My outlook on NaNoWriMo hasn’t really improved in week two — which doesn’t surprise me, really. I finally had a bit of an aha! moment in the chatroom the other night, which gives the story some direction. I can see it hitting 50K, maybe even my lofty (impossible) goal of 70K overall.
That said, my stats look like this:
This is pretty atypical for me. On an average year I tend to hit par within a couple of days and then stay on top of it. My writing tends toward large bursts, so I keep up alright, and usually give myself a safe buffer to work with. In years past, I’ve been done before Thanksgiving so that I could focus on creating awesome food — which I do much better than writing, apparently.
Some of my reticence with the writing is still feels and bullshit, which I’ve already mentioned. I even had a friend give me permission to stop writing for a while longer if I wasn’t ready. I wanted to yell, “But I haven’t in months! How much longer is that supposed to take‽” I’m really rather tired of myself at this point, but I still feel small and angry in the time between when I start to type and when I finally get involved in the writing.
I’ve also developed this nagging fear that I’m rewriting the same story over and over and over again with tweaks to the setting.
- There’s always a character at the cusp of making a large decision that affects other people more than it does them.
- There’s always a character who has dual identities that are sometimes at odds.
- There’s always some sort of social class dichotomy in the setting that keeps characters at odds.
- There’s always some sort of dystopian/social unrest element that moves the story.
It seems like no matter how many changes I make, I keep coming back to these things. I like writing them, but if I’m just rehashing the same shit over and over again — is there a point to pursuing this? I generally believe that there’s nothing truly unique to be told — we’re all writing Star Wars, guys — but I could at least tell slightly different stories from the ones I’ve already told.
I’m not engaged in my main character. I’m literally plotting a climax that kills every single main character.
I recognize that the purpose of NaNo is do something rather than to complete something, which is 10% of why I opted to do it this year. But it’s hard to write this while thinking, There’s nothing of value in this narrative. I don’t know when I got like that.
That said, I’ll keep plugging at it because I really can’t fail at this too. I also want to beat my nemesis. He hates his story too and is slightly more prone to apathy than I am, so I think I can pull ahead of him soon. The stats have my back; he had a 3K lead at one point, but as of this writing he’s only about 1200 ahead of me:
