I NaNoWriMo-ed just to try it.

It Felt So Wrong

In brief, then, I’m never doing NaNoWriMo again. Hard pass. I actually get a cringe feeling even thinking about it, and I’m not exaggerating that; my spine is tingle-flipping out the same way it does when waiting in the little examination room after the nurse who takes the vitals leaves but before the doctor walks in. Novel writing month just doesn’t work for me; I most certainly do not thrive while free writing, thirty days is way too many days in a row, and I am absolutely not able to develop story structure as I go.

Let the whining commence.

F-off Free Writing.

I deliberately set out to write with a very minimalistic outline and no real forethought about what the story was about or how it ought to be shaped. I felt that was in the spirit of the challenge and, well, I’ve spent most of the last year agonizing over minutiae and not actually writing so, chuck all that stuff in the bin and let’s just free write for thirty days.

I hate it. It doesn’t feel right. Look, I need to agonize over the point of a story. I need to know where I want the story to go before I set out, I need to picture the characters prior to the story’s start before I can launch them into the action; hell, I need to pause and visualize how my daily errands are going to go before I leave the house. 

The problem, for me, is that I endlessly waffle between whether a thing should be like this or rather like that, or whether a story should veer off in X direction or instead go in Y direction. Visualizing things ahead of time is all well and good, but I need to eventually make decisions about all of the above and choose something so I can start—ahem—actually writing. But spontaneous free writing? No thanks. Writing already feels too much like public speaking and forgetting your speech; free writing just adds the extra discomfort of cartwheeling naked up to the podium without any notes.

Too Damn Long.

I didn’t actually do all thirty days of the challenge—I hit the word goal on day twenty-five and promptly stopped altogether—but thirty days of writing without rest is too much. It’s too damn much! I admire any writer capable of writing everyday, but I also wonder at (and am jealous of) the wiring that would allow anyone to put more than fifteen hundred words down each of those days. 

I was most definitely over it by day twelve. I very nearly quit by day fifteen. At that point, I was pretty much just grimly pushing through in order to say I did it; which would, perhaps, be admirable if I wasn’t already certain my story was fundamentally flawed (see the bit about story structure below). This was not a marathon where I eventually broke free into a runner’s high and found some blissful stride; it was a painful march towards pretty severe burnout.

Ten days of this pace would be pretty great. Fourteen, maybe. After that I think every day of writing translated into a day of burnout later. I basically spent the first two weeks of December just shedding stress like a dog shedding their undercoat in spring; leaving little messes everywhere and really exasperating all the trying-to-be-understanding humans around me. (Thanksgiving may have contributed to that situation a bit; holiday stress is a real special blend of chemicals, isn’t it?)

Structure? What Structure?

My minimalistic outline did not provide a real story structure. Instead, it was just a short list of events that pushed the characters from bad to worse. I thought: this is fine, it’ll be a kind of action-y story, just something to breeze through. It was not. It was not at all. The story quickly became incoherent as I pulled some weird mental leaps to push event A to event B and then on to event C, as in ‘why the hell would any character agree to that?’ or ‘how is the character not exceptionally angry and just leaving right now?’ kinds of issues. It also lacked any sense of pacing. For a visual representation of my story’s action I invite you to picture two cats fighting: a bit of weird yowling and spitting, a lot of deeply uncomfortably but utterly silent staring, and the occasional furious flurry of paws flapping at (mostly) empty air and (sometimes) any face that dares to get too close.

I need to learn a whole lot about story structure. In fact, I need to learn so much, I don’t even know what it is that I don’t know. What exactly is story structure? Beats me. But I can tell you that I did not emulate my favorite storytellers at all and I most definitely noticed this by day twelve, and was certain I couldn’t fix it by day fifteen. But I didn’t want to go back to the drawing board, I wanted to finish the challenge, so I forged ahead—and I was right, nothing improved with persistence. Carry on? Uh, no. Lay down and give up? Yes. Yes, that’s more my speed. In my defense, I am going to think really hard about what went wrong while I lay here curled up in a ball; always be learnin’, right?

