It’s official. I’m throwing in the towel.
It’s November 30th tomorrow, the final day of Nanowrimo, and my word count stands at a little over 30,000 words.
That’s a Nano fail.
I feel kind of bad about it.
I was so sure I could make it happen – I even wrote a rather boastful (in retrospect ) post about how I could handle everything family life threw at me and still make that word count.
How little did I know.
My Nano novel started out like this….
See that lovely clear path.
Straight as an arrow.
But, oh yes – up on the horizon there – see that? That’s right. A great big, tangled, old wood – all dark and forbidding.
And that’s what my nice, clear cut little Nano novel did to me – turned all dark and nasty and tangled.
I couldn’t make sense of it. Characters were rushing here and there with no clue what was going on, and speaking atrocious dialogue while they were doing it. My healthy 1,700 words a day habit was under attack. The manuscript was all CAPS LOCK, which is my way of adding a note mid- write.
Yikes. There was no write. It was all NOTE MID-WRITE.
But I ploughed on. Just slower.
I guess that’s ok.
It feels like a fail, but there are 30,000 words of a new novel sitting on my hard drive that didn’t exist a month ago.
I’m not giving up on it. I’ll probably finish by Christmas. And then I’ll hide it in a drawer until I can bear to look at it again.
Kristen Lamb has a great and inspiring post called Nanowhat now where she talks about exercising self discipline. Basically – small steps and build on it. Nanowrimo by its very nature flies in the face of that good advice. You need big steps, and lots of them, to make 50,000 words in a month.
If I learnt anything in November, it’s that I’m not ready for big steps yet. But little steps, five days a week?
That I can manage.
How about you?
Are you a Nano winner? What does that feel like? And are you happy with what you’ve written?
🙂
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Trudy, I found this at the bottom of Kristen’s blog, right about the time I finished mine about being a NaNo Failure. Which makes for a catchy title but isn’t quite the case. I just found another way NOT to write this book. And I have a mass of really wonderful scenes to string together
Failure isn’t the case is it? Not really. You’ve got some good scenes to weave into a story. I’ve got the start of a decent plot (that went a bit haywire in the middle). And we both spent November getting words on paper, words that weren’t there before.
And Kristen’s post was just what I needed to read.
Thanks so much for commenting 🙂
If you’ve got things you can use than it’s in no way a fail. I did Nanowrimo a few years ago and wrote 50,004 words. They were utterly terrible and I’ve never looked at them again – certainly more of a fail than it sounds like yours is going to be. The only thing it did do for me though is get me writing. Happy Christmas x
Thanks Claire. I’m not sure I’d do Nanowrimo again, to be honest, the pace was just too fast for me, but if it got you writing, it wasn’t such a fail for you either – sounds like it was more of a stepping stone.
And a very Merry Christmas to you o<:-)