Life’s Rules is not done. Yes, finishing NaNo did happen, but not with a completed draft. Difficulties arose.
The Idea
Before November, I made out a bullet list of the major scenes I expected to occur in my nove Life’s Rules. And the first fifteen thousand words went according to plan.
Then the novel took a sharp turn. The bullet list became obsolete. Even though the novel still moved in the same general direction, the route had changed.
Hated Timelines
This novel draft was supposed to move from beginning to end with little deviation. Finishing NaNo with a rough draft seemed a sure thing.
Instead I ended up with a different novel, one requiring a timeline. And I didn’t have one. I blundered on for thousands of words until the novel began to look like a disaster happening in slow motion.
Solution
There were three possibilities. One was to abandon the whole thing, write something else. That wasn’t what I wanted to do.
A second was to continue with the disaster I was working on. The ending draft might be over the fifty thousand words, but it would be a mess requiring months of work and rewrite to straighten out.
This alternative was not attractive. I don’t mind doing rewrites. I do mind doing unnecessary rewrites. And this would be one.
That left the third alternative. I started back at the beginning and did a rewrite of the twenty-three thousand words I’d completed.
This time I put in the timeline. It meant adding some new material and deleting other scenes. Some got altered to fit into the timeline.
The Result
I ended up finishing NaNo with half a draft. It isn’t completely right. It needs another thirty or forty thousand more words to finish the draft. This can be done in December.
Perhaps I did break an unwritten rule of NaNo of not editing. However, I ended up with half a draft of workable prose.