It Felt So Right

One might be starting to get the impression NaNoWriMo was a complete waste of my time. It was not! On the contrary, it was unbelievably worthwhile. I say unbelievably because a) I’d spent so long turning my nose up at the exercise, and b) *gestures to all of the above bitching*, but it honestly feels like one of the greatest strides forward that I’ve yet made towards self-actualizing this desire to write a novel. 

Like, hey, can we just pause and celebrate completing the 50k word count goal? That felt good. I mean, it felt exhausting and kind of hateful (I don’t want to unpack that) at the same time, but it was good. I’ve spent most of my adult life doing the things that I needed to do—and never an iota more. You know what I mean? My buddy Nick who also NaNoWriMoed with me does (these are his words, but they hold true for me as well). I’ve worked hard sometimes, sure, and done plenty of difficult things, yeah, but only ever when I really had to. I didn’t have to reach this goal. But I did. NaNoWriMo is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done that I simply did not have to do.

That’s worth celebrating.

But beyond the actual fact of meeting an arbitrary, self-policed goal, I also feel that I won some hard earned insight into what works for me and (as evidenced above) what doesn’t work for me. What works: I definitely like setting word count targets, I actually really benefit from pushing an exhausting pace, and I ended up really enjoying the sense of community around the whole affair.

Setting Goals. Who Knew?

Setting goals for oneself is really helpful. Who knew, right? Turns out defining success is a pretty good way to achieve it. I chose to go above the NaNoWriMo daily par goal of 1667 and instead aimed to hit an even 2000 words every day. This absolutely worked out for me. I hit my goal every day with a single exception: one day I stopped at 1800 words, but I wrote 2200 words the next day to make up the deficit.

Quick sidebar: nope, I never stopped at exactly 2k words. I’d always write a bit more, but not more than twenty or so. But I did always try to stop mid-sentence. I really liked the trick of ending in the middle of a thought, as it was easy for me to just resume it the next day and get the ball rolling right away.

Still, while the daily target was motivating, it was really the overall target that kept me going, and specifically watching how each day’s labor moved me closer to hitting that overall target of 50k words. Watching that steady progress is hugely motivating, and is absolutely something I want to incorporate into all my future projects. 

Exhaustion Helps Me Be Kind

Writing 2k words a day for 25 days was exhausting and left me almost no energy for any other kind of creative work—nor for any kind of creative angst. In other words it took all my energy to reach my goal, and I had none left over for worrying about the quality of the writing. This was a good thing! I didn’t overthink anything.

I know, I know, I just complained above about how much I missed overthinking things, but hear me out. For the past year I’ve been writing first chapters to various stories—and then overthinking them. So I’d rewrite it. And then rewrite it again. And again. While I do want to be the kind of writer who goes through many, many revisions, this was getting excessive because I wasn’t actually learning anything about what the story wanted to be before I was already going back to the drawing board. Why indulge in this repetitive madness? Because my inner critic was harping on me to do better the entire time. I couldn’t silence the nagging sense that things just were not to taste, so like an overanxious cook I kept adding seasonings and stirring like mad until I realized I’d been stressing the minutiae so much I’d lost sight of what I was even cooking (burnt soup, mostly).

It turns out the solution for an over-active inner critic is to put that son of a bitch to work. We don’t have time for your anxiety, inner voice, we have a goal to reach! In the future I definitely want to set aside time for writing ‘sprints’ or the like; times where I give myself exhaustingly challenging word count goals to reach so I can just force myself to get a real chunk of writing out of my head and on to the screen.

Community Is Kinda Great

I’m an introvert and also so lazy, and consequently find balancing the reward-versus-stress of engaging with communities—even online spaces—pretty difficult. NaNoWriMo was kind of awesome because there was a sense of community, a sense of so many other people doing what I was doing—yay not alone in this absurd make believe—but I also didn’t feel like I had to do anything beyond simply participating. I created an account on the official website and updated my progress, but otherwise didn’t really engage with the wider community there. It was nice. It also wasn’t anything to take note of, really.

