NaNoWriMo Update #1

Well – this certainly took an unexpected turn.

Today we’re seven days in – and I’m at 9k words. That means that I’m going to have to pick it up if I want to be able to hit 50k by the end of the month (unless my novella is done before I reach that number), but at the same time it’s going much better than I expected.

I might not have as many words as I wanted, but I’ve written those I have extremely fast. This whole story is coming to me so quickly, so completely fleshed out and clear in mind. I’ve never experienced anything like this, and I think there’s one particular reason why this is happening.

I don’t outline my work, and I call myself a pantser, but I always keep a document with notes whenever I come up with a new idea for a story. It’s usually not very coherent, it’s just a long train of thoughts, and it’s often not very much either. Maybe just a paragraph or two. But I have to have place to jot down all those little plot twists and character quirks that pop into my head, before I have time to start the actual story. (I have at least 30 of these future stories lined up now – and only so much time to write them).

The thing I’m writing for NaNo this year came to me in September 2019, while I was vacationing in Finland. I was following my wife around in shops, and immediately pulled my phone out to write down this idea.

And then it’s been stirring in my head for fourteen months. I’ve written down more things over the years, but I’ve also just thought about it a lot. Eventually it got to the point where I didn’t need to write down the notes because I thought about it so much that it just stuck with me. The whole story, mapped out in my mind, from A to Z. (Well, not entirely, but you get the point.)

When I sat down last Sunday to begin writing it for real, it didn’t feel like drafting something new. I knew this story by heart already, I’d been thinking about it for a year! It was just matter of physically writing it down.

And when your brain isn’t getting in the way of your thoughts, it’s very easy for your fingers to just hammer out the words.

I’m looking forward to cracking on with week two of NaNo, and I hope I won’t regret what I’ve just written here. Sure, there are some parts I need to figure out, and I need to up my word count, but if it’s going to feel as easy writing the rest of this thing as it has up until now, then I’m not worried.

Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? How are you finding it? Let me know!