Failure is not an option

Tomorrow is 20k day!

Not a 20k race, something much more challenging…hitting the 20k mark in your NaNo novel.

If you’re nowhere near hitting the magic number yet, don’t fret. NaNo is a challenge, yes, but that doesn’t mean you fail if you don’t hit the 50k. Ok, you don’t finish the NaNo challenge but that doesn’t make you a failure.

If your friend hobbled back from a marathon and said “I only *gasp* managed *wheeze* twenty-four *chokes* miles…” would you sneer at them in disgust and call them a failure? Pfft, no way. You’d pat them on the back, wait for them to finish throwing up, and congratulate them on their success! They may not have finished the marathon, but bloody Lemony Snicket Jiminy Cricket they ran twenty-four miles! How far did you waddle around today? To an empty fridge and back a few times to check if food had magically appeared? Along the worn path in the carpet to the kettle for some more brain juice and cheeky digestive?

Personally I sat on my arse at work all day, I’ll sit on my arse when I get home, and even if I went to watch my friend run a marathon I’d probably be looking for somewhere to park my rotund buttocks as they slogged their guts out.

So you can’t, by a frickin’ longshot, call twenty-four miles a failure.

Same with NaNo.

50,000 words or more is fantastic. Well done, you finished NaNo, you have a fair chunk of a novel ready to be edited to death until it resembles something vaguely readable. Or maybe you have the majority of a novella, or a huge wodge of short stories ready to be revised, rewritten, and redrafted? Either way…*clap clap clap*

But what happens if you end the month on 40k? Or 30k? Or 7k?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

No NaNo police appear to lock you in the WriMo jail of Apathy. You don’t get booted from the forums. Other NaNoers will not shun you in favour of people that doubled or tripled the 50k target.

The only way you fail is if you give up on those words.

If you almost killed yourself getting that 7k on the page, then well done. You bled through the pain, blinked sweat out of your eyes, and made it as far as you could. You haven’t failed. It’s one bloody month of the year. You’re a writer for Cthulhu’s sake, you should be writing almost (if not) every single day of your life!

You fail if you toss those words aside and wait for November to come around again, refusing to put yourself through the pain until then (unless that’s your bag, baby, in which carry on and keep smiling).

You fail if you throw the pages in the bin and refuse to add to them or edit them.

You fail if you think you’ve failed.

So to all my fellow NaNoers out there feeling dejected and crestfallen, chin up little buddies! You’ve got this! You’re a motherfucking writer and nothing is going to stand in your way, not ‘missing’ the daily target, or ‘failing’ to achieve 50k, not the naysayers or the NaNo cynics, not that pesky voice whispering to you at night telling you to give up.

Shut up, head voices! You don’t know me…and you smell and wet the bed *ner ner*

Sod the word counts, sod pessimism, sod feeling sorry for yourself.

You, my friend, are a writer.

So write!