Four Things NaNoWriMo Taught Me In Week One

I thought I'd make a post about what the first week of NaNoWriMo has taught me. I feel I've learned a lot already and if I didn't want to win so badly, have my novel written, I could walk away now and feel like I've achieved something important.

1. Outline's are Priceless: Outlining my story made me realize I didn't have a substantial plot, at least not one that would carry me across 50,000 words. I will always write an outline from this point forward, the more detail I can put in (without turning it into wordy paragraph's which I have been guilty of before) the more I can write on that bullet point when the time comes to churn those words out. The end result becomes longer and more well thought out. 
2. No Look Back: I cannot stress how hard this part is for me, or was for me before this week. I'm dyslexic and have real trouble spelling words and forming sentences in ways that other people can understand them. Even this post I'll likely have to edit a few times to get the word usage just right. With Nano there is no time to second guess sentence structure. No time to worry about whether that is the correct way to spell a word. No time to worry about semicolons. No time to worry about whether it makes sense! Just write and keep pushing forward. It's hard, really hard, but once you get it, you really fly through the words; suddenly able to write hundreds in the span of time it took you to write fifty before. 
3. What's Inspiration?: I hear people going on about " I don't have the inspiration to write today." "I need to be inspired to write." and I used to be one of those people! I would get hit with a sudden dose of inspiration and write a few pages in a frenzy of  "I have to put this idea down right now.", put my work down, and never look at it again. What I should have been doing is using that inspiration to create entire outlines for novels. Don't waste your inspiration on your word count! Put it into your outline and you can push through the tedium of the pages that follow. I didn't think I could do it at first, but now that I've begun to just push through and force myself to write the slow points where I'm not sure how to transition. What's final editing for anyway, right?
4. Deadlines Are Awesome: The deadline is what is keeping me sprinting! I want to finish! I want to have the pleasure of knowing I've won NaNoWriMo. Me, the dyslexic girl that everyone said would never write anything of value. Having that deadline keeps me from saying "I'll just write it later its cool.". I'll never write it later, I have good intentions but lets face it, that "write it later" thing never works out for me.