NaNoWriMo: Reaching 50,000

I hit 50k!

This was my first time doing NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, and I reached the 50,000 word goal in 24 days. Actually, I finished at 1:30 am today, so that would make it 23 days 1 hour and 30 minutes (I started precisely at midnight on Nov. 1).

Here is my word count per day:

As you can tell, the single most productive day was day 17, with over 5700 words. Second was day 1, with 4500.

On day 13 I was in NYC for the band trip, and only managed to squeeze out the 1700 words between hotel and bus (plus a couple of sentences at the Cornell Club).

I was reaching 1667+ words every day until day 22, when I had a rather intense math prelim due. Then I got writer’s block, as indicated in the last post. But fortunately I had only 2000 words left when that happened.

That incident does not always means schoolwork is a detriment to word count. In fact, it depends on what type of work it is. For example, on days 11 and 12, I wrote a 1700-word English essay and an 1800-word history essay respectively, yet that hardly subtracted from my word count. So math and literary creativity are, apparently, incompatible.*

*Actually, that is definitely false. I blame myself for being lazy that day.

Here are two graphs I made with the above data:

Daily word count:

And the running total:

What is next? Well, I reached 50k but haven’t completely finished the novel yet. There are just a few plot points left to resolve. That should be done in the next few days, maybe even on the bus to NYC.

After that I do plan to take a break from writing until December, when I plan to edit the novel. What I’ve written for NaNoWriMo is a first draft. And it isn’t pretty by any means. But that’s what Nano is supposed to be, an amazing experience, and I’ve definitely felt that.

2 final things:

First, I have a much more extensive table of data, which includes segments of time (start and end time), number of words written, and location. I’m not putting it up here now because it’s just too plain bulky. Someone did mention interest in analyzing this data; I’ll get it to ya right away. Readers, watch out, there may be another round of graphs. 🙂

Edit: For example, this:

I wrote the 50,000 words in precisely 101 writing sessions; they ranged from 5 minutes to 3 hours in length. The scatter plot above shows word count by duration of session.

Second, by tonight I’ll be in NYC!!!!!