Have you ever had trouble “stopping”? Let me explain. You are writing and there is no end in sight. You may have an outline you are going by but as you write the story keeps unfolding and your outline is appearing outdated. You can’t leave your “world” you created, you can’t “stop” the story with a “The End”. You are compelled to keep writing or you entertain the idea of “maybe it should be a trilogy” and yet it keeps growing. The story continues to unfold. There is so much you want to tell in this vast story of yours…
Maybe it started as a short story and grew to a novel of epic proportions. Maybe it is a TV script that has grown to a whole season’s worth of material. Maybe it was a Haiku that turned into “Only as Life” ( by Nikhil Parekh.)
My last NaNo novel was just a lark, since I had done zero planning and had no good ideas. But I made myself a promise (as yet unfulfilled): I will finish it well enough to put “The End” on the last page and be done with it, but I will finish it.
The goal was 50,000 words in one month. After 3 months of continual addition (no deletion, very little re-reading), I’m about 90,000 words. If I cared at all about the story, it could easily hit 150,000, but I’m headed to an arbitrarily rushed ending, because this is just a story I’m writing to prove something to myself. Just as soon as I unpack my office from my recent house purchase and move. sigh
I shudder to think how large subsequent novels for which I invest time, research and months of planning will grow to be.
