 Hello my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel. It is December 1st which means a couple of days ago I just finished my first nanorhymo. Now today my husband and I are heading back from a holiday in Italy to our home in Estonia which means that we're in transit for 15 hours I think today. So I thought it would be fun to take this time to reflect on the different lessons I learnt after completing my first nanorhymo. Lesson number one is that preparation really helps. So in October I use three different plotting methods to attempt to plot out my book so take your pants off, story engineering and save the cat. And even though I didn't have the ultimate book plan I was hoping for so ideally I wanted to get to the end of October and have every single scene and every single chapter and every single conversation outlined so that when it came to writing I'd have every single thing guided. Now that didn't quite happen however the preparation I did do really helped because I had the significant plot points I had some of the key scenes I wanted and that was enough to get me started and build up the momentum so that when I started writing the only new bits were really filling the gaps in between the milestone scenes I already had. Now preparation was also really helpful during nano itself. I struggled for the first week I really wasn't sure how to get into the writing everything I wrote felt like crap so in the second week what I started doing was I would have the scene that I wanted to work on that day and then I would outline it before I wrote and what that meant was that it was enough to get me through the awkward you know first 15-20 minutes of writing where everything sucks until things started to flow and being able to get into that state of flow meant the inspiration started to come and even though I had these scenes outlined sometimes new information would come up or they'd go in a direction I wasn't expecting so having some preparation actually helped fuel the inspiration during the writing process itself so tip one is preparation really helps. So my lesson number two about doing nanorhymo for the first time is that you don't need to write every day so because it's 50,000 words in 30 days and because nanorhymo divides that into 1,667 words a day it can feel like the only way you're going to succeed is if you do write every single day and if you don't write every single day it can feel like you're just going to continue falling farther and farther behind if you're like me and have a full-time job or if you have any other commitments other than your novel writing every day might not be realistic so there are a couple of ways to approach this one is the slow and steady which is the 1667 words a day and another one is you see these people who might only write once a week but they'll do a big write like they'll do five 10,000 words at a time and get their 50,000 words together that way for me I found it worked better to do a compromise so I even though I know I'm capable of writing really big word counts in short amounts of time I also know that's not very sustainable and there's going to be a big hangover afterwards so one of the things I wanted to achieve with nanorhymo was more consistency so for me the compromise was writing six days a week I would write every day after work except Friday generally about 1500 words a day and then I'd catch up on the weekend but I wouldn't have to do as much catching up and that was how I eventually got to my 50,000 words so tip number two is that you don't need to write every day if that's not going to work for you third lesson learned in nanorhymo is that you can set your own goal now even though there's a goal to write 50,000 words in 30 days you can take part of the experience without making that your goal even for some reason that is what you want to do so maybe your goal could be writing a first draft or revising a draft or creating a habit of writing every day or even doing daily or weekly nanorhymo vlogs so my goals were I did want to hit the 50,000 words just to see if I could then I really wanted to start writing a new project which I did I wanted to create a more consistent writing habit and schedule even with a full-time job which I did and I also wanted to start doing weekly vlogs for this channel which I did so even if I hadn't hit the 50,000 words I think I still would have gotten a lot out of the experience because I had other things that I wanted to achieve the fourth lesson I learned from doing nanorhymo for the first time is that little bits of writing can count and they definitely add up so when I first started I felt like I needed to have an hour or two hours to write just so I could get that 1,667 words done but there were days when that wasn't possible especially during the week when I was working so what would happen is if I wasn't going to the gym I might do some writing at lunchtime and I'd get let's say 800 to 1,300 words done which wasn't all I needed to get done for the day but if I then did a little more in the afternoon then all those little chunks of writing did add up to something that then contributed to my 50,000 word goal it worked in a similar way when I was trying to write a really difficult scene or I just couldn't get into it and then breaking that writing into bite-sized chunks was really helpful so if I was doing a live writing sprint on YouTube where we were writing for say five minutes then eight minutes and 15 and 20 I only needed to focus on writing for that 15 minutes let's say and whatever I got done that time was fine and I just knew that that little bit would add to the total and there are quite a few days where I updated my word count for that day three or four times just because I either couldn't get the solid chunk of writing time or writing just wasn't working for me that day so I needed to divide it so if you're worried about finding enough time to write finding those one hour plus chunks or if you're just having really difficult time writing one day just know that even though 100 or 300 words might seem insignificant if you have you know four or five of those throughout a day then they will add up to help you reach your word count target and my fifth and final lesson learned doing nanorhymo for the first time was that you need to find what motivates you so some people might simply be motivated by their word count going up every day some people might find their story idea motivating enough that they always want to work on it for me it didn't matter that I was excited about the story it didn't matter that I'd committed to doing nanorhymo there were times when I just didn't want to write so at those times the things that I found really helpful were first for the words which is the monster battling rpg I found having certain word counts that I needed to hit to defeat monsters helped ensure that I actually hit those word counts and having to gather certain materials for quests helped basically basically helped me choose which monsters to battle and that then informed to the word count I needed to hit the other thing that I found really helpful was doing live writing sprints on youtube so this is something that a lot of both the tubers do I personally really like Kate Kavanaugh's live writings it's a one and a half hour or two hour live youtube stream where it's a combination of chatting with you about your book and your project and your progress and having these concentrated periods where you're just supposed to be writing and those periods might be seven eight minutes 15 20 25 and what I found was that if I only had to write for five or eight minutes to get started that was enough to get me started when well on the days when I really didn't want to so those are the five lessons I learned from doing my first nanorhymo if this was also your first nanorhymo or even if it wasn't your first I'd love to hear what lessons you've learned what tips you've learned in the comments below as per usual if you like this video please remember to like and subscribe and I will see you next time bye