Experiencing Crushing Failure and Remembering the Future

The first year I tried to do NaNoWriMo, I failed miserably for a number of reasons. It was before I had an account on the official NaNo website, for one thing. The site provides pep talks from famous authors and lets users see their friends' word counts, so there's always a spirit of friendly competition. In addition to not being on the site, I'd never written anything more than a few pages long before, so I was attempting something foreign and new. That November, November of 2011, I wrote scarcely anything, and I didn't finish the novel I'd started until April. That manuscript is barely 22,000 words. Maybe I ought to be proud of it. After all, it was my first finished story and I worked hard on it. And I was proud of it for a while. But then I got some negative feedback on it from someone whose opinion I put a lot of stock in, and now I can hardly stand to think about it.


But I'm not here to talk about NaNo 2011.


I'm here to talk about NaNo 2014, which would've been my greatest NaNo failure had it not been for NaNo 2011. One could even argue that it was my greatest NaNo failure, since in 2011 I wasn't really participating in an official, dedicated capacity.


I seriously can scarcely believe how badly this NaNo went. I've had the idea I was writing from for several months, but I started developing it in earnest back in August. For a while, I was incredibly excited. Then... I don't know, something went wrong.


Maybe it was that I had to write a short story for school, and it didn't go well, and I ended up struggling and getting frustrated. Maybe it was that my reading list was ever-lengthening and that wretched, ambition-killing thought crept back in: "So many other people have already written books. And you know what they say - there's nothing new under the sun. Your stories have all been told. Forget writing. Just read." Maybe it was something else. For whatever reason, by the time November rolled around, my passion had cooled and I no longer cared much about NaNo.


But I was still determined enough. My word count goal was 30,000. On November 1st, I wrote more than 2,000 words. I was ahead of schedule and ready enough.


But then, I just didn't write.


Whole days went by in which I didn't write a word. I kept telling myself that tomorrow, or next week, or November 15th would be the day I started writing in earnest and that I'd still be able to reach my goal. Halfway through the month, a good friend who also did NaNo (and, like, actually did NaNo, hit her word count goal and everything) came over and we each read what the other had written thus far, and she loved what I had and told me I had to finish it, and it should have been a huge confidence boost that got me just dumping words on the page... and it wasn't.


On November 20th, I changed my word count goal from 30,000 to 20,000. By yesterday, as I was sitting down to my 10,000-word-long manuscript in utter despair, I told myself I'd be content if I could just pass 15,000.


The end-of-November word count of my manuscript is approximately 18,050 words. It's always hard to gauge how much longer the first draft will get, but I'd guess I'm around halfway through.


I feel bad.


Now, let me just say this right out: I'm not seeking laudation or encouragement. Don't bother telling me that 18,000 is still super impressive or that we all have bad months or that there are all kinds of people who couldn't write a novel of any length or anything like that. As a perfectionist, as someone who knows she can do better at NaNo because she has done better in the past, and as someone who has been thinking about and tentatively planning for and looking forward to NaNo 2014 since last December, I am disappointed in myself and nothing anyone says will change that.


Here's what is going to happen.


I have a couple other school writing assignments that I have to do. I'm going to write them. They're going to be good. I'm going to (try to) relax and have a fantastic month, stuffed to brimming with Christmas-related activities and wonderful presents and the presence of family members and friends and all sorts of things like that. When I've had a breather and a glorious holiday season and I don't hate my book as much as I'm inclined to at the moment, I'll get back to it and finish it. Maybe next year I'll start work on some other idea, one I can work on without a one-month timeframe. And then, next November, I'll do NaNoWriMo again. And this time, I'll do better.


I read a book recently that I loved. There were a lot of things I loved about it, but only three passages from it ended up in my Quote Notebook. One of those came when the main characters encountered an unknowably ancient character that spoke in riddles, like the mentors which are the subject of my last post, except that this character wasn't anyone's mentor and was only there for one scene. Anyway, one of the cryptic things this character said was, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, but those who remember the future can plan ahead for the weather".


