NaNoWriMo Postscript: Close, But No Cigar

I didn’t quite get to 50K.

Almost had it...

I’ve had a week to deal with it, to let that simmer in my brain. I failed NaNoWriMo this year. I fell behind during Thanksgiving week, and despite a last-day push that had me put up 2200 words or so, it left me a shade under 4000 words short of the goal.

Over the last week, I’ve dealt with the emotions surrounding not reaching the goal. There was the disappointment, feeling like I let myself down. I felt like I squandered a very strong start. There was the self-doubt, wondering if I would ever be able to prioritize writing over anything else going on in my sphere. I looked around my writing space and see motivational signs like the “50 K OR BUST” sign I have on my corkboard, or the glowing marquee that said “35 K WORDS AND COUNTING” before I left for Thanksgiving, and I haven’t had the heart to change. I looked at these things and wondered to myself and my wife if I’m a fraud.

To her credit, she told me I was being dramatic. Multiple times, actually.

She then suggested I look at the things I accomplished in the month. 46,096 words in a month is more than I’ve ever done. I have roughly 60% of a first draft complete. And while I did fall off the pace over Thanksgiving, I was able to carve out time during a family vacation to write, and that was also something I had never previously been able to do. She suggested that I take the things I learned in November and apply them.

So, what did I learn?

· I’m a plotter. I had more success this time because my outline was detailed. I knew the story, cold. The outline period was almost like dress rehearsal for the book. I knew the parts that would work for sure and the parts that were iffier before I started word one. The road map I created was essential, and I should never write anything else without one.

· You can get a lot done in 25 minutes. I used a discontinued app called Write-o-Meter that is based on the Pomodoro Method of time management. It includes a timer and a word tracker, and I found that in doing multiple 25-minute sprints per day, I was able to churn out between 2000 and 3000 words in a given day. I spent a lot of the year complaining about how little time I had to write, and here we are, banging out 60% of a novel in a month, using less than three hours in a day.

· Setting boundaries with people you love isn’t a bad thing. My wife has been recovering from a surgical procedure, and for the time leading up to NaNoWriMo, I was there to help her with everything she needed. November coincided with a time she was developing more and more autonomy, and I decided to use that time to get NaNoWriMo done as best as I could. I closed the door to the writing space, and for 25 minutes at a time, was completely unavailable for anything except emergencies. And it worked. I was afraid that she would resent me for taking the time, and it turns out she needed a break from me too. All jokes aside, she was very supportive of the time I needed to take to write, and she was (and still is) very respectful of the space I need to do it. As one who has been historically bad at setting hard boundaries, it’s good to know that I can do so and not damage relationships.

· Writing makes me want to write more. It’s weird. Earlier this year, I couldn’t do anything. I had such a hard time getting started that I thought that trying to be anything more than a hobby writer was just not going to happen. Once I put my head down and started writing, though, I did it a lot. Once it became part of the routine, I almost craved it. Word counts went up, page counts went up, and I now have so much material. The lesson here, then, is that doing something and seeing results makes you want to do it more.

I haven’t been able to work on fiction since the end of November. I’m tired; all of this is a week ago, there has been not nearly enough sleep, and my brain just did a month-long boot camp novel writing. I need recovery time, just like with any intense workout. But I did come away with new tools to help me push forward with my writing and with life.

So yeah, I failed NaNoWriMo. But I didn’t lose.