What's up everyone, my name is Ashley Wylde, long time no see! As most of you
probably know, I took the entire month of November off of video making so that I
could try to write a book. November is National Novel Writing Month, and this
was my very first time making an attempt at it. For two or three years I've been
thinking, "hey I write, there's this thing that happens, maybe I should try it?" I did
National Poetry Writing Month a couple of times and I thought, "well maybe this
"is a good opportunity for me to expand myself and try something new."
I was not sure what to expect. One of the major things that definitely came out of
the experience is I wrote a lot. I'm just gonna spoil the ending for you right now:
I didn't write a 50,000 word novel. But I did write over 26,000 words. That is more
words than I have ever written for any reason, especially consecutive, especially
about the same idea. This video is about my experiences with National Novel
Writing Month, also called NaNoWriMo. I always want to say "reem-oh" but it's for
sure "rhyme-oh" as in "writing." I really kicked butt for the first 10 or so days,
and I think the breakdown, and I'm gonna call it a breakdown because there's a
way to win and I didn't do it... I think it's twofold. There's a "me" problem and
there's a problem with my story. The "me" problem is that in any situation where
I'm doing the same thing for more than about a week at a time, I become bored. I
get lazy. I get indifferent. I feel sluggish. I'm
unmotivated. I get discouraged. That happened to me mmm... probably two or three
times during the course of November before it actually killed me, so to speak.
After about 10 days I felt that. I felt the boredom, the sluggishness, the
laziness. But there's all these great pep talks and emails and things that you get
from NaNoWriMo and they were pretty good at picking me up.
I was able to push through that feeling because I was reading these pep talks
from other people who were also feeling that way, so I wrote for another five
days. Still did pretty well, was behind the ball but actually was able
to catch back up. And then I felt it again and the second time it was kind of
heavier, the second time it paralyzed me for two or three days and I didn't write
anything at all. But then I was able to overcome it, I was able to continue
writing, I was still three or four days behind but I was meeting my daily goals
and I felt like, "hey I'm back on the wagon, I'm gonna make this happen," but the
crushing blow came about a week before the end of November. In the first place,
it was the holidays. Second of all, I had family in town and I just didn't want to
be writing, I wanted to be with my friends and family
relaxing, eating, playing board games, hanging out, maybe going on a day trip,
and those are the things I did and I don't regret those choices but
unfortunately at that point I had fallen off so many times and I was already so
behind that finishing kind of became this elusive pipe dream for me. The other
part of the problem is a problem with my story. The nature of my story is laid out
in a very linear way. Think numbers: here is section 1, here's section 2, here's
section 3. I finished my story at around day 18 and I mean "finished" as in it's
over, as opposed to it's done. That is, I got all the way through all the sections
that the story encompasses. I knew that I wanted to go back and add more and bulk
things up and create new scenes and sort of tie things together, but that is a lot
different than just writing a lot of words. NaNoWriMo calls for you to write a
lot of words. It doesn't call for you to edit. That's not the point. The point is
to get all the words out. But I was at the point in my story where in order to
add more words, I needed to go back read what was already there, consider it, think
about what might fit, and then write that. And that first process of the going back,
considering, and then coming up with what... I got lost there. And because of the way
my story was structured, that was really difficult. I think if I was gonna do
NaNoWriMo again I would come up with a much more open-ended story only because
with an open-ended story it doesn't have to end where you thought it was gonna
end, you can just keep going. The last seven days of November
I wasn't writing, and I also hadn't posted videos in three weeks, I started
to feel a lot of guilt. I was really struggling because I was like. "I'm
"supposed to be writing a book, I'm not even writing a book, and I'm not
"even posting videos so I can write a book... and I'm not even writing a book and
"I'm not even TRYING to write a book I'm just not writing it and that doesn't
"feel very good to me." That was really, really hard and it made it so that
December 1st felt like a party to me. November is over I don't have to feel
like crap anymore. I'm working really hard on reframing the
way that the end of NaNoWriMo made me feel. I'd like to take away some of the
really good things I expressed like the fact that I did write this story, there's
more to be written yes, but there's this half of a novel there for me waiting for
me to pick it back up. And I have the opportunity to choose how and when I
might want to do that. I wrote more than I've ever written, I was able to figure
out what routines would help me to write more consistently... that's awesome and so
I'm trying to focus more on those things than on kind of the way that it started
to feel twisted or bad or the ways that I kind of held myself accountable in a
way that ended up being belittling. I just wanted to share with you all some
of my thoughts because this has been a month since I've seen you and I took on
this huge thing and even though I didn't win or even though I didn't, you know,
complete it or reach the finish line, I took a lot of really valuable things
from it and I just want you all to see that winning or succeeding is not always
going to happen. That doing something the way you thought you were gonna do it
isn't always realistic. I want you guys to see that I fail, I drop the ball, I
am not perfect. I'm sure you know that I'm not perfect, but I want that to
always be a fundamental component of my content. If you're interested in trying
NaNoWriMo, I would recommend it. I think I'm likely to do it again. I also think
the story I've created, I'm likely to finish, even though I didn't finish it in
the context of November. And if there's something else, something like NaNoWriMo
that you can think of that comes up for you that's in line with your hobbies and
interests: a challenge or a group or a club or a project that you've thought
"maybe when I'm good enough," or "maybe down the road" or "maybe someday
"I'll do that," I would say - the sooner the better.
Life is short. On October 31st I didn't want to do NaNoWriMo, not at all, and then
I realized that you can only want to do something for so long before you're just
saying you want to do it, you don't actually want to. If you do want to,
you'll take steps. So I woke up on November 1st and I gave it a good shot,
and this is what came out of it. I hope you guys enjoyed this video, I'm gonna be
back to posting but my posting is gonna probably be a little different. I don't
think I'm gonna do like the every Monday thing anymore, I think I'm gonna do like
the "every time of video is finished" thing because I'm hopeful that that will
give me room to sometimes make three videos in the span of a week and
sometimes make two videos in the course of a month, because that's how long it
took me to get my idea to the kind of video I want to make for you. Have a
wonderful day, have a wonderful week, go do the things you like, follow your
dreams. I will see you guys later. Buh-bye!