The real note here, though, is more local. While I didn’t do too much with the wider organization, I did engage with two of my friends who were also participating in the challenge and my god was it helpful to have them on this same journey. A few other friends didn’t participate, but they were invested and cheering us on, which was also pretty much the best. Even simple things like a thumbs up emoji in response to me reporting that I had hit the 10k mark was honestly a very powerful motivator. It was also delightful cathartic to hear when my friends were struggling; in part because I didn’t feel like the only one hitting rough patches when they would complain they were losing interest or running on empty tanks, and in part because it pushed me to keep going when I saw that they were forging on anyway.

No more writing alone! It is a bit of a burden to place on another human being to ask them to invest in your artistic projects, especially while they are still works in progress, and especially if you need to do some venting about the struggle, but I am resolving right here and now that I will at least ask my friends if they’re open to lending me their ear so I can whine when it’s tough and cheer when it’s feeling good.

Summary Over, Rabbit Hole Ahead

Hey you. Yeah, you. Want to go deeper into this rabbit hole with me? You do? Well, that’s great, because I’ve been speaking in pretty general terms up until now but I want to get more specific. I mean, I’m nothing if not an over-thinker, and I’ll be damned if I let go of that character trait (let’s charitably call it a quirk) after lugging it around for so many years already.

I want to delve into some of the specifics of my process and look at what my intentions were—what I thought I’d end up with—versus what I actually got, and how I set out to bake a pie (to return to the cooking metaphor) and yet ended up pulling a casserole out of the oven. You probably think that’s a terrible metaphor (and you’re not wrong) but you also haven’t seen me cook. I assure you, one hour of watching me in the kitchen and it might not seem like such a stretch.

Apparently I bring that same energy to writing. Let’s get into it.

Quote Unquote Outline

Alright I’m just going to launch right into it without giving you too much context when it comes to the actual content of the story. What’s in the story isn’t really important here. What has been learned from trying to put the story together is what we’re after. Cool? Cool. So I’ve mentioned that my outline was pretty minimal. I laid out ten events, each of which was supposed to be a transition from the frying pan to the fire, as it were: going from a bad situation to a worse one. Here’s my ten events:

1. Stealing aboard a ship to escape the ashstorms of Kultara
2. Discovered as stowaway and imprisoned
3. Shipwreck, escaping the sinking steamship, washing up on shore in the wilderness
4. Hunted by two dragons in said wilderness
5. “Saved” by a company of dragon hunters who are in turn being hunted by authorities
6. Authorities who are hunting the dragon hunters attack; inconclusive skirmish
7. Discovering a hidden city, still hounded by authorities
8. Finding the Graveroad (big secret holy grail) and the codex there
9. Forced to flee before they can gather enough answers
10. Return to Korelgart to plan next steps

I then had three character names. 

“Ihsan is a polyglot and young scholar, knowledgeable of the Koreishi”; “Osric is a dangerous cultist of the Black Tree”; “Raelan is Osric’s second and lieutenant”.

That’s it. 

That’s all I prepped ahead of time. 

Now, this is kind of disingenuous, because I do have context for all of these terms like Black Tree and Koreishi and Graveroad and things like that—I am an inveterate world builder, I make up settings, this is one of them. But the critical thing here is that I didn’t commit to the setting as I’ve previously imagined it; I forced myself to put it as far from my mind as I could, telling myself that I’d allow myself to pull character and place names from the notes I had, and otherwise I fully intended to create the story and the details of the story’s setting as I wrote for the month.

In other words, I was going to pillage my setting notes for anything that I needed to keep me flowing towards that daily word count (mostly names of things; names are hard), but try not to use all of the details and connections those notes spelled out.

Yeah, obviously this was pretty naive. It sort ofworked, but of course, most of the writing fell into the familiar channels carved out by my earlier thoughts on this world. I needed the setting notes to do this challenge—I seriously would have failed if I’d have had to think of new names for things because I would have just stared at the blinking cursor until the day ran out—but while pulling from the notes haphazardly might have kept me putting words on the screen it also saw me abandoning the internal logic of the setting.

