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Comment by swagempire | Hacker News Reader

While I empathize with your situation-- be careful not to discourage others. The only two fully completed novellas were because of this month and I'm very proud of them.

I'm much more annoyed I haven't been able to replicate this outside of the contest.

Hope you feel better now.

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I want to be clear, I am not trying to discourage others - however, I did try NaNoWriMo because of an aura of "everyone should do this, it's great" from people around me, so I am more just making the gentle point that people shouldn't feel that they "have" to do NaNo, or that there's anything wrong with them if they try and fail.

If it does work for you, that is, of course, great.

Indeed, NaNoWriMo does - by the very nature of its focus on "pushing yourself to succeed" and positivity in challenge - make it hard to talk about not succeeding. (And I am pretty sure that attitude didn't help my own interactions with it.)

It's also, you have to make an artistic sacrifice when you're doing it. You're writing a first draft of a novel, but it's not meant to be a good first draft, it can have plotholes and characters who learn nothing and unintentional red herrings and all sorts of other stuff that drives readers up the wall.

My book, I got to the word count but the characters hadn't done a quarter of what they were supposed to over the plot, it was a book with an extended beginning, a little bit of middle, no resolution or ending. So I learned a lot about myself! But if I was trying to actually make a worthwhile narrative, well, I need to consider how much reasonably fits in 50,000 words and how many books do I need to tell the bigger story.

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