Beginnings and Ends and Everything in Between

I slacked off a little bit on my blogging this month to participate once again in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. I love the challenge of it, and usually end up with at least the skeleton of a book that I can work with, since NaNo novels as a whole are really about the writing and the accomplishing, and not actually about creating fine literature. But the book is finished and my winner’s certificate is ready to hang in my office with the others, so it was a success.

But here’s something I learned about my writing this month. I had plotted and prepared for weeks leading up to this year’s challenge and I thought I knew my characters inside and out. They still managed to surprise me in places, they even managed to make me cry a couple of times. But here’s the most important lesson I learned: sometimes the story is just over.

I finished my novel, beginning, middle, and end. And it was too short for NaNo. I was about six thousand words shy of the goal of 50,000 words the first time I struggled with how I was going to finish the challenge. I added plot twists here and there and made sure all of my key stories were complete and easily understood. With three thousand words to go, I introduced a whole new character, a semi-love interest, making sure not to go too far in that direction since I already knew he wasn’t going to play a larger role in the story later. But with exactly one thousand words to go, I struggled to figure out how I could meet the word count without throwing random, disinteresting points around in my book.

The real lesson I learned is that sometimes the story is just finished. I kicked myself while trying to squeeze in those extra words just for the sake of writing them because I knew this was not the path to good writing. An arbitrary goal, whether it’s a fun noveling challenge or a not-so-fun instance when a teacher demands a five paragraph essay and mandates that each paragraph have five to seven sentences, does not equate to good writing. The author and the characters have to lead the way and ultimately, the plot will decide when it’s done.