Nov 08 2008
Whatever Happened to NaNo?
I planned to write about the pains and pleasures of National Novel Writing Month, but reality took hold of me, and I dropped out just short of 9,000 words. For the first time out of three tries, I had a plot — a real plot with a beginning, a middle and an end. So what happened?
Just as I was about to reach 9,000 I found myself so bored that I couldn’t force myself to go on. I don’t normally write fiction, and I’m used to rounding off a topic in 700 words or less, but neither of those facts were part of the problem. Suddenly, I realized that the novel I was writing wasn’t the one I wanted to write. But doing the necessary rethinking and restructuring would take weeks, and the research for some of the background would add to that. So everything came to a screeching halt.
I don’t regret it, though. Every time I try something new and either find out that I’ve screwed it up completely, or that it’s the wrong thing for me to be doing, I learn something of value. In my three attempts at NaNo, I’ve discovered that I’m not really cut out to write fiction. I could slog away at it and probably get fairly good at it, but at what cost? A novel consumes time and energy that could be bringing me the smaller but regular rewards that come from essay and article writing.
But there’s an idea and a cast of characters that keeps nagging at me and wants to see the light of day, so maybe it will happen when the time is right. I’d like to think that I have one novel in me and that it could be a really good one. Time will tell.
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