Only ten days until the NaNo ends. And it looks like I’m going to lose this one, too.

It isn’t that I’ve lost interest in my project(s). It’s just that I kept restarting it/them and wanting to spend time with it/them.

I also decided that this was going to be a middle-grade chapter book, which usually run up to 30K words. NaNo’s are supposed to be 50K. But I figured I could write another 20K of fluff and still win the thing.

I’ve heard of a lot of writers who go back and forth between scenes, or who will write the ending of their story and backtrack to the beginning. I’ve tried that with the two other NaNos for this year, but with the third and last one, I decided to go the traditional route. So far, I’ve written from the beginning and… I’m still in the beginning. My characters have yet to reach the “point of no return,” when they’ll be thrown into the action and can’t return to the way things used to be.

But I much prefer this to writing absolute crap, which was how I won the ‘07 NaNo. Trust me, that one was horrible. I used adverbs, purple prose, gratuitous sex scenes. A lot of gratuitous sex scenes. I didn’t really feel pride as I downloaded the little graphic that declared me a winner. I just felt… dirty. And not in the good way.

So, after doing this three times, I have to conclude that the NaNo may not be for me. I feel like I have to rush 50K words, no matter what, quality be damned. I have a hard time continuing any project if I think it’s crappy.

It was like that for the first NaNo. But, dammit, I wanted to win that thing. I kept going until I was sick of the story, characters, even the entire world I’d spent years creating. Two years later, I can only think of five small things to salvage from that wreck, which is pretty good. But I’d feel better about the experience itself if the story had been a quality first draft. Because I believe that quality first drafts are the difference between major rewrites/overhauls and some major tweaking and rewriting.

(At least, that’s what I believe. I’ve never written an entire story and then a second draft, so I have no personal experience to back up that thought. But writing well the first time around so the subsequent rewrites won’t be such a chore seems to make sense.)

Who knows? I might give the NaNo a try next year, just to see if I can win it with a damn good draft.