I didn't "win" but I made progress and consider that a big win. So, while I didn't write 50,000 words in one month, I did double the wordcount on my current novel that I've been working on since 2015.
I began November with 4 chapters and just over 16,000 words. I will be ending November with 8 chapters and over 35,000 words.
The last chapter I finished had been in progress for ONE YEAR. 4,111 words in 12 months. That is SLOW. BUT, that chapter couldn't have been written without a ton of research as the groundwork.
Since 2015 I've read about 12 books relating to the subjects I cover in the novel. I keep giving my characters stupidly complicated professions and hobbies that I know nothing about, and getting the details of their daily lives correct is difficult from the outside looking in.
Setting plays a huge role in the story as well, and I'm David Tennant's Character in "The Decoy Bride" in that I'm writing the whole thing from Google Maps, basically. I have a research trip planned, but the cost is keeping me from really pulling the trigger on going. Flights to Manchester were a lot less expensive from Logan than SDF.
According to my log, I only reached the NaNo daily wordcount goal 5 times, and only breached 1,000 words without reaching the goal of 1,667 like 3 other times. I wrote 0 words 10 times in November.
Also, I'm fairly certain that 1,845 words is the most I've ever written in a single sitting. People who can write like 5k in a day are impressive.
That being said, a lot of people write really dull, trope-y, insipid stuff. And a lot of WriMos use word "hacks" like always writing out the character's full name (and giving them extra middle names and titles) instead of using pronouns. Doing this kind of thing just to reach a wordcount goal is not how I roll. It just makes more work for yourself in editing.
Also, I'm not going to stress myself out about an arbitrary count only to throw most of it away in edits because it's rubbish. My goal is to tell an excellent story. Not reach a count.
I did learn a lot about process by participating with the NaNo community this year. A lot of the struggles I go through with writing are fairly universal, as it turns out. The feeling of camaraderie is really encouraging.
I learned that under the very best circumstances, I can write about 1.5k words in 3 hours - if I'm not too tired, not over- or under- caffeinated, the story doesn't demand really intricate writing, and there aren't any research gaps that need to be filled to write the thing properly.
And I learned that writing 500 words in a day feel very natural to me. As my chapters end up hitting right between 4k and 5k words, I SHOULD be able to crank out a chapter every two weeks. That never happens. But I think it would be an excellent goal for me to try to write and give a first pass at editing one chapter per month, and that will be my goal going forward.
My current outline begins to lack detail at around Chapter 12 and I'm currently writing in Chapter 8. I'm getting really close to a major development in the story that will effect the rest of the outline, so I'm hoping to get to that point before the end of the year.
I write sequentially. If I project out from my current outline, I suspect 20 chapters should finish up the story, so I'm looking at right around 100k words, or about a 500-pager. That's right around the size of Twilight or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I'm guessing, of course.
I outline a character's emotional arc and add in as many scenes as need to happen to bring about the proper feelings in the characters. I have a broader outline of major events in the story, and about four chapters ahead of where I'm currently writing that include a lot of detail on planned scenes.
Almost every chapter I outline ends up being split into two chapters because I have such a horrible time moving the story forward. I get too caught up in how the characters are feeling about events and the writing ends up being very internal. It is what it is, and I've stopped fighting it.
I've got three abandoned novels in the creative graveyard already. Each one of them failed not because the concept was bad, not because the story wasn't interesting, or the characters weren't worth exploring. They failed because I was trying to write the way the "how to write good" books tell you to write, and it just wasn't in me. This time around, I'm doing it my way. And it's not easy to read. BUT...
I've accepted that there's room for challenging writing in the world.
I'm going to persevere. I just want to finish a novel once in my life. That's the goal. And I'm hopeful it won't be awful. Slow, dense, in a style that won't suit every reader - certainly - but not awful.