Hello everyone! Today, I thought I would share my NaNo experience now that November is officially over!

---

I finished NaNo relatively easily since I was mainly editing my novel. Even so, it was still a lot of work to sit down and write and make those changes! Here’s my experience with it.

---

2021 NaNoWriMo

As I mentioned in my Halfway through NaNo post, I decided to edit my previously written novel for NaNo. The goal for NaNo was 50,000 words but my draft was 80,000 words, so my goal was to edit at least through 50k words. I did want to edit all 80k, but I also didn’t want to rush myself through it.

Ultimately, I think the lack of prep did hurt me. My thought process was that if I was looking at it for the first time I’d be able to fix it with a fresh new lens, but it actually made me less willing to change stuff right away when I realized that I’d provided the information I’d added later in the novel, just a few paragraphs down. Plus, I realized that I actually had made a lot of changes already, and I’d forgotten about that. For example, I’d had made two characters into close friends of my main character in my first draft and at some point went back and made them side characters instead. I didn’t remember I had already done that so I went into the editing process prepared to make that change already, only to discover that I already had! I think I really should have read the novel once all the way through, so that I would remember where my novel actually was.

I did figure out how to better incorporate social media into my novel. It was pretty much by acknowledging it but then removing my main character actually participating in social media. Instead, my main character does have the opportunity to look back through her old social media accounts but it didn’t feel natural for her to actually use social media at that point in her life. It was nice to accept that and change the story accordingly, giving her other hobbies that were more reasonable for where she is in life.

Overall, I did feel that I didn’t change enough, mostly due to the fact that I just didn’t know my novel well enough anymore. I intend to finish editing the 80k and then hopefully going right back to editing it again and making those bigger changes.

Also, I did enjoy having writing sessions through my library. It was only myself and the librarian at the end, even though more people did sign up. While that was a bummer not to get to know even more local authors, I did enjoy having that set time and a bit of a support team there!

---

So those are my updates on 2021’s NaNo event. I did enjoy it and I’m glad I participated, but I hope not to fall into that trend where I’ll leave my novel for another year.

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

Follow me on social media!

Instagram | Youtube | Facebook | Twitter | Bloglovin‘ |Pinterest | Poshmark | Email