Writing Scary Books: What I Learned from NaNoWriMo

And you mentioned the Novel Writing Month, which is fantastic.

I know that a lot of my friends try to participate, at least, you know, see where they can go with some of their ideas.

Do you think that this discipline that you can write a novel in a month, is that possible? Can you go into it without preparation and then just go with the flow to see where you want to be with your book?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think if you go in with no preparation, there's a good chance the book you write is going to be a complete mess.

How much planning I did varied, but I always had at least a little bit of an idea of where I was going when I went into it.

I'd often, because I was writing fantasy, I would often have a lot of the world building done and I would have the characters and I would have just like a rough arc of for the characters that I wanted to get them to go through and a rough idea of where it ended.

And a lot of stuff would change in the middle.

But having an ending in mind, it's like being a sailor and having the North Star.

It really does help having even just that little bit of guidance.

Nowadays, I actually do a lot more intensive planning.

But I still think there's a lot of value in writing challenges just to get you going.

And I think that it's completely valid that there are writers I know who don't plan literally anything ever and they just write and they do actually finish books.

And some of them are quite good and it's kind of astonishing.

But it's also not possible for everyone, especially like a month is such a short period of time and it depends on what you're doing.

You know, when I did NaNoWriMo, most of those years I was in high school.

I didn't have the adult responsibilities I have now.

So I was able to write those massive amounts of words and And now I have a lot more responsibilities, so now it takes me a few months to finish a book.

And I also do find that the quality is better when I go slower, but having those challenges to write those big amounts of words... really helped me build discipline and confidence in myself that I can finish a thing.

And now I have built a process on that.

And I actually even run a similar challenge now.

We call it First Draft Fall.

It's through my Weeknight Writers organization.

And it is our answer to NaNoWriMo.

But the big difference is that we actually have programming over a couple of months.