I did it. I wrote 50,298 words in November for National Novel Writing Month.

I honestly didn’t think I would make it this year. I’ve only won NaNo once before and after a fairly lousy Week Two and a Week Three that wasn’t much better, the odds seemed stacked against me. As the month wore on, I slowly gave up all my good writing habits: I started sleeping in instead of getting up early to write before work, I worked through lunch instead of writing on my lunch break. By the time I finally sat down to write for the first time each day at six o’clock p.m., I was mostly too exhausted to produce much more than a few hundred words.

Once the final week rolled around, I wasn’t feeling very motivated and I was behind on my word count, but I figured I had come to far to quit.

So I kept writing. Every word, every sentence was agonizing at times but I kept going. As the end of November neared with a long holiday weekend ahead, I still had hope to come from behind to win. I didn’t give in to my exhaustion and self-doubt. Those last thousand words were slow to come together, but they did.

I think the NaNoWriMo experience was pretty well summed up in these words from author, Ralph Peters in his NaNoWriMo Pep Talk:

“Writing is wretched, discouraging, physically unhealthy, infinitely frustrating work. And when it all comes together it’s utterly glorious.”

I spent a large part of NaNoWriMo feeling frustrated, and discouraged. But I learned that I can sit down at the laptop and write every day even when I’m too tired or not feeling inspired. And because I kept going, I was able to write more than 50,000 words in a month and win NaNoWriMo, even when I didn’t think I could.

So to all those who won NaNo and to all those who participated, congratulations. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it.

What did you learn this November?