In short, I had a perfectly good outline and setting using these characters and locations, but that project was too large and ambitious for fifty thousand words written in a month, so I made a quick (anemic) outline and pillaged my notes to try to create a different, shorter, less ambitious story.

In hindsight I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea. Though, to try and give myself some credit here—hey, I did complete the challenge and learn some things!

Thirty Three Scenes and No Flow

As I wrote, I would create a document for the day and then keep all of that day’s writing on that single document. Then I’d create a new document for the next day. So, my documents were just the dates: 11/1, 11/2, 11/3, etc. After I finished the challenge I wanted to see how many scenes I had created and I broke up or combined all of those documents into one scene per document, ending up with thirty three scenes. 

Or, at least, thirty three things that my free writing self had intended to work as scenes. As part of this post-mortem I wanted to go back through these and see how many of these thirty three groupings actually worked as intended.

In order to do this I gave myself a pretty loose definition of what a scene is: namely, that it has a beginning, middle, and end, while following one of two formulas; either beginning with a goal that comes up against conflict and ends in disaster (goal->conflict->disaster), or else begins with some setup that transitions into a turning point and ends with payoff (setup->turning point->payoff). Finally, I asked myself the question: was this scene necessary to further the plot?

I then grouped these scenes into parts corresponding to the ten listed events in the outline above. I didn’t finish the story, so my thirty three scenes fit into eight parts (I made it to ‘Finding the Graveroad’ before calling it quits at the fifty thousand word mark). For lack of a better word we can call these chapters. Let’s go through them and do a quick breakdown on what I wanted out of it compared to what I got.

I. Stowaway

Vibe. I felt pretty optimistic about starting this project. I excitedly began writing on November 1^st and almost immediately the writing bucked my planned outline and veered off into unexpected territory. Great! This is writing, baby! I’m doing the thing! That excitement didn’t last, but it was fun to tap into it, and I think there’s something to be said for the sheer joy of just rampaging off down the page letting whatever comes, come.

Intention. My intention with this chapter was to just get it out of the way. As you may have noticed, I have a problem with first chapters, as in, I never get past them. I just do them over and over. So really, all I cared about was that I get through this one and keep going. I just wanted Ihsan, my main character, to escape his home city of Kultara, a place he didn’t want to be in anymore because a nearby volcano was covering the land in ash and famine was looming.

Stats. I wrote 7,802 words in this section over the course of three scenes. 

The first scene followed the goal->conflict->disaster formula, clocked in at 3,201 words, and was necessary as it introduced the main character and pitted him against his first obstacle, namely, the authorities that didn’t want him to leave—and successfully prevented him from doing so, forcing him to go on the run within the city. Oh and also Ihsan can use magical implements? Cool! Ihsan is a sorcerer now; but he needs certain items to actually do any magic.

Second scene was 2,385 words and mostly followed the setup->turning point->payoff formula, and was necessary as it introduced Raelan as an untrustworthy but resourceful companion who also wanted out of the city and was also on the run. But, behold, she has a plan! (First major deviation from my outline—I had not envisioned Raelan this way at all.)

Third scene came in at 2,126 words and went from a goal (get out of the city together) to conflict (sneak on a military ship bound for the Viridian Coast) and ended in disaster (Raelan sells out Ihsan in exchange for her own safe passage). It was necessary because it introduced the primary antagonist in the ship’s captain, Aesa ca Koris, revealed Raelan’s plan was this betrayal all along, and established that Ihsan was a person of interest (worth taking into custody) simply by virtue of his ancestry. Oh yeah the guards take his sorcerous implements, can’t let him have those.

Thoughts. I was pretty happy with myself by this point, which was four days of writing under my belt. I felt like my beginning was sloppy and had some logical inconsistencies and some of the character decisions were a bit wobbly, but ultimately, who cares? We can fix that in post! I felt confident I could revise that into shape, and felt that I had some good building blocks at this point: a main character wanted by the authorities because of his ‘knowledge of the Koreishi’ which had translated into being ‘one of the last surviving Koreishi’, an untrustworthy but resourceful companion in Raelan who I already intended at this point to turn around and later save Ihsan, and a prim and rigid antagonist in the ship’s captain Aesa ca Koris who would pursue Ihsan through the remainder of the story.

