I have 473 words to go. woohoo.
This is the seventh year I’ve done Nanowrimo. Every year I’ve know there was a whole lot of rewriting needed before the ‘story’ could bear being seen by someone else, but I’ve always felt there indeed were chunks of a good story in the mass.
This time? I just want it to go away. Mr. Starving insists I should just archive it to disk for several months, that it’s probably better than I think, but I dunno.
Lesson I am taking away from this: I started disliking this about 10 days in. If that ever happens again, I’M GOING TO START OVER WITH A NEW STORY.
Losing tens days of writing is far, far better than twenty days of slogging through crap. Trust me.
Go, StarvingButStrong, go! Squeeze out those last few words!
Thanks for the encouragement. 
I did indeed ‘finish’, with a few hundred words to spare, and have collected my Winner’s Certificate and all.
Now I just have to go make a donation, and I can cross this off as ‘finished.’
I finished a few minutes ago. Out of the eight that I’ve done, I think this is the third best (after '05 and '07), but only because the others were REALLY bad.
Well I said I wanted to do a postmortem on the experience so here goes.
Conclusion first: I’m glad I did it, I’m glad it’s done, and I’m glad that I will never do it again.
I’m glad I did it because I spent a lot of time thinking about topics like extended plotting, character development, and stylistic choices. It’s one thing to examine them externally, it’s another to attempt to internalize those lessons. That is what I’m taking from my NaNoWriMo experience and it is valuable.
At the same time I’m glad it’s done because 50k words in a month is a brutal pace. It required a lot of dedication and sacrifice. It also required that you accept the failings as they come and let them go. It’s easy to turn out 50k words if you just spin words along; as the amount of care in crafting the story the slower you go.
And there’s one of the major problems with NaNoWriMo for me: I’ve spent thirty days writing 50k completely useless words; this is lower than a first draft version in my eyes since it would take a complete rewrite to reach the level that I would call a first draft. This is the reason why I don’t think I’ll participate again. It hurts to spend that much effort and energy crafting something that terrible.
So congratulations to all participants and I would say it’s an event that any would be writer needs to take part in once. After that, however, I think the writing exercise is done and future efforts are better directed elsewhere.
Yeah, That’s how I felt last year.
I re-did the same story this year - 50k words, with no decent beginning chapter and no decent end.
Turns out, after a cursory edit, that parts of the first and fourth chapters from last year’s failure have made the perfect first chapter for this year’s draft.
Please don’t give up. Put it away for a couple of weeks or months, then look at it again and see those few bones that are the basis of something good. Or see that next year you’ll do better with an outline and some research.
I thought it would kill the writing bug I’ve had since childhood and it rekindled the desire. If 1667 words a day is too much, Stephen King did 6 pages every day- at 250wpp that’s 1200w a day. Or one page a day to churn out a novel a year. Children’s author Lynley Dodd does one or two (30 page) books a year - her goal isn’t a certain number of words, but the best words and pictures to fit the idea in her head.
Nano is for those people ( like me) that find the goal easier with a deadline - you could well write better with the *goal *(a reasonable draft) as your priority, however long it takes you to get there.
You say that after nano the writing exercise is done, when for me I’ve just got my starting point. Please don’t give up when all you may need is a change of perspective.
Gah, bad at maths tonight - I’m going to blame the wine. 200 words per page is what I meant (Double space, big print!). But they’re arbitrary numbers anyway.
If you work best with your inner editor on full roar, then aim for a finely crafted paragraph or three every other day. I personally find it hard to understand those people who wrote 100k or more, some of them in the first week. I simply do not understand how that can work.
I can see that I should have been a bit more clear but I left NaNoWriMo with the conclusion that it was interesting to do once but was not the environment for me.
I’m certainly not giving up on writing; I have other outlets for that and I do not need to try to save such an utter disaster. I’ll ask you to take me word for the fact that I can recognize a hastily slapped together mess for what it is.
What I wrote wasn’t gold, although I like it enough to continue working on it --however, I did not find 50K hard to get to in a month. I had severely limited access to computers for the first half of the month, probably 1-2 hours a day tops. After I got my laptop, I had two or three 3K days that were actually some of the best passages. I had a very clear idea of where my plot was going, and the narrative is very action driven, without as much character development as I like (for the rewrite!) but I did not feel it was slapped together because of the time crunch. Maybe I just type fast VBG :).