I’ve mentioned this in some previous posts, but it’s pretty important, and after several folks asked about it, I realized that finishing my novel deserves more than just a paragraph. I’m apt to minimize the importance of some of my accomplishments, and maybe this will help non-minimize the minimizing which has already started to appear.
Way back in October of 2008 I signed up for something called NaNoWriMo. Some of you are familiar with National Novel Writing Month, but for those not so, it is a challenge where participants attempt to write a novel of at least 50K words in length between the dates of 11/1 and 11/30. This is especially lovely for those of us in the U.S. who work this frenetic exercise through the Thanksgiving holiday.
I loved NaNo. I can’t say enough good things about it. I made some new friends, learned a ton about writing, and overall just had a reall kickass time with the whole thing. I also spent a lot of money on coffee, but that was just a bonus. Come the end of the month I had blown the 50K goal out of the water by writing seventy-six thousand words! One little problem. Novel still wasn’t finished.
That’s right, I’d gone from day one where I wondered how crazy I was to be even attempting to write a real honest-to-pete novel-length novel of not-so-lengthy longness (50K is about 200 or 250 pages, as I recall – about the length of “Fahrenheit 451,” for reference), to “Holy crap, how am I ever going to stop adding words! Won’t these people please resolve their conflicts?!”
My determination at the outset of the project was in keeping largely with NaNo’s idea that it’s just pretty awesome to set yourself a big goal and then allow yourself the time and energy that you need to make it a priority and complete it. Completing it was still my priority, and I was determined that this was not going to be another one of those things where, two years from now I’d run into a friend at a Christmas party or a gig, and they would say, “Hey, how did that book go that you were writing?” and I’d shuffle my feet and look away and go, “Oh, yeah…I, um, I got a lot done, but it sucked, so I didn’t finish it.” I’m so NOT about not finishing these days. It’s one of the hallmarks of my past that I want to change about myself. Even if the final product isn’t that great, or I don’t really do anything with it, I want to be a person who finishes things, because if I keep doing that, then sooner or later those finished thigns are going to improve in quality, and then, maybe, at some point in the future, I will start having finished stuff that I can look at and go, “Okay, not bad. Kind of cool.” and then I won’t hate myself for never doing anything. It just makes it easier to get out of bed in the morning, you know?
So, November ended and me and my NaNo buddies scattered to the winds for the holiday season, but we kept in touch and after things calmed down we were able to regroup and still get together on the odd weekend for a little informal meeting and catchup. I continued to write either at these meetings, before, after, or just whenever the heck I could get some time.
It dragged on…and on…and on. At one point I remember there was a two-week period where I only wrote 80 words or something like that. I just had other stuff to do, plus I was getting the beat-down from the novel itself. I was stuck. I’d never done something like this, and it just wasn’t moving. I dug in my heels and refused to quit. Weeks went by here and there where absolutely no words made it into the document, yet I still refused to say I had stopped. When this happened I’d try to find a couple of hours one week and pound out as many words as I could, sometimes getting a thousand down, maybe two thousand, before events conspired and I was kept away again.
By June things had evolved. I’d moved forward with the plot a good deal, even though I didn’t like where it was going or what was happening, or even how it was happening. It didn’t matter, I was going to keep going until it was finished! I looked at some saved documents and noted that it had been about a month since I’d even pecked out a single letter on the novel. It was grim, but it looked like I was in the home stretch, I just didn’t know quite how to end it.
Have you ever ended a novel? I hadn’t. How do you take all those thoughts and words and wrap them up? I mean, after they’ve done all this incredible stuff, how do you have them do something so mundane as to just…get on with their little imaginary lives? How do they say goodbye to each other? How do I let go of them myself?
On June 28, 2009 I was sitting in the cafe wondering about this. I knew I was at the end. It was a done deal, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Two of my characters were down to saying goodbye to each other. They didn’t want to part, and I didn’t exactly want them to just stop living their little lives either, even if I knew their little lives needed a massive rewrite to become interesting little lives.
She has to leave, I thought, staring at the screen. It’s time for her to go. They both have stuff they have to get on with, and this part needs to come to an end. I don’t know what they’re going to do from here on out, but it’s time to say goodbye.
They said their goodbyes (for probably the third go-’round now), and she finally really made it to the door, opened it, walked out, and closed it behind her. He sat on his bed for a few moments, and then picked up what she had left for him.
I leaned back and looked at the screen. There wasn’t anything left to say. They were on their own now.
I clicked “Save,” and took a drink of my coffee as the word counter totaled it up. 92,165 words from hello to goodbye, from start to finish, from “How am I going to write a novel,” to, “Wow, somehow I managed to write a novel.”
It’s been quite a trip. It’s been fun, aggravating, exciting, annoying, interesting, hard, and overall just plain excellent. What I do with it from here on out, I have no clue, but I can at least say I’ve written a novel, which is a hell of a lot more than I could say about myself a year ago. Bring on the party conversation. Go ahead and ask me “How’s that book going?” I’m prepared now, fully prepared.
