


I've done Nanowrimo since 2013, and every year it hits me differently. This year was a weird struggle. In the beginning, the story flowed quickly and I got a lot more written than I expected to. But my characters had ideas, so I really had no choice but to follow where they led. Then I hit 50k mid month. But I wasn't done, and neither was the story, so I kept going, curious to see if I could hit 100k in one month. (I didn't, but I did reach 72k!)

The second half of the month was harder. On the one hand, I was able to set time aside to get writing done, but it got harder to connect with my characters. Not for any particular reason that I can name, but come January, I'm going to reread what I've written and continue from there. I'm still trying to figure out why it got so difficult, but I think it was mostly just the fact that I had written so much already by the end of the month, and I kept pushing myself to keep going, just get a few more words written. It gets harder the longer you do that. 

It is worth it in the end, but dang. it's hard. But at the end, you have lots of words to read later! It's much easier to have something to edit than to write a brand new story from nothing but your imagination and an outline. Stories are 80 to 90% revision, after all.

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