MIGHTY PEN: Amanda Acton
Wahooooo! Our NaNoWriMo winners are adding up, and I’m so happy for you guys! Another Mighty Pen to reach 50k is Amanda Acton–congratulations!! Thank you so much for being part of the fam this year. I hope it was as fun as it seems to have been productive for you. If you missed reading an excerpt from her project when she hit Silver Pen, you can check out Eight of Swords here, and a short interview is below!
Interview with a Mighty Pen: Amanda Acton
What’s one thing that changed in your expectations for your project from November 1 to now?
I had an outline when I started. I thought it was a good outline and that I had done the groundwork to get a nice looking first draft out. As you can imagine, NaNo swiftly informed me that I had not yet done enough groundwork to get a nice looking first draft out. So instead of NaNo being about chugging out that first draft, it turned into more of an exploratory project where I jumped between different scenes and tried different things. It’s helped me get some solid perspective on the shape of the story. Now I can go back and try this whole planning an outline thing again.
What moment in NaNoWriMo18 stands out the most to you?
The fundraising. When I signed up I wasn’t even sure that I’d manage to get to $50, but here we are at the end of NaNo and I’m a couple of dollars short of $250. I am blown away by the generosity of family, friends, and yes, even complete strangers whom I’ve never even met or interacted with before NaNo.
And it was SCARY putting myself out there and asking for sponsors. Almost like making actual phone calls scary. But I did it, and it’s been amazing and seriously a huge lesson on the good things that can happen when you put yourself out there. 🙂
What’s something you’ve learned, or that you’re proud of, from this year’s NaNo?
This year I went in with the goal of having fun. I have anxiety issues and a lot of my recent writing has been clouded by an overwhelming sense of existential dread. So I told myself that if I was going to do NaNo, I was going to do it because I enjoy writing. At least, younger me definitely enjoyed writing, but I somehow lost that sense of joy along the way. And I did it, I got to 50000 words without freaking out or stressing or beating myself up for not doing it perfectly. I just kept the goal in mind, that I was here to have fun, and the words came easily.
Any advice for yourself or others for next year’s NaNo, if you’re able to participate again?
A huge win for me this year was giving myself permission to write things out of sequence. Instead of looking at NaNo as this thing that had to be a perfect narrative piece, I used it as a way to brainstorm, so when certain things caught my attention more, I could focus on them. Or when something wasn’t working, I could simply shift into a new space and not have to worry about trying to make the previous thing work. Giving yourself permission to define what NaNo means is one of the best things you can do.