The Lessons To Take Away From The Petite Writing Month

Last Thursday, I came back from work, rolled up my sleeves for the last time of November and decided that I would finish National Novel Writing Month today!

There were only 137 words left. But my eyes were already falling shut, protesting at the bright glare of the screen. Creativity and ideas were a mere concept, and hardly anywhere on my finger tips. With only so few words left I could not break down now. I could not abandon the goal now! I did not want to be the Toyota of this story, instead I channeled my inner Porsche #2 - admittedly this is not a reference many get. Hence I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and began to type.

An hour later the words lay before me. If I am honest I was too tired to even read them again. I am not quite sure what I wrote that time. Instead I concentrated on the word count: 652 words.

"Is that enough?" I wondered sleepily, and just to make sure I typed it into the calculator. It was! Now you'd image a scene where in the distance "Legendary" is playing, confetti is thrown, I am spraying people with champagne, and people are cheering me on ...

The final Petite #NaNoWriMo update:
A month ago I set myself the goal of writing 30.000 words. Today I wrote 652 words. This means I cross the finishing line with 30.374 words! I am proud and happy ☺

— Susanne (@floralcars1) 30 de noviembre de 2017

... instead I pretty much fell into bed, got some shut-eye and couldn't be woke up had the whole house collapsed on top of me.

What I have taken away from this month has been documented on the blog - there is an index at the bottom - but also three smaller lessons that are important to bloggers and writers:

Be The Porsche #2 of Your Story!

I already mentioned that this is not a reference many get. Now let me quickly explain: in this year's Le Mans the Porsche #2 had to return to the garage in order to get fixed. When it rejoined the race it seemed almost hopeless for the team. However, just by never giving up they won!

In short it means: never give up. Not even when victory seems unlikely or the goal is too daunting at the beginning! You never give up!

The last week in particular was very exhausting for me, not only is coming up with idea after idea quite hard when you have to do it so often in such a short period of time. My work hours had also changed to ... let's call it less favourable.

Even then, I decided that at the very least I would have to try and make it. I couldn't stick my head into the sand without even giving it a shot!

Falling Behind Is All Right

... if you know when you can catch up

Early on I began to notice that I tended to fall behind during work days. This was to be expected given that I work up to 10 hours a day. With that in mind I went into November and happily noticed that I use the weekends to catch up.

This meant that on average I did write 1,000 words per day. However, in reality I wrote way more on the weekend and considerably less on workdays. These balanced each other out. I had a calm mind.

At least until the last weekend of November. The problems was that November ended on Thursday ... not during a weekend. Hence, I sat in front of my laptop and chewed my nails. I was already a few 1,000 words behind. Would I even make it?

Very sensibly I decided to take it word by word, sat down and began to write ... well ... there is no other word for it: it was smut*.

Smut Saves Lives! 

We shan't argue about the quality right now. Instead, I am going to stand here tall and proud and state that smut saves lives! Or at the very least my Petite Writing Month. Instead of trying to squeeze some desperate blog post, which would have amounted to maybe 1,000 words, I managed to get almost 6,000 words out of two people getting it on.

This did not only obliterate my backlog, it pushed me ahead of schedule as well. Suddenly I went into the last week with a calm mind, knowing that in the last four days I would only have to write around 1,200 words. That was more than doable.

The most important things that I am going to take away from my Petite Writing Month are: coming up with a lot of ideas is quite hard, it is okay to fall behind if you know when you can catch up, sometimes you have to channel your inner Porsche #2, and most importantly smut saves lives! 

How did you experience NaNo? Did you reach your goal, and what did you learn? 

Leave a comment, or if you want to share your experience in more detail - or possibly a future blog post - drop me a mail 😊

Read The Whole Story:

Introduction: Taking On The Petite Writing Month

Week I: Finding The Time To Write Every Day

Week II: I Wrote Millions Of Words ... Oh It Was Just Ten

Week III: Reignite The Spark For Writing With FanFiction

Week IV: The Best Writing Motivation In Existence

*the other word for smut is "pornography" but we'll gloss over that.