The Sixth

Sometime near the end of October I thought to myself, “hey I’m really falling behind on all of my writing goals and the holidays are coming up, why don’t I undertake a labor-intensive, time-consuming writing project?”

So, with little thought and even less preparation, I embarked on an attempt to write 1,667 words a day, 30 days in a row, for the entire month of November, at the end of which I would have produced a messy first draft of a novel(la).

In other words, I participated in the National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) this year. I liked it. I failed miserably, but… did I? Definitely sort of. But I also succeeded in a way. “How did it go?” you might ask. It’s a fair question. And it’s a question answered differently depending upon which version of me you ask.

Strictly speaking, I lost. I came up woefully short of the 50,000 word goal with just over 30,000 words.

But then there’s weasel-me, who would like to point out that I also wrote at least 750 words every morning in my Morning Pages, which, in an “every word counts” project, could maybe sorta be added, in a quasi-technical way, to my total. Those 22,500 words would put me over the finishing line, and on record as having one of the most repetitive yet meandering collection of words daring to call itself a novel(la).

Then Sour Grapes Natasha will tell you that 50,000 words hastily written in 30 days in an “every word counts” frame of mind is gonna be bad unless you’re Stephen King, and probably even if you’re Stephen King. To act like hitting a fairly arbitrary number of words in an equally arbitrary number of days is synonymous with writing a novel(la) is silly at best and insultingly hubristic at its ugliest. So maybe I didn’t want to win this stupid thing anyway.

And before that line of thinking goes on for too too long, Pollyanna Natasha steps in and mentions that, hey, I wrote a lot more this month on one project than I probably ever have before, and if that’s not something, I don’t know what is.

I also learned a lot along the way: I seem to work best in short intervals and when my goals are focused on the time invested rather than on the amount of words written. The “critical” aspect of me that needs to be put aside while I write doesn’t just latch on to the quality of my work but also the way I work. I can just as easily get hung up on something like how long it takes me to do things as much as how clunkily a sentence can stumble around before it get to the end of itself.

But I’m okay with losing. I’m also fine with letting that weasel part of me have just enough of my ear to tell me “but you did hit the goal and win.” And it’s true that even if I had kept up the pace and won, whatever I had produced would have been a wreck. It would have needed that much more of an overhaul to get it working. But I had fun. I enjoyed the plunge. I don’t regret my choice to try it. To get into it and then stop and take a day to make an outline. Get stuck, Take the time to look up things like “verb tenses”and “establishing pov.” Get unstuck. Feel the way a scene can unfold as you write it. Do research on “how moons work.” Lose enthusiasm. Keep writing. Play with timing in a written medium. Find enthusiasm. Keep writing. Get discouraged. Write some more.

So I’m glad I did it, even if I lost, but I shouldn’t have, and it was stupid anyway.