A NaNoWriMo Retrospective: the horror that was 2006

First of all, I knew I was in a bad spot when moving into a new house coincided with the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. I started off okay and stayed ahead of the curve for the first week, despite not having an internet connection with which to update my word count. The graph of my daily word counts that the site generates is misleading at best. After that first week, though, something happened.

I don't know what it was. It wasn't quite the chaos of the move. It was partly the exhaustion of the move and partly not being able to get into my novel like I normally do. Even last year, when I was ranting about how much I hated Pale, I could get into the characters and get something out of them. For some reason, I was never really able to connect to any of the characters in One Thousand Holes, which is akin to me having a writer's block. When I did begin to feel a connection to some of the characters (Rowan, Cyrus and their pet unicorn, Bruno), they weren't supposed to be part of the novel in the first place. I put them there because I needed more to work with. They gave me subplots and smut, but it still wasn't enough.

I realized somewhere around 40k that I had a 35k story and that I was pushing it to limits it didn't want to reach. I also realize now what I did wrong. I should have told the entire saga of Shiva's life, which is something I've always wanted to do anyway. That's at least 100k. This last little piece has no business being 50,075 words long. None at all.

It especially has no business having that ending. I passed the ending I had in mind and knew I had to keep going, so I started writing as badly as possible. I had the characters realize that in order to save the world, they would have to essentially blow themselves up. Once they did that, and survived, they realized that they had done more damage than they meant to. In order to save the world, they had to have sex. Then they saved the world too well, and after a number of years of glorious peace and fucking, they bring a bit of chaos back by, you guessed it, having sex. While the last five thousand words or so are horrid as far as the story I was trying to tell, I found it interesting to attempt to be writing a creation myth. I've been reading a book of Native American folk tales, and that style of storytelling seems to have heavily influenced the end of One Thousand Holes. I still disavow all knowledge of its existence, but I'll keep that idea in mind for future reference.

In five years, I have learned a lot. Not necessairily about writing but about myself as a writer and what kinds of things make writing a joy for me. I had the most fun the very first year I ever did NaNoWriMo. So next year, I will probably go back to that. I might pick up one of the several things I've started just to get the feel of the idea down. I might not. I don't know yet. But I do know that I am not going to plan anything at all. If something occurs to me in May, I'll start working on it then. In November, I will adhere to the theory of spontaneous plot generation. I might come up with a title, a character, a beginning, an ending, but I'm going to leave the bulk of it to chance. Because that's fun. Agonizing over it is not.