This post is an entry in the What I Learned From . . . group writing project at Middle Zone Musings.

Forgive me for babbling on and on about the benefits of National Novel Writing Month, but when I saw this group writing project announced on Middle Zone Musings, the first thing I thought of was how much I’ve learned already from NaNo just from signing up. Even though I’m only about a fifth of the way through the 50,000 words I need to write in November, I’ve learned:

I can be amazingly productive when I’m sufficiently motivated. I talked a little last week about all the preparations I did before NaNo. Basically, I surprised myself by doing more housework in a day than I’d done in weeks, including tackling a cleaning project I’d been putting off for months. I also worked ahead on homework for what may be the first time in my life. Most importantly, I did all this without the usual 1:1 correspondence of work to procrastination. Amazing. I should decide to write a novel every time the apartment gets dirty.

I can focus. This shouldn’t be an earthshattering revelation, but I was starting to wonder. I’ve noticed lately that when I’m reading a slow-loading forum (like the NaNo forums), I start a thread loading, then I switch to Google Reader to skim half a blog post, then I switch back to the NaNo thread, and so on. Some days, my attention is fragmented like this for hours.

So I was glad to find out that I can still focus. When I get into a good flow with my novel, I can write for half an hour without looking up. And in that time, I can crank out 1,000 words. This is a big deal for me. Many of my former novel attempts have ended around 4,000 words, and that pitiful amount took long, exhausting days. I look at my word count for NaNo and I’m just astounded that I’ve produced so much in such a short amount of time.

I like to write. This shouldn’t be news either. But because I was always giving up on other writing projects, I was starting to doubt that I actually liked to write. I knew I liked to create stories (i.e. scribbling notes about characters and their troubles), but when it came to writing it out word by agonizing word, I always stammered and quit. The forced pace of NaNoWriMo has let me finally give myself permission to fail horribly. And that has freed me to enjoy writing again, for its own sake.

I’m looking forward to the other lessons that NaNoWriMo will teach me about myself and my writing. I’m sure there will be many. I still have 40,000 words and 24 days to go.

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.