Why I didn't Finish NaNoWriMo

I was doing great the first week. I wrote 10,000 words and earned a badge. This was my first attempt at NaNoWriMo, and I was already ahead of schedule. But then, I stopped. I was robbed of time. My book wasn't cooperating. I was realizing that the stress of meeting a daily, weekly, or monthly word count had little to do with actually writing my book.


I think writing is unique to all writers, and it should be because it's an art. Your book should be YOUR book and not the same book that someone else could have easily regurgitated. Art isn't meant to be hacked. If it's hacked, then it's not really art.

It's true that I could have proceeded with NNWM and spit out a really, really bad first draft and spent the next year fixing it. It's like with NNWM, all words are considered equal, but not every 50,000 is a novel. Or good writing. Sometimes 50,000 words is simply a trash heap of 50,000 words.

I'm not saying this is true for all writers. Some people need a goal and a sense of accountability. Accountability has never worked for me. It's like those diets that everyone gets on at the same time, and I'm the only person who gains ten pounds instead of loses. If a person tries to guilt-trip me by telling me that everyone else is doing it, then I'm more likely to wave and say, "Have fun without me." I'm not a bandwagon person. It never worked before, so why would I think now would be any different?

I had an outline and the better part of a novel, so why didn't it work? I believe that there were questions within the outline that weren't ready to be answered yet. They were bridges I couldn't cross because I hadn't arrived at that point yet. They made a nice, neat list, but the execution was flawed.

There are things in the process of writing--discoveries that are made--that make the book better. When I am too strict with an outline and word count, I'm not allowing for this discovery process, which is really the most exciting part of writing. I have to allow time for staring into space. NNWM doesn't give me credit for daydreaming, which is actually an important part of my process. NNWM doesn't give me credit for researching stuff on the Internet, and this is something I do frequently throughout a book because there's always something I thought I knew enough about but didn't.

In the end, I didn't beat myself up over NNWM. I didn't feel like a failure. It was my first time to attempt it, and I felt that it stole away some of the joy of writing since it didn't allow me time to do the things that I consider important to my process, and it focused on quantity over quality. Since I had already finished two novels, I didn't feel like this was a failure on my part. I had simply learned that it wasn't my cup of tea.

So, that's the result of my experiment with NNWM that I thought I would share.