You’re Going To Fail NaNoWriMo
It’s that time of year again! The end of National Novel Writing Month! You did everything you needed to do before November started. You planned, detailed, timelined, researched, noted… everything you had to do to prepare for the coming month. November came and BAM! You were off, writing your little fool heart out!
And then life happened and you ran out of gas just before the finish line. Or perhaps right out of the starting gate. I know, it happens to the best of us. It happened to me, just now. The month isn’t over yet, but I can already see my demise just ahead, on the left.
This is my third NaNo. The first two I did, I wrote my 50K by the sixteenth day of the month. Had I continued at that pace, I would have hit 100K words before the end of the month, but I wrote what I had to to win, and left it at that. I even wrapped my stories up in 50K instead of just writing until I could write no more. As much as I was ready for those, I wasn’t.
You see, I went into them trying to win NaNo. That was my goal. If I got something good out of them, awesome. If not, whatever. I won NaNo. I didn’t completely get the message just right. Yes, I know it’s all about quantity over quality. Yes, I know it’s all about writing without stopping to edit or smell the roses. But I missed one huge important lesson.
It’s not about winning NaNo.
It really isn’t. It’s about training yourself to get a novel out of your system in little time. It’s about training yourself to just write, let the words flow, and in the end, go back to it and do your editing. You can’t tell a story if you stop to change it before it’s told.
The story I decided to write this year, Suburban Legend, was my moment of doing it the right way. The first two years I did little planning. That’s how I write (if you couldn’t tell by my stories!). I guess I’m a blogger that way, and I need to learn to not be. If I get a story idea in my head, I work out the details there and when the time comes, I just open the flood gates and let it pour out onto the paper.
This year, however, I actually planned a beginning and end to my story, my characters, trivial points in the middle of the story, and even the subplot. I planned ahead. On top of that, I realized what I’m telling you now. I was going to write my story until it was completely told. If that took me past November, so be it. The only thing I hadn’t expected was, that my story would be told before November was over, and before I hit 50K.
I thought for sure I would have enough to fill out 50,000 words. I even wrote parts to the story that I hadn’t originally planned, because you know, that happens. I even fluffed it up a bit. But truth be told, I’m not great at fluffing a story. And right now, I can’t imagine coming up with 12,000 words of fluff to hit the 50K mark. It just isn’t going to happen.
What you have to realize now, Mister or Misses Author, is that your story shouldn’t suffer because you didn’t finish NaNo. NaNoWriMo is there to teach you, to help you train yourself to be a better writer. To motivate you. To get those untold stories out of you and onto paper. It’s not there to be a competition to win. If that’s the case, you’re playing the game for the wrong reasons.
Sure, I lost NaNo this year, but that’s okay. Because it’s the story that matters, not NaNo. Sometimes stories aren’t told in 50K words. Maybe your story wasn’t meant to be a novel. Maybe it was meant to be a short story. Or a pamphlet. Whatever.
The point here is, I could write 12,000 crappy fluff words just to hit 50K, but why? So I can put a little jpg on my site saying I won? As soon as December rolls around I’m just going to delete all of that crappy fluff before editing my story. That’s not writing 50K in November, that’s cheating. Hell, I could copy my entire MS and paste it to get 76,000 words for that matter, and then “HEY LOOK! I WON!” No, I cheated.
Don’t cheat yourself, but more importantly, don’t cheat your story. Finish it. Don’t be depressed that you lost NaNo. You only lose NaNo if you don’t finish that story, no matter what month it is. Go write it, finish it, and let the world see what you wrote.
