The Book Nerd’s Guide to Failing NaNoWriMo

By Nicole Hill / November 5, 2015 at 11:00 am

Welcome to the Book Nerd’s Guide to Life! Every other week, we convene in this safe place to discuss the unique challenges of life for people whose noses are always wedged in books. For past guides, click here.
We’re five days into National Novel Writing Month. Hand check! Are yours glued to your keyboard, or have they wandered off to less taxing diversions, like flipping through the nearest already written book or, perhaps, etching a triptych into a cave wall? I thought so.
Look, there’s no shame in being a NaNoWriMo dropout, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Sure, it’s still early. There’s plenty of time to get back on track. You can make up those 2,000 words. You’ll just tack them onto your weekend total! You make this vow five or six times. By the weekend, your target number to stay on course is 12,000 words in 48 hours. You write 1,500 and wander off to see if any Halloween candy has escaped consumption. Then you’ll watch just one episode of Gilmore Girls on Netflix.
You never return to your novel.
There are any number of ways to end up at this point. It turns out writing a novel is difficult, and time-consuming.
Now, there’s lots of great advice out there for how to write NaNo into submission—including some of our own. But let’s be real: some of us are just never going to produce 50,000 words we’re decently pleased with in the course of a month. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve got significant others/kids/dependent mammals/jobs/bar tabs that fill up much of your time. The last thing you want to do at night is sidle up to a computer screen and think up names for a fictional hamster.
I’m here to tell you that’s OK. As a veteran of such dismal affairs, I can safely say it’s all right if you…

Never got past the first paragraph because you couldn’t settle on a name for your protagonist’s love interest. (Marcus? Todd? Callum? Slade?)
Became uncomfortable with the degree your main character’s desire for purpose in life mirrored your own.
Ordered a pizza and never looked back.
Got lost in a “Worst Line I Wrote Today” forum thread for daaaaays.
Shelved your novel to write erotic fanfiction about some of the posts in the “Worst Line I Wrote Today” thread.
Could in no way come up with an appropriate deus ex machina after charging ahead without an outline.
Ended up hating one of your characters as a person so much you couldn’t continue writing her. #UmbridgeSyndrome
Found yourself at 40,000 words without a denouement in sight.
Spent so much time with Ctrl-F keeping your chief antagonist’s eye color straight that you missed several days’ word counts.
Got upset because NaNo has already yielded The Night Circus—so what is even the point—and ordered another pizza.

All of this is perfectly reasonable. It happens to the best of us. (Well, maybe not the best of us, because, well, Night Circus, but whatever.) The best part about National Novel Writing Month is that it’s surrounded by 11 other months equally suitable for frantic word-slinging. Live every day like it’s the day you could finally sit down and crank out a masterpiece. It may not be how Hemingway did it, but it’s probably healthier.