This November, I took up the challenge of writing a minimum of 200 words per day.

So, how was it?

I managed my 200 words (or more) on 27 days of the 30. Two days were out for illness, and the final day of the month I was away from home organising an event. I took a notebook away with me hoping to get some writing time, but it just didn’t happen. However, during November I wrote nearly 13K words, of which 11.7K were adding to the extremely rough draft of my accidental novel. This makes it just over 20% of what anyone who won NaNoWriMo achieved.

My life is currently arranged such that, some days, there just isn’t time for writing. And declaring that I was going to make the time didn’t really change that. On days when I left the house at eight in the morning and got home around half eleven at night, sitting down to write even 200 words seemed like a very tall order.

On the other hand, it did force me to find ways to squeeze that writing in. Typing out the next part of a scene on my phone while squashed in to a carriage on the Central Line is surprisingly plausible - and Google Keep makes transferring it to my laptop extremely easy. I should do more of that. When driving, thinking through the next bit of writing so that the 200 words is a typing exercise rather than a writing task can really prune the time required once I get home. And when I only have half an hour to spare, it really is worth trying to squeeze a little bit of writing in. All of those are lessons that I can - I hope - take with me into the next month and the new year.

And I can, at least, wallow in the certainty that I was completely correct: NaNoWriMo is not for me. Or not at the moment. A couple of days ago I was chatting to someone who’s won NaNoWriMo twice, and she concurred: writing 50K words in a month while having a full time job - which she did once - is Not A Good Idea.

Carly Racklin originally suggested this writing challenge. She and Brina Williamson both took it up, and their support and companionship on Twitter was wonderfully welcome. We all wrote words during the month, and thus I declare that we all won.