Yes, It Is All My Fault!

That wordcount is staring you in the face. Every time you look over at it you get a little sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach. “I’ll never make 50,000 words,” you think to yourself. “I can’t even think of the next sentence! Why did I imagine I could ever be a writer?”

Riiiight, because Real Writers never get stuck. Or if they do, they know exactly how to get unstuck. And you will get a 6-figure book deal on your first book sale, and Hollywood will both buy your movie rights and give you full creative control over the script. Don’t forget all those literary awards! It’s when they start writing lit-crit analyses of how the theme of peanut butter relates to schadenfreude and your body of work that you know you’ve arrived. And how DID those monkeys feel, flying out of your butt?

Again, back to intent. Are we here to collect a wordcount trophy, or are we here to frikken write? So what to do when you’re feeling discouraged and as if you’ll never make that shiny 50K words at the end of this month, but you do sorta care about your characters now and kinda want to know what happens next for them anyway?

Hey, did you know that 50,000 words isn’t even a proper novel-length work in many cases? Sure the technical dictionary definition of novel-length is anything over 40,000 words. However, 40K or even 50K is NOT the current accepted industry standard, and in fact varies somewhat by genre in expectations. A mystery novel might be 60,000-80,000, while a thriller might be 100,000 words or more. If you’re coming in at 50K, it might be better to see what you can trim down enough to sell it as a novella, or add many more words to bring it to the size most people expect to read when they pick up a novel. Also, the story type matters as well: a Steven Brust Vlad Taltos novel is usually 80,000-90,000, while the Khaavren Romances are much, much longer than that.

The most obvious solution is to find some way of redefining success for yourself that allows you to continue working even if you don’t hit an arbitrary and specific wordcount. It’s been two weeks now, you should have enough data to at least make a guess about your average daily wordflow. One way to look at it is that NaNoWriMo was a useful tool for getting you to learn this flow-rate, or at least a starting point to guess from. Set your new standard of daily wordcount success at 4 pages a day, or 500 words a day, or whatever seems to be a more achievable and sustainable wordcount goal for continued writing. If you’re around the 3-page-a-day rate, and you still want community support, and you’re on Livejournal, there’s a community over there called novel_in_90 that has a 3-page-a-day wordcount goal for a finished novel draft in approximately three months. Still fast, but much less weighty than one month. There are likely similar communities to be found elsewhere, or if you know enough local writers create your own!

Maybe your wordcount is too erratic to pin down to a daily average. Some days you’ll write 4000, other days nothing, other days 50, then 1000 the next. Or maybe you don’t really have a problem when you actually sit down to write, but you’re a rather distractable sort who pretty easily loses focus to ooh squirrel!

Uh, right. Focus. So maybe in these instances, your daily measure of success is whether you write at all. One of Steven Brust’s sayings is “any day I write a sentence is a good day.” Or you could use “time spent writing” as your counted number, rather than a specific number of words. And as both Steve and Neil Gaiman (and others) say, writing a page a day will still get you a novel a year. Think about it!

How do you think you might redefine your NaNoWriMo success to keep writing if you can’t make 50,000 words by November 30?