I thoroughly failed this year, but I learned two connected lessons:
- I will always have distractions from writing.
- Writing projects require consistency.
Distractions in life are a given. Friends and family visit us, we go visit family, people randomly invite us to some local event, and unexpected projects appear. My own hobbies distract me from my other hobbies. So much can demand my time and attention, and I have to prioritize where to place my effort.
This November, I consistently chose to spend more time with family. We either had family visiting us or were visiting family for half of the month. While I worked hard to keep my novel attempt relevant, it eventually became unsustainable to achieve the required average pace to “win” NaNoWriMo. Because it’s a goal-oriented project, there’s a tipping point at which inspiration to work harder becomes a sense of hopelessness. I quit my novel around November 20th.
“Quitting” is an awful mental frame, though. What I actually did was accept that there was no way to write fifty thousand words—an arbitrary goal to achieve in a month—without sacrificing sleep and mostly writing gobbledygook. Because I began All These Things Are True with no preparation and little intention of writing a novel this month at all, it was intrinsically linked to November and NaNoWriMo. When I accepted failure in NaNoWriMo, my first instinct was to quit the book altogether. But that’s not how writing works. It takes time and consistency. I can’t sustain the 1,700 words a day necessary to “win” NaNo while writing something I can iterate on and be proud of. While I’ve achieved those fifty thousand words a few times, I never felt my writing improved from the effort. If I’m going to put my head down and craft a new world, explore characters, I should come out the other side having accomplished something beyond hitting a word count.
One thousand words a day—thirty thousand words in a month—is achievable without dramatically sacrificing other parts of my life. When I choose to write a novel, not because it’s part of a month-long sprint but because I have a story I want to tell and characters that compel me, I will do so at an appropriate pace. Consistency is important, and the base idea of maintaining a floor of words per day is useful, but it must be realistic.
I don’t know whether I’ll continue the core plot of All These Things Are True, pivot the story elsewhere, or begin a new project the next time the novel-writing bug hits. That’s not important compared to refining the process that works for me and maintaining engagement with my writing. My blog requires the same attention. There’s a tangible quality difference between posts I write in an hour because I need to get something out the door this week, and those I noodle over for a while as I consider their structure and proofread the final result.
Writing is tough. The older I get and the more experience I gain, the more I understand my own shortcomings as a writer and find new ways to improve. I’m not as fearless as I used to be, but the naivety of youth, while admirable, doesn’t yield better results on its own. It still requires the quiet, calm, consistent refining hand of experience. While I don’t literally subscribe to the adage of write drunk, edit sober, there’s something on the fringes of that idea I could take: write wildly, edit wisely.