Monday, December 5, 2011

In Which I Admit That I Failed NaNoWriMo

This year, I thought I'd give into National Novel Writing Month. I thought I'd give into it in a big, big way. I thought, in short, I would SMASH it.

That did not happen.

If you do not promptly commence being shocked...well, you probably know me.

Writing stuff, I have determined, carries with it a lot of pressure. That's not to say I don't love it, because that would be a lie. And that's not to say that I didn't initially ask people to hold me accountable for any NaNoWriMo related promises. And also: words are cool. It's even cooler that you can string them together to form a sentence, then string those sentences together to form a story.

Writing stuff is also intensely personal. At least, it starts off that way. These words move from my brain into my fingers onto my pages, and then I want to keep them. At least for a little while, anyway. But after that initial wanting-to-keep them phase, I want to ditch them. ALL of them. Quite badly, really.

Was I going somewhere with this?

Ah yes, my NaNoWriMo Novel Attempt is currently 12 pages long, which means that it's several thousand words short of its goal. But it's also a number of pages I didn't have before I so congenially attempted to throng with the scribbling masses. (Okay, actually, that was when I knew it would be too hard: writing isn't congenial; it's actually fairly solitary. If you invite people to a writing party, it's not as though there's much partying to be done.)

So yes, I failed. But at least I started going somewhere.

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