Nano 2014: Day 29

What do you do when everything falls apart the day before the you reach the finish line?

I honestly don't know.

I wouldn't say that this month has been the worst NaNoWriMo that I've had. My first Nano Novel was terrible. Just...terrible. It fell to pieces because the plot didn't hold up and there were too many major characters who had very little development and a fantasy setting that I didn't understand at all. I didn't know what I was doing at all. So I scrapped that story and put it aside in a folder where I can pick away at it little by little, collecting whatever value there may be in the pile of literary compost.

Not that my first NaNoWriMo was a complete waste. I got a few good characters, a month's worth of extra writing experience, and, most importantly, I proved to myself that I could write a novel in a month. Even thought the project got trashed, it marks a milestone in my writing because, before that novel, I'd never even attempted to write a novel in a month. After being told about it by a couple of friends, I'd decided to join in just for the fun of it. I didn't fully intend to reach the goal because I didn't fully believe that I could do it. But when November 30th came, I'd written 50, 000 words.

Were they all good words? No. Most of them weren't. A lot of that novel is still cringe-worthy, in fact. But it doesn't matter. Because I showed myself that I could exceed my expectations for myself and have fun doing it. For every Nano and Camp Nano after that, I always aimed for 150k. As of August of this year, the highest I'd ever gotten was about 55k. But I also got two more novel drafts, both better than my first. I plan to revise and publish one of them, and the other I could publish after a little more extensive revision.

This month I've once again exceeded my expectations. I have almost 90k. That's only about 60% of the way to my goal, but it's 35k more than I've ever done before. So I'm proud of myself.

My plan with this novel was to work on revisions during some of December and all of January, having the book completely done by the beginning of February. But this may be joining my first novel in the dung heap.

There's a lot more to love about this work in progress than my first. The characters are round and lovable/hatable. The bonds between the characters are so much more visible. The dialogue is more realistic. My writing techniques are better.

Still, the backbone of my plot has been pulled out. Writing about a girl who enters a riding competition to win college tuition money, I'd put of the research because I've been focusing on my wordcount. But now that I've been researching, I've discovered exactly how unfeasible this plot was.

So now I have no story. Can I change it? Have her do something else for the money? Maybe, but that also undermines a lot of other things going on in my story.

Should I discard the story and glean the good parts from it? Is there a way to keep going? I don't know.

What do you guys think? What do you do when this happens to you? Do you think my story is worth salvaging, or is reducing it to spare parts the best way to go?

--Britni M