As some quick background, I participated in NaNoWriMo this year, as I have in past years, but for the first time I did not win. After getting over my disappointment, I decided to document some of the lessons I learned. If I participate next year I will hopefully remember to look back at these lessons and apply them to improve my chances of winning. By sharing them here perhaps other participants can benefit as well.

To understand some of the comments below you will need to know that in the past I have used the word processor part of OpenOffice.org to write my NaNoWriMo novels, but this year I tried to use two new tools together: Celtx and Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

This is what I learned:

1. Don't take winning for granted.

I will admit that my prior wins gave me a false sense of certainty about my winning again. Intellectually, I knew it was possible to not win, and as the month progressed while the novel did not I knew the odds were increasingly not in my favor, but in the past I have been able to pull it off despite poor progress during the month. I didn't realize until the end of the month just how much I had taken winning for granted.

2. Get & stay ahead; don't assume time can be made up later.

When we sign up for NaNoWriMo and commit to writing a new novel in a month, we can't know what that month will hold. Sure, there are holidays like Thanksgiving that we can plan around, but there are many events waiting for us that will take us by surprise. Therefore, it makes sense to get ahead and stay ahead as much as possible, so if any big disruptions occur they don't completely scuttle chances of winning.

3. Don't delay resolving technical problems.

If you experience technical problems that interfere with your writing, you must tackle them with all haste. Not only will the delays risk putting you behind schedule but the frustration and delays can have a serious and negative impact on your motivation and creative inertia. For much of the month I struggled with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but at the end of the month, with only a few days remaining, I tackled those problems seriously and found some workarounds that boosted my productivity. It was too little, too late.

4. Choose your project priorities — prove a tool or write a book?

Conflicting goals regarding the novel project can prevent reaching 50,000 words in time. When I first participated in NaNoWriMo in 2006 I decided that I would write my novel in OpenOffice.org under Linux for no better reason than to prove that it could be done using free software. Luckily, that goal of proving a writing environment did not interfere with the goal of writing the book. (Technically, the book isn't done, but I did reach 50,000 words on time.) I skipped NaNoWriMo for a year and then resumed participation in 2008 with the simple goal of writing a book. Likewise, my goal in 2009 and 2010 were just to write a book each time. This year I decided that I would dictate my entire novel to prove that it was possible. Unfortunately, that goal did conflict with completing my word count before the end of the month. This is not to say that dictating the entire novel and finishing on time was impossible, but my mismanagement of the obstacles presented by Dragon directly interfered with the goal of completing those 50,000 words. I could have abandoned that goal and simply typed my novel, and perhaps I would have won, but instead I allowed the other goal to take precedence.

5. Don't adopt more than one new tool per NaNoWriMo.

I think both of the tools I adopted for NaNoWriMo this year are valuable and worth using in the future. Celtx is great for staying organized, mapping out the story, and writing the actual manuscript. Dragon NaturallySpeaking, when it works well, is an excellent way to compose text while giving your hands a rest. In fact, I'm using it to draft this blog post. However, there are some bugs in the software that can be very frustrating, and frustration with a tool is not conducive to creativity. As I described it during November, at times it was like using a pencil to write the story and having my lead break every third word. The added complexity and learning curves of multiple tools does not provide a solid foundation for a NaNoWriMo project.

6. Get lots of practice with a new tool before using it for NaNoWriMo.

Before NaNoWriMo started, I tried to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking with Celtx to write a short story. I did not give that project enough time, however, so I ended up learning things during NaNoWriMo that I should have learned beforehand. I think it is a good idea to keep an eye out for new or better tools for writing, but I do not think a November in which participation in NaNoWriMo is planned is a good time to become familiar with a new tool.

7. Don't keep pushing at a story that doesn't hold your passion.

I realized fairly early in the month that I just did not have much passion for the story I was writing. It would have been better to either radically change it or abandon it and start something different in the first or second week of the month than to continue struggling to find the necessary motivation and concentration for this particular story. This lack of interest in the story was naturally compounded by the frustration of struggling against the bugs (and occasionally very inaccurate voice recognition) of Dragon.

It is much too early to say whether I will participate in NaNoWriMo in 2012. Whenever I do get back to it, and for others who participate and may run across this blog post, hopefully these lessons will be useful.