So my NaNoWriMo experiment has come and gone. It’s time for me to reflect on how well I did.

A Summary

So what am I talking about? What actually went down on this site and what am I reflecting about? I’ll take your questions and answer them.

What was my goal?

From “The NaNoWriMo 2011 Experiment”:

I want to do something a bit crazy: I want to do NaNoWriMo, except on my blog. For those of you who know exactly what NaNoWriMo is, all I need to do is tell you this: I will be writing my 50,000 words in a series of blog essays for the month of November, attempting to write a blog post every day, something I wasn’t even able to do in my blogging experiment when I wasn’t a full time student.

 

But what the heck are all of these letters?

NoNaWriMo? NoMoWriNa? Which one was it again? From the Official NaNoWriMo.org About Page:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000 word, (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

 

But where is my novel?

What’s with all these blog posts? Well, from “The NaNoWriMo 2011 Experiment” again:

Of course, you might remark that I’m not really doing the Novel part of NaNoWriMo, but have no fear: doing this in a blogging medium still keeps the same commitment to taking risks by writing on the fly, and still results in the same 50000 words if I do it right, so the rest is just social convention.

 

Why would I want to do this?

Isn’t 50000 words a lot of work? Here is a quick sampling of my reasons, again taken from “The NaNoWriMo 2011 Experiment”:

1: I want to try different styles and manners of writing.
2: I want to show solidarity with my friends.
3: I want to honor the history of this blog.
4: I want to have the space to write about more than just religion.
5: I want to see if I can do it.

 

Was I successful?

Well, I did accomplish both goals by the designated 11:59PM on November 31. I wrote 30/30 essays (100%), completing my goal to write an essay for every day in November. I wrote 54257/50000 words (108.5%) over these essays, writing a total of 59851 words (119.7%) if you also count my comments to responses.

A complete listing of my completed essays, from “The End of a NaNoWriMo”:

1. Birds Are Dinosaurs, But Pluto Isn’t a Planet, Part I
2. Birds Are Dinosaurs, But Pluto Isn’t a Planet, Part II
3. Birds Are Dinosaurs, But Pluto Isn’t a Planet, Part III
4. The Meaning of Ought, Part I
5. Weekly Link Roundup #13
6. The Meaning of Ought, Part II
7. The “Why Do We Care?” Test
8. The True Fear of Being Wrong
9. God, Babies, Hell, and Justice
10. The Curious Case of Detached Value
11. The Meaning of Ought, Part III
12. Weekly Link Roundup #14
13. The Spectre of Scientism
14. Clarifying Comments on Ought, Part I
15. Clarifying Comments on Ought, Part II
16. My NaNoWriMo Dilemma
17. Identity Confusion as Definition Confusion, Part I
18. Identity Confusion as Definition Confusion, Part II
19. Weekly Link Roundup #15
20. Rating Presidential Candidates by the Politifact Heuristic
21. The Metaphysics Dilemma
22. Making the Question Go Away
23. There Are No Religious Facts
24. Moving Forward to NaNoWriMo (Guest post by Emily Matthews)
25. Proving God Through Cosmology?
26. The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully, Part I
27. Weekly Link Roundup #16
28. The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully, Part II
29. Ask Peter #22: NaNoWriMo Edition
30. The End of a NaNoWriMo

 

Success by the Goals

But sure, while I did accomplish the stated goals and wrote as much as I needed to, those goals were only indirect to the five reasons that I gave for doing the project — what I really wanted to accomplish with my NaNoWriMo. How well did I accomplish those things?

Well, I can immediately resolve “3: I want to honor the history of this blog” because I accomplished that just by doing the event. I can also resolve “5: I want to see if I can do it” because I definitely did it (see above). I also completed “2: I want to show solidarity with my friends” by participation in the event along with others who completed their novels. (Pshaw, novels.)

But the remaining two goals merit a more in-depth reflection.

 

1: I want to try different styles and manners of writing.

Perhaps this is a bit misleadingly stated without the further clarification offered in the original post, but I meant mainly that I wanted to learn to write faster and with less concern for my content being easy to follow and well-edited.

I think I accomplished this — there were a few days where I was able to pull 5000 words or so out in about three hours, while still resulting in essays of reasonable quality (such as the two part series on philosophical identity).

I also learned how to get in the mood of writing consistently, and spending a bit of time every day (well, nearly every day). Despite being busy, I found a way to make time for writing — usually at the cost of sleep. Oddly enough, I created an urge to write that would always compel me to settle down and write for my blog, with the guilt of unproductivity if I failed. More interestingly, this guilt persisted even after NaNoWriMo ended, but then disappeared after a few days. Now I find writing just as hard to motivate as I was prior to NaNoWriMo.

 

4: I want to have the space to write about more than just religion.

For my 30 essays, I wrote six articles I would consider specifically targeted at religion, two articles I would consider related to defending naturalism/humanism, and twelve more articles seemed related to philosophy.

Adding the four weekly link roundups, that would make 24/30 essays (80%) be targeted to philosophy — which, while definitely interesting for me to write and hopefully interesting for you to read — I would classify as “more of the usual”.

It seems odd that I’m a Political Science and Economics double major in college, but I never feel like writing about either subject for my blog, and that’s reflected by how I only wrote one essay from these two categories: “Rating Presidential Candidates by the PolitiFact Heuristic”.

So I’d say that, broadly interpreted, I failed at this goal — I ended up only making my blog even more top-heavy toward philosophical issues. And while that probably is not at all a problem, it is something I probably should be conscious of, so I don’t lose sight of my other academic interests.

 

Essay Quality?

The NaNoWriMo About Page issues the following warning to everyone who undertakes the challenge:

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

But that makes me wonder: did I write crap? And just how much crap did I write? What was my crap-to-awesome ratio?

My essays felt rushed, but that’s probably because I had to write about three times as often as usual. This definitely caused me to make some mistakes on a few posts, with typos and awkward wording. It also caused me to belch out a few posts just because I needed them for the word count, not because I thought they were particularly insightful: “The Curious Case of Detached Value” and “There Are No Religious Facts” don’t particularly excite me.

I also did make some mistakes that were discovered in later commenting, leading me to mess up on my posts about moral theory, ending up with me pleading My NaNoWriMo Dilemma.

But on the other hand, if I may be permitted to compliment myself, I think that I produced a few gems: I personally like my work on The True Fear of Being Wrong; God, Babies, Hell, and Justice; The Metaphysics Dilemma; Making the Question Go Away; and The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully.

 

Do Differently?

If I were to NaNoWriMo again next November (no promises, depends on if other people goad me into it with that “solidarity” thing), what would I do differently? I would want to explore a greater breadth of subjects like I first intended. I would also probably want to enter November with a greater plan of what I wanted to write about; have more pre-decided topics — often coming up with a topic is more difficult and time consuming than writing about it.

I also want to have more notes prepared on each topic so I can quickly remember what excited me so much about the topic in the first place — sometimes I lose sight of previous ideas because I didn’t have the time then to write about them, and don’t have the exuberance now to remember what I wanted written and why I was motivated to do so.

I would also work to write more concisely — to bring essay length averages back to and potentially under 2000 words, so that I don’t have to speed through essays at the end, and so they remain at comfortable reading lengths. Then I can work on being able to write on more than one topic in a day.

 

Overall?

Overall, I’m excited that I was able to complete this project. I hope I can use this success to stay on the current plan of Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Friday posting. And who knows, maybe I’ll do NaNoWriMo again next year?

At least you can look forward to several months of essays that don’t have the word “NaNoWriMo” in them. Consider this the end of me talking about it… at least, directly.