Not a NaNo Winner

NaNoWriMo is over and the verdict is in. I am not a winner!

I’ve won two years before when it was incredibly effortless to write 50k for a variety of reasons but this year the story just did not come as easily as it has before. Maybe I didn’t have enough time. Or maybe I didn’t plan well enough. Perhaps I hadn’t let the story incubate in my head before putting it on paper. Whatever the reason–it didn’t happen.

And you know what? That’s totally fine.

Winning is awesome and makes you feel like the biggest achiever of writing in the history of words. But when you don’t complete a story in 30 days it feels like some kind of failure, doesn’t it? Like suddenly you think you’re not worthy to word anymore. Like maybe those successes before didn’t count at all. You start to let that self-doubt creep in and second guessing becomes second nature. But I say that’s a bunch of crap-a-doodle-do! Don’t let this one empty check mark on your list hold you back from the overall goal. Writing.

You still wrote words at some point. A few hundred…a few thousand…several thousand. Maybe it wasn’t 50 thousand words, but you got ideas down! You can still finish this book! The ending of NaNoWriMo doesn’t mean the end of your book or the end of your career in general. This was just one step in the process. It was just an outlet, a motivational tool. It’s meant to rally everyone together behind a common goal and get support from each other throughout the challenge.

It’s not supposed to be a negative event for the writing community so let’s stop comparing ourselves to each other or each others’ accomplishments and celebrate that each victory is different and just as valid. It frustrates me how some people think winning NaNo makes them better than those who didn’t. Or how people who couldn’t finish feel less than because of the set back. Sure, some people won. And yeah, some of us didn’t. We’re both successful at the end of the month, though, because we kept working on our goals. We kept working at our dreams!

Keep at it into December, and even into the new year and beyond if you have to. One day you’ll have a finished novel that you began during NaNo, but completed on your own time. Writing isn’t a race. Writing is a long, arduous process but in the end, all that time is worth the investment. So let’s not take not finishing as a bad thing, but rather just another bump in the road along our writing journey. Instead of feeling bad after not winning NaNo, feel awesome! Whatever you accomplished is just as worthy as people who won and someday down the road, you’ll reach the finish line with this project and it will be just as sweet.