I will caveat this post by saying there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to manage 50K in 24 hours. I went in with the slightly saner goal of 25K and even that was a stretch. I ended up with 14,158 words and a new perspective on writing. It’s the latter I’m going to talk about, for prosperity (lol).
I don’t need perfection
I’m a micro-editor. I will write a sentence or two and then twiddle with them. While this does result in a clean draft, said draft takes months. I’m not kidding. And I can lose momentum even on stories that I love to write – A Certain Darkness has stalled due to my need to have everything exactly right first time.
With the 24HN, I couldn’t do that and end up with a decent word count. I had to just write. The only thing I allowed myself was to correct typos. That was it.
I don’t need details
I have blank spaces where I wanted a good word and it wasn’t coming to me. Brackets and other placeholders galore. My FMC didn’t even get a surname until I declared the challenge done.
Getting out of my own way was so liberating. I’ve learned that I can get mired in the details and are they really necessary? No, Margaret, they are not.
I can write a whole story in 24 hours
It is the roughest draft I’ve ever written in my life, but the bones of an entire novel are in place. Bones that I can build on.
I used to believe that slow writing and picking at words was how I wrote. It took trying this challenge to push me out of that belief. It’s opened my eyes to what I can achieve, even with my neuro-spicy brain.
Moving forward
I’m relaxing today to give my brain a chance to cool off. Next step is to go through the story and note the action down into an outline, so I can see the rise and fall of the narrative. Developing the main characters, deepening the descriptions, and so on.
Which is all stuff I do as a rule, but usually during the rough draft. Doing it afterwards is a new and exciting thing.