Ah, such skill. I won't even need 30 days! I thought to myself.
Then real life rolled over me, backed up and rolled over me again. Enough of my excuses. This is what I learned from FAILING NaNoWriMo 2010:
- Setting goals is good. Winging it is bad. When I wrote I wrote well, but I allowed myself to begin to slack when I thought it was going too easy. Sticking to the 1,667+ words a day is an attainable goal...if you hold yourself to it.
- I sometimes have the attention span of a 5th grader. When I set a goal which requires a consistent output as in NaNoWriMo, I need to remove distraction. No cell phone beeping incessantly with text and email. No TV. No Facebook or gaming breaks. Not until the work is done.
- I am not a seat of the pants writer, I need an outline. I think the idea of people just writing, letting the words/characters lead them, is an overly romanticized notion. I'd love for it to work that way, but as well as I did write, I know now it would have gone better if I'd had better focus and direction. Not that the story won't take a twist or a turn on its own, or even take a new direction entirely, but I need a road map so I at least end up in the right state.
