Week 14 Mindset: What I Learned from NaNoWriMo

I thought I would say a few words here about how the NaNoWriMo website really helped me take on a big writing challenge in November, keeping me on track until I reached my goal. The set-up was very useful and very motivating. I'm a big believer in tracking progress for growth, and that's the emphasis at NaNoWriMo also: forward progress, and watch your writing grow!

When you create a project at the NaNoWriMo site (and you can do other kinds of projects; it doesn't just have to be writing a novel in November), the site creates a stats page that tracks your progress. All you have to do is click on a little + button to update your word count:

There's a nifty graph that shows your project, comparing what it would take writing steady all month long along with your own progress. Since I am a very steady writer, I did not have a lot of ups and downs compared to the daily targets:

I also used a spreadsheet to keep track because the NaNoWriMo graph is pretty unforgiving. It just has the one steady-on track that you either follow or don't. There's not a lot of room for adjusting your goal as you go along (the goal is 50K for the challenge), and there's also not a way to readjust the trajectory chart if you want to give yourself a "reboot" partway through. That was not a problem for me, but if I had gotten way off track, I think I would have found it kind of daunting to be way off the trajectory line.

Anyway, I really felt supported at NaNoWriMo in terms of how it recorded my progress, plus the great community at Twitter too (the community at Twitter was fabulous!). So, that got me thinking about a Tech Tip I could do, creating some kind of progress tool in Excel for these classes! More about that in a separate post.