Why I Quit NaNoWriMo and Started Again

This summer I was on a roll, finally piecing together a novel I'd been writing off and on for over a decade.  Editing was going well, organizing was going well, even writing things I'd put off for years was going well.  And then I hit a wall.  No matter how badly I wanted to work on my novel, it was as if my brain had switched itself off for the time being.

After copious amounts of complaining online to my friends, one suggested I start a "throw away" story or poem in the hopes that my writer's block would go chew on that and I could get back to the srs bsns of my novel.  I was hoping to have a full draft done by my-October.  Not having written much of anything in the way of poetry since high school, I pulled out one of my spare composition books and started working on a random story.

In about a month and a half I had over 95 handwritten pages of a story I had never really thought of writing.  I was on a roll again.  It irked me to some degree that the story I was working on wasn't the one I'd intended but it was also cathartic to write.  The problem was, National Novel Writing Month was rapidly approaching and I needed to set aside the story I was burning through to plan another story...



This turned out to be a mistake.  I did things almost exactly like I did last year when I won NaNoWriMo for the first time.  The only difference was, last year I didn't have a story I was enjoying writing hanging over my head.  This year I did.

Despite being a fun enough story and having elements about which I've always wanted to write, I couldn't get into this year's WriMo novel.  I chained myself to it for hours and by November 12th, I only had six thousand words and had stopped writing completely.  Then yesterday real life came crashing down on top of my head.  (It chooses to do this in November FAR too often!)  I was tempted to just abandon NaNoWriMo for this year and take loss number three after last year's triumphant, last-hour win.

But NaNoWriMo is about getting it written over getting it perfect and careless exuberance... things I had in the story I had set aside to start my WriMo novel.  So yesterday I decided that real life can cram it and rules are meant to be broken.  I set aside my WriMo story to be worked on at a later date.

For the rest of the month I'm going to try my damnedest to add fifty thousand words to the story I put aside at the end of October.  I've already added pages to it despite being emotionally exhausted yesterday.  Today I'm really going to tear into it.  Will I finish?  We'll see at 12:01 on December 1st.  But I won't have actually quit NaNoWriMo and I will enjoy what I'm writing.  In the end, that's all I care about.