NaNoWriMo, My Methods and Failures, and Your Way of Writing | The WriMo Blog, with Esther Hadassah

Hello, writer friends! Are you a NaNoWriMo participant (this includes Camp)? Do you enjoy challenging yourself to write 50,000 words in 30 days? If your answer is yes, you'll like today's post. Join me as I share my past NaNo experiences and reflect on the methods I've used when writing 50k.

Disclaimer: This post was originally supposed to go live in November of 2022, but I had so much going on that I forgot. Which is why the layout is slightly different.

This is where it gets interesting! I am not sharing these things to tell you "This is the only way to write," no, friend! I am sharing this with you because I want you to see that every writer is different and the only way to write YOUR WAY is to WRITE YOUR WAY. This post will contain tips and tricks that you are allowed to try at your own leisure. What works for me may not work for you, but giving these things a try won't hurt you. Decide for yourself if you like these tricks of the trade. If these things don't work for you, that's fine! You do you, because you are writing YOUR WAY. If you agree to everything I've shared, we will get along great.

Where will I be getting my tips/tricks from? Mostly my past experiences, but also from other writers/authors from across the web. I tend to grasp information like a sponge and if something really resonates with me, I will share it.

The first thing I want to share involves my failures. It is okay to fail NaNo. I have failed so many NaNoWriMos riding on the fact that I won three WriMos in 2016. I've been participating since 2014... I think, don't quote me on that because I went through a phase of deleting my NaNo project books after I was done with them instead of keeping them there to track my writing progression. I stopped deleting them in 2016, so that's how far back my projects go. (◄ Image features is what the Camp NaNo site looked like before they merged.)

(► Image featured is my NaNoWriMo projects before the merge.)
I loved setting up my projects and keeping track of my word count milestones. It became my thing. Some of you might remember how November was the best/worst month for my writing because in 2015. I started a novel and halfway through my family was hit by a major life event and it made November the hardest month to do anything. Memories tend to reappear during November, making my mental state very hard. And that is okay!

Every writer will suffer something in their life that prevents writing creative flow. Something I recently learned while reading "Writing Into the Dark" by Dean Wesley Smith (hereafter: DWS) is how the "Critical Voice" is part of the human nature to help us when something is too risky or dangerous. When life events filter into our writing time, our Creative Voice becomes helpless and Critical Voice takes control. DWS breaks down the battle between Critical and Creative and what blew my mind was this quote: "There is NO DANGER in writing."

I know, mind-blowing. The moment I read that line, my perspective began to change. As writers, we are meant to create and when we allow our Critical Voice to run rampant, we lose sight of that joy writing brings us.

I highly recommend reading "Writing Into the Dark". It was on my wishlist and my author friend, Angela, sent me a gifted copy. It's one of those books that gives you a very necessary confidence boost while showing you a new method of writing.

Now, as previously mentioned, YOU do not need to let anyone else tell you that YOUR WAY of writing is the wrong way. You want to write a new story by hand, do it! Wanna use an old-fashioned typewriter to avoid internet distractions? Go for it! The sky is truly the limit when it comes to writing the way YOU want to write.

(► not my image, but I've used it in past posts.)
My method of writing has always started with a single sentence of inspiration, an attempt at an outline, and then I throw it away after ten minutes of discovery writing. I've had some success with outlines (my book Pieces of Me is an example of sticking to an outline), but I only tried them because there was a writer who said "Outlining is the only way to get a story finished." MYTH. Outlines are not the only way to get a story to the page and I had to learn this the hard. That is why I am a strong advocate for writing "YOUR WAY".

Something I have learned from all my years writing, and I have been writing for a little over a decade, is that you have try everything before you decide what doesn't work for you. To this day, I still try different methods and I always find something new to include in my routine. For instance, I now keep a notebook specific to a certain project and as I am discovery writing, I take note of what I have written and create something of an outline to keep track of my story. This is also a tip from "Writing Into the Dark".

I hope you found my ramblings helpful. That's all I have for now. Thank you for being here. Stay safe, and stay awesome. See you in the funny papers!