Anyway, back to business.
For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month; a worldwide challenge for writers to sit down and complete a 50,000 word novel--from scratch--in one month's time. It takes place yearly in November, and the same people who host it host Camp NaNoWriMo twice in the summertime. As I type this, people all over the world are typing furiously, as Camp NaNoWriMo is well into its second half, and writers young and old alike are pulling their hair out and wondering why the hell they thought this was a good idea.
I love the smell of fresh prose in the morning. Or I would if it, y'know, had a smell.
I began this month with the best of intentions. Almost a year ago, I dove into a story I referred to as The Decagon Project (which you can begin to read here). The reason I called it this is because of a dare I received from a certain someone (you know who you are); I'm supposed to write a story containing a love decagon--or a love triangle with 10 people in it, for those of you not up-to-date on your literary terms. (If that can be considered a literary term, that is.)
Anyway, after working on it for a year I hadn't made quite as much progress as I would have liked. That's why, when July rolled around, I decide to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo and use this outer motivation of writing madness to finish the story by the time the month ended.
19 days later and I've only written an additional 1,433 words.
Maybe this is just me, but the problem I encountered with continuing an old story--as opposed to starting with a fresh, sparkling new one--is that it's a lot harder to get into the spirit of NaNoWriMo, so to speak. The whole idea behind NaNoWriMo is to worry less about quality, and more about quantity; to push back your "inner editor" and just write, without over-thinking every word that appears on the page in front of you. Over the past couple of weeks, I've found that doing this is a lot harder--sometimes even impossible--when you're so used to taking your time with it, instead of rushing around and writing 14,000 words in a day. (Which I did on the last day of NaNoWriMo this past November.)
Who knows, maybe if I continued to push it, I would've broken through. Maybe if I had just tried a little harder--blocked Facebook and Tumblr, turned off my phone, and holed myself up in my room with music blaring--I would've written more words this month.
The problem with that, though, is that I would be forcing it too much.
Writing isn't about how fast you finish something, or how many words you write. It's about the story. It's about the discovery; people and places and adventures that you could only dream about. Whether you take your time and spend years on a story, or rush through it in a matter of days, the result should still be the same.
Everyone writes differently. What's most important is figuring out what works best for you.
For me, it simply depends on the story.
Until later,
- Justyne
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