I Won NaNoWriMo 2021!

For those that missed my past writing update, I decided to participate in this year’s NaNoWriMo event after

I won NaNoWriMo 2021!

And if you don’t believe me, you can check out my project here.

But the more shocking part was this—I won after only eight days of writing. 

How did I do it?

Honestly, it took three things—preplanning, the fact that I was using a partially-written project, and a lot of writing on my end.

My NaNoWriMo project was a project I’d started working on a little bit during October after I first came up with the idea. However, I hadn’t outlined the whole thing and only wrote maybe the first few pages’ worths of it when I decided to join NaNoWriMo during mid-October. I used the rest of October to outline the rest of the novel and then started writing the rest of the novel on November 1st. I’m honestly surprised I managed to finish outlining the main plot of the novel in less than half a month’s time – sometimes it can take me longer, other times shorter.

I wish I had some advice I could use from this experience to share with all of you like I did when I last won Camp NaNoWriMo and NaNoWriMo last year. However, I would only be repeating similar statements to what I made back then, so it’s not worth saying here and it’s more worth for you to just read the other two posts related to those events.

I’m still surprised that I managed to win NaNoWriMo after only the first eight days since this is a new record for me. Of course, I acknowledge that I am in a situation where I am at home most of the time (both due to writing-related reasons and current reasons relating to the world such as the pandemic). Your own situation might be different—maybe you have a family to take care of, or you’re often busy with other important things that take up most of the time you wish you had for writing. Maybe you suffer from the lack of muse, or you have trouble writing down words in just the right way.

No matter what situation you’re going through during this NaNoWriMo, whether you win NaNo or not, I think the most important thing is to keep on writing when you have a chance. Perseverance is key in getting writing done, whether it’s writing a first draft, revising it, or going beyond that. And no, you don’t have to finish the first draft of your novel in eight days as I did.

Did you participate in NaNoWriMo this year? If you did, did you reach your goal as well? Let me know in the comments below!

If you like this post, please share it with your fellow writers and readers! Also, feel free to follow my site and/or like my Facebook Page, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr for more reader/writer posts, fanfics, book reviews, and other writing-related news!