Finishing things – it’s kind of a pain in the ass and most of us have a hard time sealing the deal. Sure, sometimes, we get motivated and we make a lot of progress in the right direction. But finishing things? That’s harder than we like to admit more often than not. Follow-through is both a challenge and burden and no one really wants any part of those if they have the option out. Ironically, when it happens, we’re generally harder on ourselves than others. So today I find myself looking at last month’s (as of this writing) NaNoWriMo and thinking “I wonder how many people hit 50k and need to do more.”

The answer is that it really depends on what people were hoping to get out of it. Most people don’t really go into NaNo with the intention of actually being an author. They go in with the intention of proving they can do something of that scale but have no aspirations for greater. Others, as I’ve pointed out in the past, have far different goals in mind. Everyone’s come to the task with a different endgame. If you were just aiming to hit 50k and don’t have much care for a follow through, then congrats on hitting the goal and hope you give it another go next time. On the other hand, if you’re one of those people who were using that event as a starting point, I know from experience that the months after NaNo can be harder than the challenge itself.

Honestly, being a writer itself – especially a beginning writer – is harder than the NaNoWriMo challenge. If it were the leisurely task that people think it is from time to time, it wouldn’t require a month dedicated to it. After all, who needs a challenge to do something you work on all the time? If it were something easy, there wouldn’t be a need. Even the writers I know look at the challenge as something of an excuse to get motivated again. So… the question that’s been posed to me once is, “how do you keep going?”

And, besides being stubborn (and even angry at times), the answer is… Continue reading Finishing What You Started →