I recently finished National Novel Writing Month, writing 50,000 words in November. But Thanksgiving weekend I found myself cramming to write almost 30,000 words thanks to procrastination. It's always easy to put something off for ourselves to deal with later instead of in the present; even this blog post has been put off until today.
This time, I actually learned something valuable from procrastinating. The point of the National Novel Writing month is to write a novel, not to write a fantastic novel, or even a good novel, but to just write a novel. So, that's exactly what I did. I wrote a novel in a month and now I can move on to other writing. I eventually stopped worrying about splitting hairs and let myself write freely in order to meet my deadline. That is what I believe to be one of the key lessons of the challenge: learning to write without the constants editor and critic hovering over your shoulder.
What did I gain from National Novel Writing Month? 50,00 words. A story. I definitely think it was a good experience and hopefully I'll have free time in November 2011 to do it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment