After NaNoWriMo...

I thought I'd have a lot to say after NaNoWriMo was over, but I find myself at a bit of a loss. I crossed the finish line at 50,020 words with about five hours to spare in the month of November. Like most things I do, I consider that pretty much adequate. No lofty 100,000 words, but I sure didn't fall short either. I even wrote out my whole story, so there's no serious slogging left to do. All I have now is 291 pages of manuscript, which I sneakily printed out at work today (double sided -- don't worry), and a drawer full of pens. Hopefully I'll be able to move through the draft and get the first rewrite done by Christmas.

One thing is sure, though: after a month-long vacation, my perfectionist streak has returned with a vengeance. Despite banishing it from my sight for a few days to cleanse my palate, I keep thinking about my story -- descriptions, timelines, what the ground feels like beneath my characters' feet. I feel like after telling everyone about my novel and then spending all this time on it I have something weighty to prove. I have to prove myself able to write a novel that's better than anything you've ever read.

While I do think perfectionism is the mother of quality work, in large doses it can be crippling. It can be a reason never to finish my novel or show it to anyone. So I think I'm just going to do what editing I can by Christmas, then -- eeeek! Horror of horrors! -- show it to my most trusted writer friends for feedback no matter what. Of course they'll know it's bad. But it's a draft, so in theory of course they'll know it's supposed to be bad. No one writes a masterpiece in the first draft. It needs to be written and rewritten until it's just right. This is just the bones. Just the bones. And if I don't start showing works in progress to people, if I don't start seeing my work for what it is and appreciating it in all stages of the process, I'm never going to kill that voice inside saying I should be embarrassed by everything I create. Every song I sing, every picture I take, every story I write.

In the end, I think that's the biggest lesson I've learned by writing 50,000 words in 30 days. No one can accomplish that while expecting perfection of themselves. I don't know if anyone can write the first draft of a novel at all while expecting perfection of themselves. And for a month, I suspended my need for everything to be well-considered and perfect and just wrote. Not in my journal, either, but in a document I want to reach the public eye someday. Doing that was a new experience for me, and one I hope to continue. I also hope to have some better reflections on the experience at some point, but for now I'm just quietly basking in my own sense of self-satisfaction.