Dec 01 2006
NaNoWriMo Statistics
November is over, and so is National Novel Writing Month. This year, over 79,300 people participated. Of these, less than 13,000 met the challenge by writing 50,000 words, a little over 15% of the participants. (The Ottwa region was higher than the average, at 22%. Yay!) Those who completed the challenge received this nifty certificate:
I learned and experienced several interesting things while participating in NaNoWriMo 2006 while lurking through the threads and speaking to my fellow participants:
- Quantity, not quality, is what is stressed here, but many are not able to turn off the internal editor and become paralyzed.
- Many registered but did not write one word.
- Many “winners” wrote more than 50K within the month, a few going over the 100K mark.
- Many participants will do nothing with the words they have written, including many of the winners.
- Very few 50K efforts end up in published novels.
- People who did not finished rationalized, procrastinated, reasoned, but did not finish.
- Those who stuck to the daily minimum (1667 words a day) or exceeded it, finished.
- Writing seven days a week for a month is mentally and physically exhausting.
One response so far
This was my first NaNo participation, and I completed 50,447 words during November. I started on November 1 with no plot, no characters, no idea what to write about. After a couple of days of intense anxiety, I came up with two or three ideas, then on about the 4th day I chose one of them and started writing. My writing was not consistent, that is, I did not write 1,667 words a day. Some days I wrote 6,000 words; other days I didn’t write even one. I did not have a plot outline or character studies, though I did have a rough idea in my head as to what was going to happen and how it would all turn out in the end. I didn’t really get serious till the third week of November, when I began writing every spare minute I could find. I went into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with 17,000 words written, and ended it with over 41,000 words. It was an amazing experience!
I’m one of those writers you mentioned whose evil Inner Editor has prevented me for years from finishing any writing project, whether it was a novel, short story, essay, article, or poem (except those I wrote for school or work). NaNo helped subdue the evil IE which allowed me to write rather than edit. I admit I winced at a lot of what I wrote, but I just kept reminding myself that “Now is the time to write; later will be the time to edit,” and it seemed to work (for the most part).
One tool that really helped was an AlphaSmart NEO, which was loaned to me by NaNo for the month. It’s a very lightweight word processor. For someone like me, it’s the greatest writing tool of the century! It has a full size keyboard (no mouse), and the “monitor” is so small that you can see only 5 or 6 lines at any given time, which prevented my eye from roving all over the page, finding things I simply HAD TO edit RIGHT NOW!!!!! (That was my IE shouting.)
Also, when I opened the current file, it went to the END of the document, rather than to the beginning like so many word processing programs out there. This prevented my IE from insisting that it be allowed to start editing from the first word to the end before allowing me to continue writing.
Other things that helped me get through the rough spots: my competitive streak, the thrill of counting up the daily words written, and most of all the fellowship and encouragement of other NaNoers, as well as the folks at LibraryThing who cheered us NaNoers on. I can’t wait until next year to do it again!