End of NaNoWriMo!
Ah, December at last! The madness of NaNoWriMo can be put behind us for another year. No more late night cramming sessions once the kids have gone to bed. No more squashing yourself into an awkward position on the Tube, just to get some room for your paper and pen. No more repeatedly asking yourself what on earth you think you’re doing.
I offer my sincere congratulations to everyone who passed the 50k mark. I even congratulate those who wrote a few thousand but didn’t make the target – you’ve still been writing! Special (and incredulous) congratulations go to those who wrote even more and literally got a novel out of the month! But as the dust settles, you may be wondering what to do next. Hopefully, this post may give you some ideas.
Forget About It
If, like me, you tried something different from your usual style this year, you may find you hate what you produced. I imagine it’s akin to spending nine months expecting a beautiful, bouncing baby, and producing a xenomorph instead (although hopefully your novel is less likely to bleed acid – if it does, you’ll find storing it a tad tricky). You might feel like you’ve wasted the entire month, but you haven’t. Honest. Take what lessons you can from it. Maybe you’ve discovered you really don’t like writing in the first/third person. Perhaps you don’t like the number of adverbs you’ve found yourself using (for the sake of good fiction, please… cut them!). You might find you now loathe a genre you thought you’d enjoy writing. Well none of this is a waste, because you now know what NOT to do next time around.
Keep Calm and Carry On
Met the 50,000 target but still haven’t finished your novel? Well, keep going! You’re now in the envious position of having a 50,000-word chunk of a book under your belt, along with the luxury of being able to finish it whenever you want. You can work under your own steam and set your own deadlines – and you can feel free to edit what you’ve already written. Your NaNoWriMo project now belongs to you. Well done!
Take a Break
It’s entirely possible that you feel absolutely exhausted now the madness is over. The adrenaline has drained away, and you feel spent. So take a break. You’ve certainly earned it. Have a few days off to do all of the things you wouldn’t let yourself do with the word count hanging over you. See friends. Go to the cinema. Treat yourself to a massage. Buy a massive bar of chocolate. Seriously, pamper yourself. Of course, if you still have the itch to write but can’t face anything major, there’s nothing stopping you dashing off a few flash fictions in the meantime.
Do any of these, or anything you like, but whatever you do…
Do Not Submit Your Work in December!
It’s a well-known trope among the NaNoWriMo detractors that December will see a flood of manuscripts inundating agents and publishers as those who completed their novels in November rush to get them into the query process. Do not, under any circumstances, let your December become NaNoSuMo (National Novel Submission Month). If you wrote an earlier novel and it’s been through the stringent editing/beta-reading process, feel free to query it, but do not attempt to query what you’ve just done in November. Writing needs to marinade a while, and you need time to emotionally distance yourself from what you’ve just done. Take a couple of weeks, or preferably a month or so, to work on other projects. Come back to your NaNoWriMo in the new year feeling refreshed, and look at it again. You might find it’s actually not as bad as you thought you remembered, and it doesn’t need as much work as you feared. Or maybe that fantastic plot you remembered is so full of holes it resembles Swiss cheese. Either way, do yourself, and your manuscript, a favour, and wait a while long before you begin to revise.
When you do want to revise and submit, Fuel Your Writing will be right here to help you!
Please share your own experiences of NaNoWriMo this year in the comments below – we’d love to hear how you all got on!
Images courtesy of NaNoWriMo and AJ Cann
Icy is a die-hard Northerner in old London town. She can still remember the days when she wrote her first stories in crayon. These days she favours a laptop, and cranks out weekly flash fictions, web-based serials and even the odd novel, usually about telepathic parrots, superheroes, Cavalier ghosts, and her own peculiar brand of steampunk.
“Do Not Submit Your Work in December!”
So very, very true! This is one of the things that gives NaNoWriMo a bad name with the writing establishment. At its core is the inability to recognize work that really isn’t ready to be shown to anyone.
Great advice here, Icy.
All sage advice but the one thing you should certainly do is try and learn from the experience by analysing what you’ve done. That doesn’t just mean the nuts and bolts of your narrative, but also the process you went through – what went through your brainbox at any given time.
And yeah, don’t send your work to agents. It won’t be ready. In any way.
Great advice here to leave writing to stew once you’ve written it. I wrote my debut novel during NaNo 2009, but didn’t look at again for 6 months. You really do need a decent break to see things with fresh eyes again.
I am not sure why I have randomly read this post today, but I wanted to comment anyway!