It’s always embarrassing to admit failure, but I’m not really embarrassed because I can’t say I even tried.
I had grand ideas about doing NaNoWriMo this year, and managed to claw up a good plot and characters for Wolves of Boston, but between the election drama and other writing obligations I never managed to drag myself into the story.
That’s okay.
One of the things I’m having to come to terms with as a writer is that my stories have a “long tail” development. I can think up ideas and characters and plots fairly quickly, but at that point I often stall. I’m realizing that it’s less of a “stall” than it is more like letting it sit in the marinade.
The process is what it is, whether I like it or not. As a pantser I’m comfortable in the ambiguity of not knowing, I’m okay with letting questions sit on my shoulder for months, even years. The trade off is that it takes months, even years, to finish anything.
Unfortunately, the less time I have to write, the less time I have to devote to wringing things out of the marinade. To go faster is more of a function of finding enough time to focus on the projects than speeding up the process. When I’ve tried speeding things up, it always ended in disaster.
But, things being what they are, I have a day!job and a dog and I also need to sleep, so there is only so much time and energy to go around.
Which is what I came up against during November, when I kept trying to start writing my NaNoWriMo project. The characters didn’t have any heft or weight to them, which was clear when I tried to write them. Nothing about it was ready to be written, and given how many other things were vying for my time and attention, I had no time to get anything ready to be written.
I did, however, write a lot during November. I edited even more. Not to the 50k word mark, but probably close.
So, I don’t think I failed at all, despite not even making a dent in the NaNoWriMo goals. If nothing else I have the characters and the framework for Wolves of Boston ready to go when true inspiration hits. That counts for a lot, with me.
Time will tell.