NaNoWriMo Final Update: My Machinery Is Too Big

  by  gin_able 

NaNoWriMo is now officially over. I wrote 122,408 words between midnight on November 1st and midnight on November 30th.

The title of this post (and the awesome image) is in reference to a quote my housemate often uses to explain why every short story she writes turns into a novel. “I just can’t write anything short. My machinery is too big.”

I think I might have a touch of the same problem. A lot of the stories I worked on for NaNoWriMo this year got a little out of hand, length-wise, turning into novelettes, novellas, or worse. Well, ‘worse’ is probably a bit strong . . .

But my express purpose this year was to focus on short stories. And only two completed ones—”G Is for Gravesite” and “U Is for Unicorn Power Imblance”—were under 3000 words. While that may still qualify as “short” by some definitions, my inspiration for doing this were all these 250-, 300-, and 350-word flash pieces that I’ve done for the Second Life writing group, The Quillians.

When I thought about the plots of the stories I planned out before November, I could not conceive of any of them being longer than a couple of thousand words. The ideas seemed simple. Easy to write.

But another thing I have learned from NaNoWriMo this year—in addition to the things I iterated in the last two NaNoWriMo update posts—is simply this: A story is as long as a story needs to be.

That sounds simplistic, but it’s hard to let go of a length when you set out to write a story of 2000 words and you end up with something 10,000 words or more. Granted, a lot of that 10,000 words will be edited out, but still.

Basically, what it means to me is that two stories took just a few words to tell. Gravesite came in at 2204 and Unicorn at just 1826. But I told the stories I wanted to tell. Each of them has a beginning, middle, and end. They resolve. They have one or more of Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event.

Others are not even close to being finished at 6,000, 10,000 or even 12,000 words. (No, I didn’t write all of any of those on a single day.)

And both of those are OK. Really.

My next step is to edit some of these, finish the others, and to take apart the novel I’m in the midst of and . . . fix problems. The next post will explain that last comment. :)