1 – Eight hour writing meetings are counter productive. You’d think you could get a lot of words in during eight hours, but put enough writers in a room together for that much time and it ceases to be a work session and instead turns into a party. As an ML it was even worse – I had to hurry to get there to secure the room, so I started out tired, and then I’d catch my breath in time for one or two hours of decent work before the whole thing wore me out. The up side to being an ML is that I can make sure that eight hour write-ins never happen again.

2 – I don’t do fairies. Back when I came up for the idea for last year’s novel I was really into Fairies. Then the post-Twilight Urban Fantasy/YA boom happened and pretty much ruined fairies for me via over saturation. In theory I still like fairies, but in practice I’ve thoroughly lost my taste for them. I thought maybe I’d like them if I wrote them, but unfortunately that’s not how things turned out. I think I’m going to stick with vampires for now.

3 – Make sure there is enough story for 50,000 words. I intended for Fairy’s Book to have a sort of serial/anthology/monster-of-the-week story, and in it’s first incarnation it was a manga. Going into November I had only outlined the beginning and the end, figuring I could pull from folklore for the middle as I went along. That turned out to be a big mistake. I ended up wrapping up the story at around 25,000 words – halfway to the goal – and I filled out the remaining words with a hasty rewrite of a fanfic. It wasn’t pretty.

4 – Don’t slack off. I didn’t even realize that I was running out of story until the later half of week three, and the idiom ‘skin of my teeth’ comes to mind for the last day typing frenzy that just barely put me over 50k. This year I’m going to put my family on notice – 2k or no dinner.

5 – Love your idea. My biggest failure during last year’s NaNoWriMo was the sheer injustice I did to a perfectly nice idea. A lot of the struggle and slacking off came about because I simply wasn’t in love with the idea I had come up with. I didn’t have any drive to explore it’s world or characters, and the story and I suffered for it.

Perhaps some day I’ll come back to Fairy’s Book and find the missing element that is needed to make it all work. But for now I’m taking these lessons to heart. I already have my story for this year lined up and partially outlined, and very idea of it makes me giddy. Angels and demons and conspiracies oh my!

On to the main point of these post, the things I learned!

The Importance of A Good Idea
The first thing that went wrong with my NaNoNovel this year was that while I loved the idea, I wasn’t in love with it so I ended up struggling to keep interested in it all month long. Frankly fairies aren’t my thing – I have nothing against them, but they don’t fascinate me. I didn’t have any burning desire to write this particular story. Just to make it extra frustrating it had a lot of internal conflict and not much happen externally. The idea wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the right idea.

My advice to myself for future NaNoWriMos is to make sure I have an idea that I can’t wait to let flow from my fingertips. An idea which I’m barely holding back, not one I have to go drilling for.

The Importance of Planning
I’ve never really thought of myself as a plotter, or a pantser for that matter, but I’ve found that stories I’ve written where I’ve had some sort of outline for first, even if I end up no where near that outline, usually turn out better and are easier to write. It’s like having a map for a new city – even if you never use it, it’s still nice to have when you end up in a tangled mess of dead ends.

Fairy’s Book was a story I’d been toying with for a few years now, but it’s never gotten beyond a bit of concept art and a general idea of the story. I didn’t even have the structure of a quest or archetype to fall back on.

A good summary, or outline, would have also confirmed what my gut was trying to tell me – that there wasn’t currently enough story there to last 50,000 words. I stretched it out as long as I could and it ended around 30k. I reached 50k by writing 20k of fanfiction. (A plan would have also also shown me that my heart wasn’t in it.)

Next year I will have a plan, even an outline if I can manage it! Sure no battle plan ever survives the first encounter with the enemy, but you have one just for that reason. Better to have a sacrificial battle plan then to have your novel be the casualty. And who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and my plan will survive that first encounter!