Well I survived NaNoWriMo and completed over 50K words in a novel manuscript.  November was probably the most stressful month of my life (to date, she says, crossing her fingers and looking for wood to knock on) but it wasn’t because of having decided to draft a novel.  It was all those other non-writing things — immediate and extended family things going on, the Thanksgiving holiday, some travel for work, the heavy kids’ school activity schedule as the fall sports season wraps up — on top of the ‘normal’ work and home life things such as, you know, the day job’s usual workload and, say, preparing dinner and doing laundry.

In other words, life.

So, how did I manage to draft the novel on top of that?

  1. Luckily, I was very prepared before the month started and had the novel well outlined.  If it hadn’t been for that prep work, I could have never drafted a novel in such a short time, regardless what was going on in my life.
  2. I refused to research as I went along — instead I now have loads of places I marked in the manuscript as I went along where I am sure I don’t have the right word / term (for the historical period) or have to look up other things.
  3. I didn’t go back and revise as issues occurred to me or as I solved a problem I had created earlier.  So, like my research list, I now have notes I made along the way that say things like “go back to scene 3 and insert name of little girl, because it turns out I need her later in the story too.”

Now I have a draft I can work with instead of ideas and bits and pieces.  I don’t know how long revision will take, but I’m excited to get started with it.  I’m more interested in getting the story right than getting it done quickly, so it will take as long as it takes.

Do I have a finished novel?  Not even close!  It’s more like I am making a quilt.  I have pieces basted together, but the final seams still need to be sewn and the stitching that makes every quilt unique needs to be applied.