It’s more than halfway through the month and your novel’s middle is sagging, your characters are refusing to co-operate, and you wish you’d never started it to begin with. Or maybe your characters are doing exactly as they’re told, and you’ve simply realized that you can’t stand them–or your story idea.
Don’t panic. As anyone who’s done Nanowrimo a few times will know, it’s bound to happen eventually. It’s perfectly natural to get frustrated with your novel. Writing a book in a month is hard, writing daily is hard, and sometimes an idea turns out to be less interesting than you originally thought. Characters can be impossible to work with and if the wrong one decides to die it can ruin everything.
All of that is perfectly natural, and it’s part of the insane, masochistic fun called being a writer. Be thankful that you currently have all the support of Nanowrimo behind you, and make some quick decisions so you can stay on track with your goals.
No matter why you hate your novel, there are a few things you can do:
1. Finish the damn thing anyway. Most writers go through a period of time when they hate their novels, even outside of Nanowrimo, and if the story still means something important to you, you have to grit your teeth and bear it. You never know, the changes might lead to something wonderful in the end. Besides, great novels are not written, they’re rewritten.
You might want to make some small changes of your own, perhaps killing the most annoying character if you can get away with it. Either way, writing a crappy novel is still an accomplishment, because most people never write a book at all. Truth be told, most don’t even get started. So you are a champion already, and if you reach that finish line, you’ll be truly different from most people. You’ll actually be able to say “I wrote a book.” And that’s the first step towards writing a great book.
All that said, you also never need to look at it once November’s over, and if you really hate it you can print it up and feed it to a bonfire.
2. Kill all–or most–of your main characters, and start over from a side character’s perspective. If your story’s dragging, it might be that your characters are the problem. Maybe you realized the main characters aren’t that interesting and somebody else is, or maybe you just hate them. Either way, it’s perfectly acceptable to kill them all–in as many words as possible, because death is great for word count.
Once your main characters are dead, start part two of your novel from a side character’s PoV. This way you can keep all your words from before and legitimately say it’s part of the same novel–even if you end up deciding later that it’s really two books, or even that your original main characters aren’t worth ten pages. Sometimes killing off characters is the best thing you can do for a novel.
3. Scrap it and start a new book. This may seem like utter madness so late in the month, but it’ll make the rest of Nano easier and depending on your point of view, you can even keep the words from your last attempt. Or you can find some bizarre way to tie your old book into the new book you’ve realized you’d like to write. You’ll want this to be a pretty superficial connection, so you can painlessly edit away the first part if you decide to later.
Of course, this all requires you to have a totally new novel idea, so if you don’t, I wouldn’t suggest going this route.
Remember, if you hate your novel, it’s not the end of the world. I’ve always ended up using one of these three strategies when I came to hate my Nanowrimo novel, and if they don’t work for you, I’m sure there are more out there. Don’t forget to ask the friendly folks on the Nanowrimo forums for help–they’re one of the most helpful communities in the writing world.