Now What? A Quick and Dirty Rundown of NaNo 2016

Dear friends and family who have endured my endless novel writing posts, here’s what you need to know about the conclusion of NaNoWriMo 2016.

First of all, I did in fact complete the 50K word challenge. My final word count for the month was 50,283 (that's what my word program says...the official count was 50,066). So, according to the language of the challenge, I “won” NaNoWriMo. They use the language of victory even though there’s not really a prize (apart from the shiny new rough draft I now possess) As an author, I simply consider having written any substantial amount of words a win in itself.

The challenge goes by word count because that’s the way manuscripts are evaluated by publishers. For reference, novels such as The Great Gatsby, The Hours, The Outsiders, and Fahrenheit 451 all hover around the 50K word mark. After publishers choose a work, they get to decide how your word count translates to the page count of your novel based on font and spacing and production cost.

Here's the catch though friends, only about 70% of the words I typed are usable. The rest is brainstorming, warm up writing, genre experimentation, and pieces that i pulled out of earlier drafts that didn’t fit into the story I ended up with. However, ALL the words counted toward my final count because it’s part of the drafting process. NaNo is about pure word count, if you wrote it in November...it counts.

But, even at 50K words, I’m only about 2/3 of the way through the first draft. Upon completing the challenge, I made a commitment to edit and revise the draft I have created in these last thirty days. That includes adding content in some places and paring down scenes elsewhere.It is my hope to have a completed rough draft available for Beta Readers by Spring Break. I will be comfortable calling this rough draft complete when it gets around 70K words. A novel with that word count is a standard sized book as opposed to a novella like Animal Farm (30K) or a tome like War and Peace (587K). Books with 70K-ish word counts include The Fault in Our Stars, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Catcher in the Rye.

I'm proud of this accomplishment, but mostly I am thankful for the push to focus on my craft. Writing is part of the fabric of my heart. Giving it energy has energized me, if that makes sense. If NaNoWriMo didn't exist, I'd probably go the rest of my life PLANNING to write a novel instead of just DOING the thing.

*****Stay tuned for an upcoming post where I will give a shout out to the human beings who rallied around to cheer me on and throw out a list of take away wisdom from this insane creative writing experience.