Okay, so I failed NaNoWriMo (I know there’s still three days to go so I’ll keep writing till the deadline, and then beyond). Can I make my excuses now? Only joking.  Am I gutted? No, well maybe a little but I think the only negative to me loosing NaNo is the fact that I did not hit the fifty thousand words.  So what are the positives that I’m taking from NaNo I hear you ask.  I REALLY want to be a writer, which I covered in A previous post so I wont regurgitate that.

• I NEED TO LEARN HOW TO PLAN.  This is a big one for me.  When I write I tend to write and see what happens. I NEVER plan out how the story will pan out which works okay when I am writing a short story but when its something of novel length that just is not going to work.
• RESEARCH.  I can’t research.  I start looking into things online and after about an hour my eyes glaze over and that’s it.  My granddad recently gave me a lot of books mainly about war which I am going to be getting into reading once NaNo is over.  I’m also thinking that maybe doing my research on a sunday when I’ve not been at work all day may be a good idea.
• PACING.  I’m figuring that once I’ve got how to plan out my work I’ll be able to sort the pacing out.
• CHARACTERS  This is a big one.  In the novel that I am co-writing (rewriting) we have a lot of characters who are rather similar to each other so creating more diverse characters is needed.  I do think that working on short stories has helped there.
• READING MORE.   I do need to read more.  There are so many novels out there that I really want to delve into and I think that it’ll help.  I may get hold of some audio books as I have the time to listen to them while I’m at work which will lighten the reading load.
• WRITE MORE.  My old goal was a thousands words a week., NaNo taught me that I can do that with my hands tied behind my back and my eyes closed.  So I’m thinking of a five thousand word a week target will be more challenging.  This is something that NaNo had taught me, it doesn’t have to be good.  I just need to be writing and I can edit it later.

In December I want to expand on my christmas story that I wrote last year,  I’ve got some damn good ideas for this little story and I’ve got a short story that I’ve got to edit. I want to start digging up the information that I need for the novel re-write.  I hear author’s saying that they spend months on research so I don’t need to try to learn all that I need to in one day.  Once I know what I need to find I can look into finding out these little details that will make the story work.  Maybe working on short stories will help with this as well because it’s learning on a smaller scale.

I’m off to bed so I’m fresh for the morning.