30-day Novel Challenge: The Conclusion

Yesterday, the 30-day novel challenge I began last month ended. A short summary of the tale would state that I managed about 16,000 words, starting well and fading around half-way. In the end I became a bit frustrated with the whole process, and wrote nothing the last five days of the challenge.

(For those who don't remember, the original goal involved writing a 50,000-word novel in 30-days)

Taking time away from writing helped I think, and with a clearer head than I had a few days ago, I'd like to share some of my "findings" from the experience.

Scheduling 

First, as mentioned in the post from the half-way point, I scheduled the challenge during a high period of distraction for me, beginning right with the World Cup and passing through the 4th of July holiday, a race, and a busy stretch at work. I'll not say these alone prevented me from finishing the challenge, but they did occupy my attention to varying degrees, and made it more difficult  to sit down and work through knots that arose in the story. What's more, the need to write could occasionally get in the way of enjoying other experiences, drawing attention away from the moment and toward the abstract notion called "the story". This was unfortunate, and a lesson worth learning. Writing is a lovely exercise, but not at the expense of enjoying life.

Now it must be said, there will likely be times when deadlines pay no mind to one's personal schedule, and care not a fig that the next month is full of other preoccupations for you. If a project comes due at a certain time, then all distractions aside, the project needs to get done. We don't always get to pick the date, or interval of time, when an important (and consuming) task comes along. Sometimes it seems we must be able to bring ourselves together no matter what the time of year. In that respect, this challenge was a helpful exercise in working on a difficult project through a busy stretch. I wouldn't have planned it that way, but so it went.

Creating a Story

With the challenge behind me, one thing at least seems clear: if you're going to write a story in 30-days, it should either be meticulously thought-out, or blended together one whim at a time. My own approach fell somewhere in the middle, and in this instance ended with the negative aspects of both methods. I had a fairly rigid notion of how I wanted the story to go, but had not sufficiently planned how to get from one set of scenes to the next. Does this idea,which sounds great in my head, actually work in the context of a written text? To my dismay, the translation from thought to text proved, in many cases, less than ideal.

One way to get around this problem is to abandon all notions of what the story "should" be, and let whims and fancies be your guide. I actually find this approach liberating at times, because it tends to expand one's idea of the possible, leaving the mind freer to think about old problems in new ways. Alas, during this particular challenge I had a very fixed idea of the kind of story I wanted to tell, without a very fixed idea of how to get from beginning to end. Ultimately this inflexibility-without-a-plan meant that when the original idea hit a snag, I was ill-prepared to develop a new one, or modify the old.

Conclusions

This was a very useful experience for me, even if the desired product didn't pan out. The challenge stretched my ability to think creatively and write under pressure. That I failed to deliver in this controlled setting is only part of the story, and to my mind at least, only relevant to the extent it revealed where improvement is most needed. Success has value and is certainly desirable; but a healthy dose of failure, taken constructively, is perhaps where and how we learn to do better next time. I suspect we only fail completely when we give-up completely--that we become so discouraged as to never try again. In that spirit, I intend to keep working on writing, and at some point in the future, re-attempt the 30-day novel challenge.

Thanks for sharing the journey with me :)