Ponder that for a bit, why don't you.


So here's to remembering the future. Here's to remembering there are other Novembers. Here's to not repeating the past, and here's to planning ahead for the weather.


To conclude this post, I'm going to post a brief excerpt from my NaNo book; the one that's already on the NaNo site, in fact, so some of you have already read it (although I've made a couple of minor changes to it since posting it on the site). And believe me, I came within about a centimeter of talking myself out of doing this, because even having already put this online I find it scary. To be sure, I've felt worse about my writing before. This manuscript and I are at least on speaking terms - but they're strained.


I guess my thinking is... well, I don't really know what my thinking is. To give you an idea of what I've been spending my time on and struggling with, maybe. It adds meaning to the rest of the post. Or something.


Well... here goes.


~Pearl Clayton 




“Adjective.”

            “Lame.”

            Sometimes, when Huck and I hang out, we put on brilliant disguises and go out on the town, maybe see a movie or eat lunch somewhere or spend an hour or two in a bookstore. Sometimes we leave the brilliant disguises at home, go someplace where we know there won’t be many people, and just sit and talk.

            “Lame?”
           

            “Yes, lame. You know, incapable of walking.”

            Sometimes we do silly things. Like, for example, sit in my living room and play Mad Libs.

            “I get the strange feeling you’re trying to tell me something.”

            “Move on to the next word, Huck.”

            Aunt Ella used to love playing Mad Libs. On the rare occasions I got to spend a week or a weekend or a day at Dad’s house, Aunt Ella would always try to catch me and make me fill a couple in with her. She seemed to like my word choices, which never made any sense to me, as they were usually words specially selected to express my frustration: boredom, end, nonsensical, pointless, lame – they made for rather depressing resulting paragraphs.

            “Noun.”

            “Is this the word being modified by ‘lame’?”

            “You know I’m not going to tell you.”

            Deep sigh. Yes, I know. “Um… idea.”

            Alright, so maybe I’m a big spoilsport, but I’ve never found Mad Libs even the slightest bit amusing. They’re only funny because they’re random, and in my opinion randomness on its own isn’t really very funny. And yet I am apparently doomed to meet people who find them (and my negative reactions to them) endlessly hilarious.

            “Person in room.”

            Ugh. I hate the ones featuring a Person in room. “Huck.”

            “Yes?”

            “Just write it down,” I say, fighting back a smile. I am not going to make him think I’m enjoying this.

            Which is not to say that Mad Libs are never entertaining. I remember once I was doing one with Aunt Ella and the paragraph was about books. It was only the first or second one we’d done, so I was still trying to think of creative and interesting words, and one of the book titles ended up being The Machinist in the Fragrant Dress. I fully intend to write a book with that title one day. I mean, man, the possibilities with a title like that! They’re endless!

            “Disease.”

            “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis,” I say. There’s a moment of complete silence. Then:

            “Um, how do you spell that?” 

            “Just like it sounds.”

            Another time, Aunt Ella asked for a plural noun, and I said “hours” (one of my passive-aggressively irritated answers; because, see, it felt like we’d been playing for hours). The paragraph was about winemaking, and contained a phrase about the juice of ripe grapes. That is, it would have contained a phrase about the juice of ripe grapes. Instead, it said something about the juice of ripe hours.

            That phrase has been stuck in my head ever since. I feel like it belongs on some motivational poster: “The juice of ripe hours of work is sweet, sweet SUCCESS!” Or maybe lost somewhere in the vague speechifying of the mentor character in a kung-fu movie – “Inner peace will come to you as the juice of ripe hours of meditation.” Ooh, or how about a cheesy, shoddily written romance novel? “And so, as Mirabella and Clem continued to spend ripe hours in each other’s company, love began oozing into their empty hearts like the sour, sun-warmed juice of those hours.”

            I’ll keep mulling it over. I’m bound to come up with something good.