NaNoWriMo 2008 washout confessions

So NaNoW­riMo was a bust for me this year, as I’ve given up only ten days in. Why did I wash out this year when fin­ished in 2006?

No one to race against. One of the big moti­va­tors for me in 2006 was rac­ing against my writ­ing part­ner, Josh Curry of Max­i­mum Geek. Josh sat out this year, pre­fer­ring to spend his time doing school­work for his degree, like higher edu­ca­tion is impor­tant or some­thing. So I was pretty much going it alone, and couldn’t rely on any­one else to push me.

Lack of incen­tives. Other than keep­ing the blog going, I didn’t really have any­thing to reward me when I did well, nor any neg­a­tive con­se­quences if I didn’t make my quota. Again, this is where self-​discipline should have kicked in, but if I had strong self-​discipline, I might be fun­da­men­tally unqual­i­fied to be a writer.

And there’s one rea­son I thought might be fac­tor, but I won’t use: lack of time. I’ve had time if I’d really wanted to write. In the past week, I’ve installed OneCare on both my desk­top and lap­top, cloned and then recon­sid­ered the Win­dows 7 user inter­face on XP (I’ll do a writeup of this later), how to blog in OneNote, rebuilt my phone around Kinoma instead of Beyond­Pod and Audi­ble­Player, then back to Beyond­Pod again, watched nearly all three sea­sons of “How I Met Your Mother” and found lots of other ways to waste time I could have spent writing.

Too afraid to screw up a book I care about. This is the big one. I know now why Chris Baty makes it a rule not to use pre-​existing mate­r­ial for NaNoW­riMo. I was rules-​lawyering my way around that pro­hi­bi­tion by start­ing an entirely new draft of Ghost Ronin, but I’ve had this story devel­op­ing in my mind for damn near two decades now. I’ve done years of research for it, have the 17 chap­ters of the book planned out in some detail, and oddly, that very prepa­ra­tion is what killed me.

NaNoW­riMo is based on what Anne Lam­ott calls “shitty first drafts,” some­thing that no mat­ter how much I under­stand the con­cept intel­lec­tu­ally I can’t man­age to inter­nal­ize. I kept freez­ing up, not want­ing to get any­thing “wrong”. While I know I have to work through this even­tu­ally if I want to ever fin­ish any­thing, I doubt it’s going to hap­pen this month. Ghost Ronin’s firm struc­ture and abun­dant research and back­story will make it great for writ­ing at my own pace, but they also served as con­stant road­blocks for the silly aban­don that is sup­posed to char­ac­ter­ize NaNoWriMo.

I’ll try again next year, and I have ten­ta­tive com­mit­ment from Josh that both he and his girl­friend will be join­ing me. I’ll pick a story con­cept that I don’t already have much invest­ment in, but one that seems excit­ing enough to carry me through 50,000 words. I’ll set up a sys­tem of rewards for hit­ting cer­tain mile­stones, and try to really enjoy the ride. For now, though, I’ll keep plug­ging away at Ghost Ronin at my own pace and try to get it fin­ished before Script Frenzy next spring.