Boom, first chapter done! We’re rolling on!

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II. Prisoner

Vibe. You might have noticed that my outline calls for Ihsan to have stowed away aboard a ship and to be discovered in this chapter; instead I had him handed over as a prisoner before even getting on the ship. So, yeah, leaving the outline behind already on day four, but still feeling it and steaming full speed ahead. 

Intention. My intention with this chapter was also to mostly just get through it. I viewed the real action of this story as taking place in the Viridian Coast, and this chapter was meant to just introduce another character—Osric—and to transport the characters from Kultara to the main stage of the Viridian Coast. You will immediately notice how wide of that mark I ended up going when you see the stats.

Stats. This chapter had eight scenes spread over 9,216 words. Very nearly one fifth of the story. So much for ‘just get through it’. Going to condense this a bit: out of the eight scenes four of them most definitely did not fit my criteria (they were just setup or exposition), and of the remaining four, I’m wobbly on whether three of them fit the setup->turning point->payoff model, and only confident in the very last scene (at 2,465 words) as a strong one that adheres to the goal->conflict->disaster formula. Four of the scenes are around 500 words each, and three of them are about 1500 words.

In terms of the story: we introduce Osric as a ‘death cultist’ who is brought aboard as a prisoner, the capture of which was Aesa ca Koris’ reason for being in Kultara, and try to establish Osric’s character as a wise monk with Buddhist-like thoughts on the impermanence of life and death. Also tried to establish Ihsan’s scholarly and polyglot credentials, and that Ihsan is pretty friendly with his captors, who are in turn pretty friendly with him. The chapter ends with a shipwreck in which Raelan returns at the nick of time to bust Ihsan out of the brig before he drowns (also returning to him his sorcerous tools), and Ihsan in turn breaks Osric free with a bit of help from his sorcerous implements. They escape to the Viridian Coast.

Thoughts. This was five more days of writing, so a bit of carryover from 11/4 and finishing up on 11/9. By this point a bit of “just got to get the word count done” grind was setting in and I let myself kind of go off with character conversations and exposition. I told myself at the very start of this project to avoid the pitfall of too much exposition… and then just slammed myself face first into that pit within the first week. Almost none of this was necessary, and most certainly could have been three scenes and half as many words.

Still, I wasn’t feeling too bad at this point. I was discovering things! Making shit up, you know? Osric and Ihsan were developing distinct personalities, I was getting a feel for what their relationship might be like, I was creating a few side characters in the guards and ending up liking the unexpected kindnesses they were showing Ihsan (had not planned for that) and the way Ihsan was basically developing Stockholm’s syndrome (also not planned but seemed cool), and mostly, I still just felt like hey… this can be fixed up. I’m cruising along, this can be revised into better shape, and I’m doing the thing. 

But then I hit a brick wall.

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III. Castaway, IV. Hunted, V. Rescued 

Vibe. I’m condensing the next three parts since my vibe was pretty much the same for all of them, namely: ‘YOU FOOL WHAT HAVE YOU WRITTEN YOURSELF INTO’. This is where I really started to not want to do this whole thing anymore. Still, the vibe wasn’t too bad—I was doing the thing! I was overcoming my desire to quit! This is writing… question mark?

Intention. This is where I thought the meat of the story would really start. I intended for punchy action sequences and fast paced plot, some real survival stuff. The characters escape a shipwreck and are stranded; they use their wits to survive; there’s dragons (!!) trying to eat them; and bad guys hunting them too! Potentially fun ingredients, but the results were kind of a mixed dish.

Stats. All three parts were in the four to five thousand word range (Part 3 = 4,958, Part 4 = 5,578, Part 5 = 4,053 words), with parts three and five both only containing two scenes while part four held four scenes. Between all eight scenes, my post-mortem definitions find only half of them are strong and/or necessary for the story—the other four are mostly exposition or setup with no payoff or conflict.

