I officially “won” NaNoWriMo as of writing this post on November 23.
As you can see, “winning” just means successfully writing 50,000 words of a completely new story during November. At least that’s the official way to do it. Even more strictly, they seem to take the stance that your novel should be finished at that stage, which I now find absurd. As you can check for yourself, my 50,000 word document, when directly exported to PDF, is 114 pages. Of course it’s lacking page breaks and all that stuff, but even in the most extreme circumstances of adjusting margins and doing a lot of typesetting, I doubt that would get it to 150 pages. That’s a far cry from a substantial novel. Novella, perhaps, but not quite a novel.
The thing is, I surprised myself this month. What started as a clear-cut story based on an idea I’d already worked through in another medium became its own object with an entirely different goal. The story, whatever it might become, is far from over. Yet I’m not sure if continuing it right now is what I really want to do. It’s hard to work through in my mind.
What made this project special (and surprisingly easy) was that the story was a vehicle for accomplishing this long-form writing task that tested my discipline and creativity. Telling the story was not necessarily the end goal, and it’s a huge mental hurdle to go between those frames of reference. If I tell myself this book needs to be finished, it’s hard for me to say if it will ever happen. Perhaps there is some mental trickery I can perform and convince myself it’s really just an extension of what this month was, that it’s to build a habit of writing because it’s something I want to do even if the story never gets told. Maybe that’s exactly what I will do. I don’t know.
Regardless of the continuation of this story, there were plenty of things I learned along the way. I began to understand what it meant to (a) write what you know, (b) let your characters guide you through the story, and (c) not be silenced by my inner editor and critic.
Perhaps I took (a) a bit too seriously at times. My character was, in my mind, a straight white male broadly around my age, and of course with my general knowledge of the world. So, that’s not very interesting, but it is accurate. The tangents that he goes on are certainly authentic. I would do quick searches on the internet to find out more information about a subject that I was broadly familiar with, but needed some specifics because, frankly, it was more convenient that way. Other times I did not provide my character with the knowledge I had. The most extreme example was how I wrote what’s current in Chapter 9. I wrote all of Chapter 10 and got into 11 until I had the time to go buy some Twinkies and go through exactly the motions and observations I wrote in that chapter. It was also a good excuse to try a Twinkie, because I never have.
Point (b) was the most interesting. All fiction writers that have opined on the subject seem to fall somewhere on the spectrum of “I am a slave to my characters” and “My characters are slaves to me”. For a long time I probably existed on some vertical axis above that line, not knowing what I was doing or what anybody meant about either of those situations. Letting characters “have control” is the hardest to empathize with, until it actually started happening to me in some cases. When I started writing, I wanted to follow the general plot points of the text adventure I was basing it on, but it became clear that the character I was writing did not belong there yet. There was a lot of growth and discovery that needed to happen first. When that started to occur in the story, I didn’t feel like I’d made a conscious decision, it felt more like the decision had been made for me. It’s strange, but it certainly was fun.
Point (c) is really the crux of all of NaNoWriMo. It takes a lot for all writers, but particularly new ones, to not be afraid of writing total garbage on the page, to really internalize the idea that you can’t edit a blank page. I’ve improved on this over the years, and this blog has been the most useful since I put very little work into editing what I write here. And I found it so freeing to just write whatever I wanted to this month, telling myself that any criticism is totally invalid because it’s not meant to be good, it’s meant to be writing that could potentially be tweaked, changed, or thrown out at a later time if necessary.
Overall this was a great challenge for me. I suspect I’ll try to keep at my story on some easier schedule, and I’ll almost certainly be attempting NaNoWriMo next year as well. Maybe I’ll find a new way to challenge myself within the confines of the month, but it was very exciting to participate in it.