My Experience with Camp NaNoWriMo | Looking Back on my Goals and What I Accomplished

Hey, everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. Camp NaNoWriMo ended a little while ago and I wanted to take a little time to see what I accomplished during the month. Although I didn’t reach my goal, I think I was still able to make a lot of progress on my WIP.

How did writing go and did I reach my goal?

Writing this draft went pretty well. I decided to handwrite it because I was spending so much time on a screen already, I needed to have something that didn’t involve an electronic device. I think handwriting forced me to slow down a little and really think about what I wanted to say because you can’t change stuff as easily on paper as you can online. This really helped me. With this version, I was able to cut out a lot of filler dialogue and filler scenes, basically getting rid of the boring stuff no one wants to read. I also revised a major part of the story and it’s planned out and executed much better.

I unfortunately did not reach my word count goal which was 35k. I ended up only writing a little under 20k, which is at least something. Writing wasn’t my main focus during July–my geometry class was (unfortunately)–so I didn’t have a lot of time to write. Nevertheless, I feel like I got a good portion of my story developed better and more fleshed out.

Another thing that happened was that I decided to not make it a multiple perspective novel. On my very first draft of this novel, which I wrote a little over a year ago, it was told from just Aria’s perspective. On the second draft, I did Aria’s, Castor’s, and Jasmine’s perspectives. But then I realized that I didn’t really need them, so I cut them out this time and went back to just Aria’s perspective. The only thing is, there is one part of the book that really needs to be in Jasmine’s perspective, otherwise it won’t make sense to people reading it. I don’t know if I should just have that one part in her perspective and the rest be Aria’s? I’m planning to make this into a series, and the next book would mainly be Jasmine’s perspective, so I feel like this would be a nice transition to get ready for that, but I don’t know. What do you think?

What’s next?

I’ve been working on finishing this draft, but since I don’t really have a deadline anymore, I’m not doing it as often. I still hope to make some progress this month and then go from there.

One of my other goals was working on dialogue between characters and making it sound more natural and realistic. Now, I haven’t heard a lot of teenagers talk for the last year, besides on Zoom at school, but that doesn’t really count, so I honestly don’t know how teenagers naturally talk. I’m hoping that when I go back to school in person this year (I’m kind of freaked out about that), I’ll be able to listen to students talk with each other and get more of a sense of how to make my dialogue more realistic.

I want to work on is the side characters. I have a few and they’re somewhat fleshed out but I’d like to add a little more depth to them. Plot holes are another thing I’d like to look over. I think I’ve fixed most of them, but just to make sure I have no parts that are left hanging and unresolved.

Overall, I think I got a lot done this month, considering everything else I had going on. I’m happy with what I accomplished and hope to continue working on this through August.

Did you do Camp NaNoWriMo? Have you done it in the past? Are you working on any writing projects right now?
Chat with me in the comments below!