Inspiration created for my NaNoWriMo friends.

Oh yes, November has come. National Novel Writing Month. This year I vowed I’d give it another shot, despite my horrid crash and burn a few years back. I failed big time, ending the challenge about 18,000 words shy and walking away from writing for awhile. Yeah. THAT bad.

This year I’m coming in at a totally different angle. I still haven’t been writing much lately, aside from school essays, blog posts, and social networking ramblings. Burnout from doing the same thing obsessively every day is still months down the road. So this year, I just might make it.

There’s another reason I’m feeling confident I’m going to hit the 50,000 mark this time around. Instead of trying to develop a new plot or characters, I have an amazing character who I’ve known for several years. She’s the star in a story that I’ve rewritten several times. It started as a short story that grew larger, with it’s last version being a small novel. I was never completely happy with all the other previous drafts, so have started over for NaNoWriMo.

I’m starting with a clean draft and a vague idea of her previous stories in my head. I took the biggest step and have a strong beginning and clear idea where the plot is going. I’m letting the setting, characters, and interactions develop themselves as I write. Previous versions were written in third-person, but this time I’m using first-person. I’m not letting any previous versions clutter my focus for the story that is unfolding right now.

So even though I’m a little behind on my word count, I’m confident I’m going to finish. Why? Because I’ve fixed some of the problems with my previous attempts at this story and with NaNoWriMo. I may look a little like the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare, but remember what happened to that little guy? Slow and steady won the race. Granted, I have a time limit where the tortoise did not. Yet I still feel this is the year that I finish the month with a fabulous semi-final draft at or above 50,000 words.