Accept that you will fail

The first thing you have to understand about naowrimo is that you will fail. This doesn't mean that you won't write 50,000 words. During the month, you'll discover that just writing 50,000 words is nothing to do with success. No matter how many words we write, we all lose.

You'll fail because whatever beautiful idea you had in your head, or whatever hopes you had of writing something beautiful, will be torn to pieces. Nanowrimo is not about writing something beautiful. It is about writing in its more brutal and ugly form, night after night. After a month of this, you'll feel horrible, like you've completely ruined whatever hopes you had, and you'll be questioning you ability as a writer and your worth as a human being.

Repeat to yourself, over and over, "I am going to fail. I'm going to screw up. I will hate what I am writing, but I'm going to write it anyway." This is the truth, get used to it. Befriend it. Invite it into your home. Hug it to you every night. Failure is something you'll become very accustomed to over the next few weeks.

This is how it will be: even if you manage to stay on top of your word count, you won't write anything like you want to write. The necessity of producing 1667, or 2000, or however many, words per day ensures you'll spend a lot of your time writing stuff you think is sludge. After a few days of continuously writing sludge, you'll want to quit. I'm telling you this now because it is impossible to keep a sense perspective in the broil of Nano.

Writing every day for a big target is intense and you tend to become slightly demented - you're either exhilarated ("I wrote words! I am the greatest!") or despondent and full of self- and novel- loathing. Either state is perfectly natural. Unfortunately, its a lot easier to slip into despondency than it is to maintain manic exhilaration. There are just too many ways you can slip up - falling behind your word count, writing sludge, losing track of your plot, exhaustion, stuff happening in the rest of your life ... all these things can convince you that you're wasting your time, that you're a failure.

Failure is what writing is all about. No writer manages to realize their vision perfectly, not in the first draft or in the fiftieth. The Nobel Prize winner, Samuel Beckett, wrote, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." He was probably thinking about his own experience as a writer, each new work an attempt to capture the ideas he sensed, but always which always eluded him. He kept trying, is the important thing.

Put a mirror above your work station and a sign above it saying, "This is a picture of failure." If you can see yourself in that mirror, you're in the right place. At least you're where you should be, trying to fail better. If the mirror reflects an empty chair, only then are you failing, irredeemably.