My Takeaways from NaNoWriMo

I lost NaNoWriMo.

But don’t feel bad for me—it was a loss by forfeit. And, odd as it may sound, I think it was the right decision.

To recap, I was working on a project entitled Short Contracts. It’s a book about a professional athlete who has underperformed thus far in his career and is trying to start fresh on a new team. The wrinkle is, he plays an invented sport in an epic fantasy world.

I still love the concept. I still love this character, whose name is Four-Leaf, by the way. But while writing Short Contracts for NaNoWriMo, I realized a couple things. First off, this isn’t the story I’m meant to be writing right now. Second, I need to stick to my process.

First point’s first. I did extensive outlining for this story (I’ve found I need these more and more, at least to get started). I had clear answers to who, what, when, where, and why. And yet, as is often the case, things changed when I started writing.

This manuscript was unruly. It didn’t do what I wanted it to do. Though I knew my general story arc, individual chapters seemed to meander on and on without settling on a point. And some characters (the coach of Four-Leaf’s new team being the best example) I simply didn’t know well enough to write. In fact, most of my character work felt uncertain, even for Four-Leaf.

For example, if you read my post from the beginning of last month,  you’ll remember that Four-Leaf used to be a female character. As I wrote, I decided to switch her gender and alter her conflict. Four-Leaf’s head coach, a dude named Harp, also swapped genders. I wrote about 20k words with four point-of-view characters, then started over and scaled down to just these two.

As you can see, I had no idea what I was doing. It felt like walking up a downward escalator: so much work to get nowhere.

Now that’s all understandable for the first few thousand words of a manuscript. You often need time to meet your characters, get a feel for what they do and say. But the moment of revelation never seemed to come, no matter how many words I wrote.

That I suppose I could take. But the worst part of it was this: I wasn’t having fun. I didn’t like these characters because they simply weren’t coming together, no matter how many words I packed in. After about Day 20, I thought, Why do this if it’s not bringing me joy?

The pace of NaNoWriMo didn’t help, either. When writing a manuscript, it’s important for me to read what I’ve written throughout the process. This helps me keep characters and plots consistent while also reminding me that even though it’s a first draft, I’ve done some decent work. By trying to cram 50k words into a month, I didn’t have time for that. All I had time for was new words. No time to edit, no time to reflect on what I’d written.

So I stopped. I realized that Short Contracts is not the book I’m meant to write right now. I moved on.

All told, I ended the month at just north of 40k. Of course, 50k is just a benchmark and not really the point of the month. The point is just to write. However, I’d set the goal of 50k for myself, so it was disappointing to fall short.

Yet I think I learned a valuable lesson: Sometimes you have a story you want to write, but you’re just not ready to write it. I’m not sure why this is and I’m certain the reason varies, but for me, I hadn’t found the right characters for the world I’d created. I’m sure they’ll introduce themselves some day, or maybe I’ll go track them down. For now, I’m moving on from Short Contracts.

But rest assured, I shall return. I’ll come back to the world of epic fantasy sports. In the meantime, I’m on to a new project. So far, I’m happy to say it’s going much better.

Kyle A. Massa is a speculative fiction author living somewhere in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. He has written two books and numerous short stories, both published and yet-to-be published. He enjoys unusual narrative structures, multiple POVs, and stories about coffee.