First year I wrote out an alarming number of contractions and added some not quite related writing I had done in November. That was probably the worst padding I’ve done.

I know last year I ended up just explaining how the rest of the story would go in a summary.

Nowadays I have more of those notes of ‘this doesn’t make sense’ or ‘this is a completely ooc tangent because I got distracted’. But I feel I’m getting better at focusing on the story and not thinking about the word count! (And I feel if you realize you are padding your wordcount you’re probably on the right track, right?)

Y’know, on one hand, I try very hard to refrain from saying “THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY TO DO NANO.” I mean, shit, they’re not my rules, and no one verifies whether participants have actually written 50,000 words or copied something wholesale from Project Gutenberg.

But I get awfully annoyed when people tromp all over what I see as the spirit of the rules and still declare themselves NaNo winners because they technically followed them.

The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel within a month. Padding the shit out of it and saying, “Well, I wrote 50,000 words so it TOTALLY COUNTS even though thirty thousand are the characters reading take-out menus from the internet” is just plain being a cheaterface.

I’m glad I tried and won NaNoWriMo last year. I learned something about writing, editing, and myself by pushing out 50k words of product. I even liked a lot of what happened between my brain and the keyboard. There were enough positives that I signed up again this year.

I’m sure there’s a hundred million metric tons of anecdotal evidence of how NaNo is good or bad. That’s because *how* you NaNo matters, and everyone does it differently. I agree with you 100%: if NaNo teaches you to write 50k words of what is the literary equivalent of frothy sewage, you’ve done yourself a disservice. Winning for the sake of winning is hollow. A manuscript even a mother couldn’t love is a sad showing for the time and effort spent.

This November I’m using NaNo as an excuse to build a writing habit. I lost mine over the last year and was having trouble getting over the hump. Now my novel is going somewhere after being stalled for months and I’m very happy with it–all 25k words of it.

I really, really like the idea of writing 10 short stories for NaNo. A lot.

Goddammit. x)