Earlier this week I threw in the proverbial towel for the eleventh month of the year, also known as National Novel Writing Month. To answer your one and only question:
No. I did not finish my book.
I started out on pace, writing twice a day on the train, and I must confess that I didn’t start from scratch. I took out the journal with last year’s NaNoWriMo attempt, which hadn’t been touched in 335 days, and picked up where I left off, finishing up the rest of the chapters that I mapped out in 2014. Then I brainstormed two new chapters (that is, I came up with two new catchy phrases), and I slowed down to writing just once a day on the train.
Halfway through the month my progress measurement went from pages to paragraphs per day... Three quarters of the way through the month I started reading again, but I didn't feel bad about it, since, according to Stephen King (my writing guru/hero), "The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor". Then came Thanksgiving, so my NaNoWriMo experience ended on November 25.
I was thinking about how to assess myself, my novel, and this experience for you, and my first thought was to give myself a C+, because I gave a good effort but I didn’t finish. But then I remembered how annoying it is to get an abstract grade from an English teacher with no reasoning or justification, and why we employ rubrics to grade writing these days. So I made a rubric, taking into account Stephen King's feelings on adverbs, and then I used it:
After using this rubric, I realize that I am actually more of a B- than a C+; I am ‘approaching the standard’, thank goodness, although the (perhaps biased) 'meets the standard' column above only requires three weeks of participation. My weak areas are organization and content, which makes sense, because the catchy chapter headings I came up with last year were not really an outline. My content suffered because I wasn’t organized. Since I didn’t have a plan, my inner nerd focused on style and mechanics while free writing for three weeks. I can live with that for a year, during which I will spend some time re-reading Stephen King's On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft.
(Now that I have devoted all this time to making a rubric, I should probably use it to rate books on Goodreads instead of debating if “I really liked it” or if “it was amazing” while staring at the cover.)
If you are up to it, take a look at what you wrote last month, use this rubric to assess it, and then let me know what grade you give yourself (and why!) in the comment section below. Feel free to use letters, percentages, or my rubricized standard scores.
