Technically I could still complete National Novel Writing Month 2016 successfully by writing just under 40,000 words between now and midnight tomorrow.
If you are a gambling type I recommend against betting on this happening.
Then again, Donald Trump is President-Elect. Right is wrong, the impossible is possible and all that.
Speaking of which, it’s time to dissect how this year’s failure came to be.
First, what I did right:
- I settled on a story (of sorts) well before November 1st, giving me plenty of time to mull it over and have some ideas ready so I could hit the proverbial ground running
- I had an established, successful plan from years past, using WriteMonkey, saving to OneDrive and writing during my lunch at work, something that can spot me as many as 1,000 words before I even get home, a big psychological boost
- Day 1 started strong, well above the minimum word threshold
- Despite uncertainties with the story, I continued to stay above the minimum word count for five of the first six days–a good start!
At the end of day six I was at 10,002 words, on track to finish November 29th (today). Cutting it a bit close but still, victory was entirely possible. What went wrong, then?
- I took Day 7 off. I planned to spend time thinking about how to best tackle the rest of the story, which was still a bit too vague and shapeless for my liking. This is not in and of itself a bad idea but in the context of NaNoWriMo it is a great way to kill momentum. By skipping a day and by not having a big cushion of words to fall back on (let’s call it The Stephen King Zone) I had to double my input the next day to stay on track (writing 3,334 words instead of 1,667). This would also mean finding twice the time to accomplish the task. With doubts about the story lingering, taking a day off was a tactical blunder.
- The day after I took the ill-advised day off was Election Day in the U.S. Throughout the day I experienced a level of anxiety that by evening transformed into a kind of existential despair, sapping me of the will to write anything except perhaps a brief essay on what it feels like to curl up in a ball on the floor.
- The following day I re-read the 5,000 or so words I’d written for last year’s NaNoWriMo and found what I’d written to be more engaging than expected. I decided to switch back to this story. I had ideas. Changing gears could work! (Hint: wrong.)
- I hit a dead end on the old story almost immediately. Looking back I was still not in a good frame of mind to write. My brain was buzzing, but with maddening, distracting and negative thoughts. I settled for writing anything as long as I was writing but was utterly incapable of putting down anything coherent. The experience was subtly surreal, so much so it would probably make for an interesting character moment in a story. Irony.
After my briefly-revived alternate project stalled out, I returned to my original story but could never summon more than a few sentences each day, usually totaling a hundred words or so. I fell even further behind. Eventually it became obvious that I was not going to complete NaNoWriMo this year and I quietly accepted this. I moved onto other projects and am just now starting to really write again.
Without getting overly political, the election of Trump had a fairly profound effect on me. Friends joked about how I’d want to suddenly switch to writing about some near-future dystopia but both of my stories were nominally hopeful and over the course of a day they came to feel false, even pointless. I’ve come out of the funk since then and have some thoughts on how I’d approach NaNoWriMo if I participated again–and I am leaning toward not doing so–but for now I am just happy to be writing anything again.