Saturday, November 28, 2009

Throwing in the Towel

I haven't touched my novel in over 48 hours.

It's still November, it's still National Novel Writing Month. I should be worried about my word count, and I should be working on the novel right now. But I just don't care anymore. The craptastic opus I created has sucked every ounce of my will to write fiction and I can't do it anymore.

I've hit the "what's the point" wall. Why bother busting my butt over this novel thing when I'm going to ultimately get nothing out of it? It's just going to be a file saved on my computer for the rest of time that I'm never going to touch again because it's not worth editing. I went most of the month, and that's gotta count for something.

Follow-through? Yeah, that's not something I've ever been good at. I tried. I really wanted to finish this year to prove that I could actually finish something that I start, but I don't have the drive anymore. I did my walking goal - I walked the 5k on Thanksgiving morning. That was a success. So at least there's something in my life that I can be proud of.

I'm not a writer. Not a writer of fiction, anyway. This kind of writing, here, that I'm doing right now, this is the stuff I can crank out until the cows come home. I just don't think I'm the right kind of creative for fiction. Maybe for NaNo next year I'll try writing a memoir or something. That might come a lot easier than some piece of fabricated fluff that once floated around in my mind.

I'm going to enjoy my Saturday now. I have a coffee table to put together, a baby shower to attend, a video game to play, and a lot of episodes of The Office to watch on DVD. It's going to be a good weekend.

3 comments:

  1. Wisdom is knowing when to cut your losses. Life is too short to try to finish something you are not enjoying. If you had an actual publisher waiting on this book or if it was required for an important class then that would be different. Try writing when you are inspired instead of cramming it all into one month a year.

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  2. I've thought about doing one of the NaWriMo's as a fictional blog allowing for a little less structure and not having to worry about getting from point A to point B. If you really wanted to get fancy you could play with the posting dates to give the story a more realistic timeline

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  3. There is always NaBloPoMo to do 30 blog posts in Nov. A way of still practiing writing without a certain type or word count. I'd still be proud of what you accomplished.

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