On The Failure That Was NaNoWriMo

Do you remember my post on how to cheat at NaNoWriMo? Well, I am now forced to tell you that absolutely none of those things worked. I finished with a little over 34,000 words - that's 16,000 words below the word count.

This may have had something to do with the fact that I didn't plan my book at all - I decided just to let my characters live their lives, which ended up with chapters and chapters of characters working on their own NaNoWriMo novel (art imitates life, right??). I intended this to be meta and thought-provoking, but actually it's just kind of boring.

My word-count failure also could have been because I now have significantly more school and homework than last year (and significantly less motivation). Or maybe it was because this year I didn't have a single main character - instead I focused on several different characters, and the way they interacted with each other, resulting in random, meaningless chapters with characters I didn't care about that didn't relate to the rest of the book at all. Or maybe it was because I was just lazy (probably that one).

Although I tried to write something every day, I didn't keep to the rigid 2,000+ words per day schedule that I followed last year. One weekend I wrote more than 7,000 words in one sitting, while last week I wrote barely 3,000 in five days. 

Honestly, though, I don't mind that I didn't finish. Last year's novel - which is really more like a pile of 50,000 words than a novel - is still sitting on my desktop, unopened since November 30, 2012. This lump of words will probably be gathering dust for the rest of its existence too - and that's okay. I'm still glad I wrote it, as terrible as it probably is, and I'm glad I wrote it last year too. I may never read either of them again, but at least I tried, and I got the experience. I'll probably do NaNoWriMo again next year, too, and spend my days feverishly writing words that no one will ever read.

It sounds pointless, even worthless, but writing something you know no one will see is kind of freeing. You have permission to write over-the-top dramatic scenes, or long reminiscences of your own life through another character's eyes, or just pages and pages describing an average event in a normal day, and your characters can be obvious copies of people you know or exaggerated versions of yourself and no one will be offended.

Plus, if you have no expectations for your writing to turn into the next Great American Novel, you can experiment with style and technique. For instance, in my almost-100-page "manuscript," I had 24 sections. Each section was completely different and unrelated to the others: although most featured similar characters and were set in the same small town (which was the original focus of my book), a few were letters or free-writes or cleverly disguised journal entries (in which the main character's name was "Aya." So subtle, right?). None of these sections are especially interesting or well-written, but they were fun to write, and they helped me learn more about what I like to write and what I hate. (I hate writing plot or conflict or drama. I like writing unrealistically self-aware and annoyingly self-obsessed characters).

NaNoWriMo provided a good jumping-off point for me, and the word count goal motivated me to start writing. Now it's up to me to keep writing without the incentive of a bar graph (that was pretty much the only incentive for me, but it was enough), keep improving, and - eventually - try to write something that someone else could read.

-Maya