I had touched on the topic previously, but my journey into writing a novel ended shortly after it began. To elaborate The National Novel Writing Month is an endeavor to write a novel in a month. It is an ambitious task, especially if you are not adept at setting time aside to write. I made it about 4 days until the weekend hit and I could not find enough quiet time to refocus on the task. I had meant to go back, but at some point, I defeated myself and found excuses for not continuing. A few things that I have learned from the process.
1. 1667 words per day is a lot, at least for me. I found that I needed to have it pretty quiet in order to focus on the task. Since this was usually late at night when the house had quieted down, the endeavor to lead to staying up later than I cared for.
2. Choose your setting wisely. On the heels of Halloween, I had recently put a lot of thought into a steampunk costume for the themed party I attended. It was only natural to lead of into NaNoWriMo with the genre that I was already geared towards. After a while, I lost steam for the punk. I don't think I really wanted to write a steampunk novel, so after a while, I just lost desire to continue.
3. Know your topic. I found that writing about the Victorian era a bit difficult, I was constantly researching things in that time frame. This included articles of clothing worn in the during the time, New England geography, notable historical people, not so commonly known tools, plausibility of technological items to name a few. I spent nearly as much time researching if something actual fit in the steampunk genre, as I did writing the story. I feel I had some interesting ideas, but research took a lot of time.
3. Ensure you don't have other projects to contend with. At one point, I realized that doing NaNoWriMo prevented me from working on my RPG. I also have a lot other projects that I want to work on and NaNoWriMo usurped all of my free time.
4. Have a Support channel. I knew another person who wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo. I tried discussing our endeavor, but didn't get a lot of correspondence. I think that finding another person on the NaNoWriMo site and watching their word count helped motivate me for a short period of time. I honestly believe that if you have someone who is going through the same experience that you can talk with, it would be more motivation than trying to fabricate reasons to continue.
5. Don't Quit! Ok, so I really cannot elaborate on this. I ended up quitting, so who am I to say 'Don't Quit'. But I believe without a shadow of a doubt, if you don't quit, you will finish.
