Please Don't Quit While You're Ahead

I'd like to share with you, if I may, a brief history of my dealings with NaNoWriMo.

I don't know for sure what year I began, but I know it was when NaNoWriMo was still relatively unknown--I think 2003, which would make me a junior in high school. The concept was new and exciting, and I found myself really looking forward to November, when I would tackle my first ever novel-length writing project. I'd write the novel I started developing in junior high and had written an opening chapter to once before. Most of the book (I thought) was already planned out, so it was just a matter of writing it down. How hard could it be?

My first NaNoWriMo, I wrote roughly 200 words.

I tried again (with the same story) the next year. And the year after that. I managed to crack into 4 digits, writing probably 1000 words each year. 2% of the 50,000 required for NaNoWriMo. It was around that time I decided that NaNoWriMo was not for me--though oddly, I still believed I was capable of completing a novel. Just not in one month.

I stayed away for a few years until, late in the summer of 2009, I mentioned NaNoWriMo to my writer-type friends, forgetting that not everyone spends as much time online as I do and assuming they already knew about it. After I hesitantly explained to them the wonder and madness that is NaNoWriMo, they decided this was something we would do.

At first, I was adamant that I would not be participating. I knew better. I'd been where they were--the excitement that comes from a ridiculous, but plausible goal--and I knew the disappointment that lay ahead. But they were persistent. It would be different--I was older now, and my writing had matured. We'd be doing it as a group, so I'd be pushed to carry on. So against my better judgment, I went for it. But this time, I did things differently. I went in completely blind, making up my plot on the spot November 1, 2009. That year, I made it to 10,000 words. A vast improvement, to be sure, but another failure.

By fall of 2010, I knew what to expect. Again, they talked me into it (my wife, in her rookie NaNoWriMo year, was the only one of us to reach 50K). So I tried again. My 2010 count? 20,000. Still better, and still failing.

So this year, I convinced myself that I was going to give up the dream that NaNoWriMo was something I could accomplish. I told my writing friends that they'd be doing this one without me, and I stuck with it. Until a week before November.

I decided that I wanted to--needed to, even--try again this year. (Why I decided that is another post in itself). So at midnight on November 1, I again dove in.

And I don't know what it is--maybe I found the perfect combination of an idea that I had invested in but hadn't planned much, or maybe now that I'm out of school I can finally feel like writing is not something to be feared and avoided--but this year, for the first time, I feel like I have a chance at winning. At just over a week in, I'm already caught up with last year's all-time high word count.

It's today that worries me. Today I wrote only 100 words.

The key, I know from experience, is to get back to it tomorrow. And maybe I have nothing to worry about. Let's face it, I'm not exactly a prolific writer, and for the last week I've been putting in an average of 2300 words a day. To borrow an analogy often made by Mur Lafferty, it's like deciding to run 2 miles a day after years of sitting on a couch. You will burn out if you push too hard.

So I'm hoping that today was just the break I needed from the fatigue that comes from writing more in a week than you have in the past year. I'm not in any danger, since according to NaNoWriMo's handy graph I can actually go another two days without writing and be on schedule, but I can't let myself fall into that trap as I have in years passed. Tomorrow, it's back to work.

And somehow, that idea no longer fills me with dread.