the problem with finishing

So I made it to 135k this NaNo, which is more than 500 pages written in a month. I still remember, when I was younger and working on Captive and Powers (two novelish things I spent a good deal of my teen years poking at), being amazed when I made it to 300 pages. This took several years, because I only wrote when I was 'in the mood for it'.


I think that's one of the things that separates serious writers from the rest of the world: they write all the time, especially when they don't feel like it. I never used to understand that; I would forget about my writing entirely, not spending time while I was in the shower or going to sleep plotting the next scene, and then on a weekend have the whim to open up my document, stare at it, maybe add a sentence, then send it back off to be forgotten. Or I'd put in 10 or 20 pages in a day and call it good for two months.

Okay, for a young person with ADHD, I think that was actually pretty good, and I at least had the lofty goal of writing a novel before I was 18 (bye bye, lofty goal). But what's my excuse now? For WriYe this year, I utterly failed at my goal, which was 50k a month (so basically, a normal man's NaNo) because I stopped focusing on writing. But I know that if I try to force myself to write a goal every day, it just becomes a chore, and I dread it, and feel guilty when I don't make the goal (which is what happened this year: it became a chore, I got depressed just thinking about it, and so I avoided it).

There has to be a middle ground, and I've decided it's spending at least an hour a day focused on writing. Even if that's just taking an hour-long shower or bath and thinking about my story the whole time. Or, actually, even if that's just staring at the screen for an hour, and managing a sentence. But more of a general focus on writing is what's really important.

Anyway, on with that title: one of the other things that makes a serious author is the ability to actually finish stories. Though I now have my 100-pages-into-it novel, my 200 page one, my 500 page one, and my 700 page one, I have yet to finish any of them. The only thing I've finished over 50 pages is a fanfic, and that doesn't even help, because I currently have a fanfic that I haven't updated in nearly a year (and I'm sure everyone who has it on story alert is about ready to murder me).

Short stories aren't any better, if I chance to write something that actually stays short (though I did write one just recently: more on that in a bit). It just amazes me that I can push myself hard enough to write at least 3000 words every day in a month to reach 135k, or 15k words in a day, but I can't push myself to finish.

I think part of it may be that I'm a discovery writer, meaning I don't outline or plan ahead very much at all. I'll sometimes have a scene somewhere off in the future that I'm working toward, but often I'm just going scene by scene, or even sentence by sentence. If I get really stuck, I will plot, mainly by brainstorming on paper, but I only do that until I've got my feet under me again, and then it's back to discovery writing. This way of writing comes naturally to me, so even if I do buckle down and outline, I end up changing the story so much that the outline becomes useless. Something about the way I write a scene, or a character, will open new doors for me, and I see a better way to go forward than my outline. So by this point in my 'writing career', I've just stopped bothering trying to outline at all.

However, that becomes a problem when I near the end of a story. All those loose ends have to tie up somehow, and my discovery writing can't just toss in new things out of nowhere; I have to find a finish in all of this. Discovery writing for me is really good at expanding and opening up a story, but terrible at closing it up, winding it in. In this particular story, I had a shaky idea of how it would end, but then my bad guy turned out to be a good guy, just misunderstood, and the person I had set up as a strong good guy, and therefore hadn't thought twice upon giving him the powers of a god, turned out to be the real bad guy. I got stuck, wasn't sure what to do, and therefore as soon as NaNo was over I abandoned it.

Now, in my defense, I was dealing with finals week right after NaNo, and relaxing my brain a bit from the sludge it had turned into in November, but by now, what's my excuse? Well, I've been knitting a lot for an Alice in Wonderland swap I'm in on ravelry, but yesterday, I didn't even do that (because my right ring finger has gone numb from working with the metal knitting needles for too long). I keep telling myself, just like I did last year, that I'll make a brilliant new year of it, so I'll buckle down as soon as January hits. But I know it isn't true. It's just a way of procrastinating that makes it sound shiny. Procrastinating is my greatest enemy in all things, but really, I'm doing it entirely to myself.

Can that be a new year's resolution, to stop procrastinating so much? But I don't want to leave it for the new year; I want to start it now. Because that's the only way for me to win against procrastination: make all the things I need to do a part of my now, make a schedule, and keep it. That's the most important part: keeping it. It doesn't matter if you've made an excellent, to the minute schedule, if you still just get on Netflix and watch endless episodes of A Bit of Fry and Laurie.


Now then, keeping with that spirit, I think I'll go do the catboxes now, which I've been putting off doing. And keep telling myself that I'm not just procrastinating my writing further by doing chores. Ah, writers: the only people who would rather scrub the toilet than do their work.


Actually, didn't I promise an account of that short story I wrote? I believe I did. Well, coming home from writing group a few weeks ago, before NaNo, I wrote a short story. The first sentence had started out as my quarterly challenge sentence, but I didn't get anything written for it because the prompt was supernatural creatures, and I had no clue how to make mine fit. But as soon as that was made moot by the quarterly challenge passing by, and I looked at it as just a story, I was able to write the entire 7 pages of it in the car on the way home. This is amazing for me: I always write long. I seen the complexities of characters, and want to include them all, and so the stories quickly become novels. But this one actually has a good end, or at least, I hoped it was good.

I passed it out to my writing group to critique, then stressed for a week because of my self-esteem issue, convinced it was crap. But when I got my critique, people actually liked it. It was entirely different from anything I'd ever written before: where I normally work in horror, it was cute. And I don't know if I'll ever write something like it again, but the few critiques people had were very helpful, and will enrich the story when I add them. And the end apparently has the effect of making people cry, or at least squee. No one is more amazed than me that I actually wrote something worth reading.


So anyway, a long post to sum up the end of NaNo, and I didn't say a thing about how my finals went. Hmm. I guess that'll have to be another post, because I really am going to go do my chores now.