NaNoWriMo 2019: Finished Again!

Last night, I finished this year’s National Novel Writing Month story at 50,397 words. Once again, what used to be a brief idea jotted down in a notebook is now a fleshed-out draft, and it feels good!

This year has been a particularly stable NaNoWriMo. While the writing wasn’t always easy, there were only a couple of days when I wrote less than the daily word count, and I ended up finishing four days before the end of the month. Not bad, considering I originally wasn’t sure I’d be able to stick with my ancient Roman historical story for the whole of the month.

As it was, I ended up really liking the characters in my story, to the point that I felt able to deviate from my original plan when they had a different idea about what to do next; this ended up leading to more interesting and emotional scenes than would have been possible if I’d rigidly stuck to my outline. I also enjoyed the process of dropping my characters into historical events and writing about things from their perspective, as I have done when writing historical fiction in the past. I was particularly looking forward to the climax which would have the male protagonist fighting in the Battle of Pharsalus; I’ve written plenty of action scenes before, but never a large-scale battle scene. It proved an interesting experience as I was limited by the protagonist’s perspective, and had to imagine him experiencing the chaos and carnage with only a vague idea – if any – of how the battle as a whole was progressing.

So, it’s been a very good November, where I managed to keep up an above-average pace and also build my confidence by trying new things. Now I need to carry that into the other writing that I’ve been neglecting for most of this month.