Ah, there’s the rub, isn’t it? You can write up a storm during NaNoWriMo, but what about the other eleven months of the year? Months when you don’t have this massive support network, months where you don’t have a public and potentially very embarrassing promise to yourself. Can you keep NaNoWriMo in your heart all year ‘round?
That’s the trick. To keep writing 2,000 words a day until your story is done. If you’re like me, 50,000 words just opened the door. You still have to walk through it and report back, with as much honesty as you can muster, what’s on the other side. If your novel isn’t finished, if it’s like mine and not even close, you have to keep going, and going it alone. There’s no more web site, no more happy little graphs to track your progress. You have to keep moving on your own, and don’t even think about stopping until you get to “The End”.
This is what it means to be a writer. NaNo is a great boot camp, but it’s not the war.
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