The characters survive the shipwreck and are forced to kill their former guards (whom Ihsan had become friendly with; this was supposed to be a hard-hitting moment that unfortunately didn’t really deliver) in order to make good their escape into the forest. They travel for a while, evading dragons, until a black drake attacks them and they wound it. The black drake is real mad about that so it follows them, and nearly eats them. They are rescued in the nick of time by a newly introduced group of characters, a hunting party known as the Wayfarers. At this point Raelan reveals she sabotaged the steamship they were traveling on, causing the shipwreck, as part of her plan to rescue Ihsan. The Wayfarers are intrigued by the survivors because they are also being hunted by the same authorities, but decide to take the three main characters to a safe place and leave them there. All the while the angry black drake is still prowling after them.

Thoughts. Alright so these three sections carried me from a bit of 11/9 all the way to 11/16. Two interesting things happened in this time. The first is that, as I mentioned above, I hit a brick wall. Specifically, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the characters just wouldn’t behave this way, that the details of their interactions were all wrong. I very nearly quit, but in my determination to push through, I also dug deep and asked myself what the characters would actually do at this point. The answer, I guess, was violence. In the earlier section I liked the unanticipated turn where the guards were friendly and the main character was feeling fellowship for them, and I thought they might continue through the story together. But why would the guards go with the main characters off into the forest? And why would the main characters go with the guards back into captivity? There’s no way either party is going to let the other just walk away. So… violence.

I thought this might be the start of the hard hitting moment, and I think I might have written the seeds of a pretty interesting (albeit dark) turn to the story right there as the main characters killed their former guards. I also started feeling good again! I mean, there’s nothing like just murdering some obstacles to get the writing flowing again, right? I thought I had faced my first significant challenge and found a way through by tapping into what the characters would do—and, actually, I think that’s true. I did do that. Through revision I’m pretty sure I could have punched that scene up too and had something pretty okay.

But then I lost the momentum. The next part of the story drags on, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and while I think the action sequence when the black dragon attacks the party is pretty good, there’s no real payoff to it, and in introducing the additional characters in the hunting party I really lost touch with Raelan and Osric and their presence in the story became very obviously an afterthought.

So by the time I finished these three parts, I was more than halfway through my story, halfway through the month, and feeling like I had a few good seeds and a few good scenes but that ultimately they just weren’t connecting together. A few action scenes that felt good and a few characterization scenes that I liked, but no connective structure to give them any kind of interplay; the characterization didn’t make the action more poignant, and the action didn’t do anything to reveal or advance the characterization.

Things were not cohering. On the 15^th I nearly gave up in despair, but pushed through, so by the end of these three parts I was really struggling. My last hope was really pinned on this new cast of dragon hunters I had introduced.

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VI. Hunted (but by humans this time!)

Vibe. It’s honestly hard to remember how I felt by this point. I would say the burnout had definitely set in and I was just forcing things at this point, so, charitably, let’s call the vibe grim determination. Uncharitably we might call it mindless floundering. It wasn’t that bad though! I swear! The 15^th was my lowest day, and so now for part six I was feeling some real pride and elation at the rising word count and the feeling of approaching my end goal. 

Intention. This section was meant to be another fast-paced, action-filled one, with the characters finding that the former captain Aesa ca Koris had linked up with the Commonwealth soldiers out here hunting the Wayfarers and was still hot on the trail of the main characters, hungry for justice for her ship and to see the prisoners returned to their shackles. The black drake was also still lurking in the shadows, ready to ambush the party should they drop their guard. Definitely had the same kind of mixed results here, where characterization and action just didn’t cohere together in a complimentary way.

Stats. Part six ended up coming in at 10,243 words, so just a bit over one fifth of the entire project. It also beats out part two for scenes, as this section stuffed nine scenes in. Out of those nine scenes, only one fits my very loose criteria for a decent scene, so by this point structure was really being left on the wayside. The longest scene was 1,801 words, with the shortest at 422, and most of them around thirteen hundred.

