Taking the L (and Learning From It)

If you didn't know, I've been trying to participate in National Novel Writing Month. It's a program that basically challenges you to write 50,000 words in a single month (50,00 being the generally accepted minimum to call something a novel), with lots of motivational messages and a support system to help you achieve your goal.

I, ah... didn't. And won't be.

"But it's only halfway through the month! How can you give up already?" I hear you say. It's a wonderful program and it helps a lot of people; many, many projects that would have never gotten off the ground have soared because of the motivation and support provided through having such a structure and resource available for absolutely free. But after eight books and 850,000 published words, I know who I am as an author, and that even after two weeks, I've accepted that it wasn't working for me.

I started it as a challenge to myself, to do something completely different after finishing the Ashes books. I speed-outlined this new book and basically jumped in feet first to see if I could Leeroy Jenkins my way through a first draft. I got several thousand words into it, but day after day it started feeling increasingly... wrong. Without knowing where it was going, I felt like it was just meandering, that I was pumping out words just to pump out words. Turns out two weeks of outlining wasn't enough. Not even close.

I remember listening to an interview with John Cleese where he talked about his writing process, and he mentioned that the less time you have to write something, the more likely you are to lean on cliche and borrowing from other things in order to get a story out in time. That's exactly what happened to me! I realized I was just writing Midnight Magic again. The major beats were all the same, the general story was the same, even thematically it was too similar, so I immediately pulled the plug on the whole thing.

But I'm not upset at all! It was a valuable lesson. It's often said that you learn more from failure than success, and that is the case here for me.

Yes, I was having fun with all the romantic parts, and some of that will survive, but the story comes first, and I wasn't happy with what I was coming up with. I'm not the kind of writer that can just barrel forward and fix it later, I need to know where I'm going and how everything fits together. Prose takes a lot of work, and I don't like doing it twice. I would rather figure things out before I start writing. I know, definitively, that I am not a 'pantser', I can't improvise my way through a story. That's the great insight I've gained through this process. The urge to shake things up and be different post-Ashes was very strong for me, but now I know that "No, what I've been doing is fine. It's the way you work."

So while I do enjoy being back in the Alumita universe, I need to take a step back and actually look around a bit. I've been doing a lot of brainstorming and outlining again, enough to have two books on the boil now! But the progress I'm making now is only because I bailed on what wasn't working. I wasn't precious about it (sunk cost fallacy, etc.) Will that book ever see the light of day? The characters and setting will, but the story is toast, that got a hard reset.

It's okay to f*ck up. You should f*ck up, otherwise you aren't trying hard enough. You aren't growing. I tried a new process, it didn't work. That's fine! In both of these new books I'm trying things I've never done before, and I may screw those up, too! But that's fine as well. In everything, we have to give ourselves the grace to fail so we can learn from that failure.

I fell down. But now I'm standing again, and soon enough I'll be able to run.