Thoughts. Those nine scenes needed to be combined, condensed, and cleaned up, which on the surface seems like exactly what revision is for, right? The problem here is that I needed so many little choppy scenes just to try and make sense of why the characters were doing what they were doing. 

Why would the Wayfarers not just turn in the shipwrecked characters and go on their business without a second thought? Need a scene to establish that; but then that scene is basically just exposition. 

Why would the antagonists still be hunting after the shipwrecked characters and not prioritizing their own survival? Another bit of clunky exposition to establish that.

Fundamentally, none of this was really wrong per se. Running into these questions, and then answering them, actually feels pretty good. It’s fun! There’s real joy in the discovery, and in letting the imagination go. The answers aren’t always clunky, either; sometimes it feels revelatory to delve more deeply into something that seems inconsistent and find answers that clarify and connect even more parts of the story than the one being—ahem—delved.

The problem is that these issues were all structural ones, and rather than going back to fix the story’s foundations, I was pressing on, building shakier and shakier scaffolding, so that by this late point in the story the solutions for the weird emergent free writing logic were, well… wobbly. 

Everything felt so wobbly.

By now it was clear to me that the story really got wiggly in the long ship travel and following shipwreck. None of that was relevant to the story of hunters evading dragons and bad guys, and the story was shackled by these earlier portions. Revision could salvage a lot of this. I really think it could. But it was very clear to me, by this point in the writing, that I didn’t want to salvage this; I wanted to learn some lessons from this and go back to the drawing board and really hammer out the story’s structure. I wanted to come at it a different way. I wanted to start over.

But, for those of you keeping count, I still had about eight thousand words to go.

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VII. Explorers & VIII. Scholars

Vibe. The vibe for this last bit was a really weird mix of emotions. There was one part of my brain shouting ‘hell yes almost there’ like it was trying to drown out the other part of my brain that was wondering why the hell I was still wasting my time with this. I was happy. I was depressed. I had weird bouts of anger. Every time I laughed, I laughed a little too loud and too long. You know, basically the perfect cocktail of emotions to bring to the table for a Thanksgiving family gathering (which took place during this bit).

Intention. Nothing mattered at this point except a) hitting my daily word count despite hosting my family for a long weekend and b) finishing this damn writing challenge. The story? Who cares. I just wanted off this ride, but I wanted to ride it right damnit, and I still had my hands up in the air gamely determined to enjoy the last few days of loop de loops.

By this point in the narrative the intrepid band of shipwreck survivors and the toughened dragon hunters have bought themselves some breathing room by luring their human pursuers into a green dragon’s lair. While the antagonists deal with that fire-breathing threat, the main characters steal into an ancient, abandoned city in search of the lost secrets that brought the dragon hunters into this country in the first place. 

Stats. Section seven put up 5,846 words and held three scenes—or, three things that I was writing like they were scenes, but really only one of them fits the loose criteria we’re using to judge ‘em here. It makes sense: the first scene was 925 words and was just exposition; the second scene was a bare 380 words and was just foreshadowing; and the third and last scene was all of the rest of the 4,541 words and was a pretty okay scene I think.

As for my last part, section eight? Barely registers. It was 1,910 words, all exposition, and it put me over the fifty thousand word count goal and I slammed my laptop shut and walked away from it like I was never coming back. Ride’s done. Never getting back on this rollercoaster.

Thoughts. So you can probably guess that I didn’t finish this story. As I write up these thoughts a month later that actually kind of bothers me. Part of me thinks it was correct to walk away, that I actually learned something from this whole event (ordeal?) and it was a pretty good know thyself moment to decide that I wasn’t going to gain anymore benefit from continuing on; but part of me feels like I should have pushed the story to a conclusion and seen if maybe, just maybe, there was more to learn by doing so. 

Ah, well. I won, and also I quit. Both things at once. I really don’t think there was any more juice to be squeezed out of this lemon, but I am glad I squeezed all the way to 50k words.