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This week: Crossing The Finish Line Edited by: Jeff  
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"Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
-- George R.R. Martin
Trivia of the Week: Jodi Picoult has nearly 14 million copies of her books in print, five of which have been turned into movies. She's had two books debut at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. She studied writing at Princeton and education at Harvard, and her books often involve recurring characters from previous works.
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CROSSING THE FINISH LINE
With NaNoWriMo almost upon us, we're approaching that frenetic time of year when many of us will attempt to crank out a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. And while some of us will participate and others won't, I think the goal is important. That is, to finish a novel-length work. Whether it's from popular idioms like "practice makes perfect" or the result of hard-earned experience, most writers eventually figure out that quickly dashing off a draft of your novel and suddenly selling it is a pretty unlikely outcome. In most cases, you might have to write multiple drafts, and even multiple drafts of multiple projects as you develop the skills that will make you able to write something that a publisher could one day want to publish. Like anything, while natural talent may certainly play a part, it's practice and training and conditioning that is the biggest contributing factor to success.
The trick is, you have to practice and train and condition yourself at the right thing.
If you want to run a marathon, you need to practice running long distances. All the sprinting in the world isn't going to condition you in the right way to enable you to succeed at running 26.2 consecutive miles. Alternately, if you want to become a faster sprinter, you don't train by running 5Ks. You train by sprinting over and over again as you revise and perfect your movements during that short stretch of just a few hundred meters.
Training yourself to write a marketable, professional novel is much the same way. Your optimal training routine isn't cranking out short stories; it's writing actual novels. Short stories can be an excellent way to fuel creativity and take a break from your longer efforts, but short stories and novels are two completely different mediums. Writing short stories and expecting to hit a novel out of the park on the first try isn't realistic, no matter how good those short stories are ... because you've been training yourself for a different kind of contest.
Continuing with the running metaphor, let's look at another problem many aspiring novelists face: not crossing the finish line, i.e. starting something and not seeing it through to the very last chapter. It's happened to all of us; we write something, don't like where it's going, and abandon it for some other project. That's okay. But some of us are serial abandoners and never seem to actually finish that novel before getting sidetracked by another one or something else entirely. This problem can be just as bad as training in a different medium because you're not exercising all your muscles, but rather just a few of them.
Writing but never finishing a book is kind of like starting to run a marathon and then quitting by Mile 13. You've still got half a race left to run, and that half of the race that you never attempt requires dramatically different amounts of endurance, energy, and willpower than the first half of the race needed. If you never push yourself to cross the finish line, you're not working out the muscles and the mindset you need in the final legs of the race.
In fiction, endings can be just as important, if not more important than any other part of your book. It's the last thing readers read, and often the part they remember most. Writing a good ending is a matter of practice. If you're only writing the beginnings of books, you're not training yourself to learn how to end them effectively, and that can have a serious effect on how publishers, agents, and audiences respond to your work.
NaNoWriMo, whether you love it or hate it, does a great job of encouraging writers to start (and finish) a novel in the span of a month. While the satisfaction of finishing something is great, and the camaraderie that comes from participating in NaNo is enjoyable, the real value to the activity - at least for me - is that it's an invitation to try finishing a novel. Sure it's on an abbreviated timetable, but the goal is there all the same.
Consider what kind of writing you want to do, and what kind of work you're doing to train yourself to be really good at that form. If you want to be a novelist, you need to learn how to write novels. And if you want to learn how to write novels, a big part of it is learning how to finish them. Whether NaNoWriMo is a way to accomplish that or not, remember that you have to train at the specific thing you want to be good at.
Until next time,
-- Jeff
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I encourage you to check out the following Writing.Com items:
A nano place to chat about NanoWrimo 2013...
This is a group for people who would like to take part in National Novel Writing Month but don't want to follow all of the rules. The overall goal is to write 50,000 words in the month of November, but on novels that have been started already. However, other goals are acceptable as well. If someone wants to they can go for 25,000 words in the month of November.
A NaNoWriMo fundraiser... compete as a NaNo writer or donate by sponsoring one!
Writing.com is exactly the kind of place where the thought of NaNoWriMo can send people into an excited frenzy. The NaNoWriMists has existed since 2006 to support those excited people - and if you're one of them, then why wait? Join us now, get excited, and you'll soon be writing as you've never written before!
These words are from the official NanoWrimo site. They are inviting you to post on their Outside-The-Box forum: Nano Rebels. I am using their words to invite you to post here and be a Nano Rebel with me! NanoWrimo is for everyone. Rebels are welcome!
Due to the extended Indian summer, it was a beautiful
September evening that was the highlight of this year’s summer.
As Kelly drove down the road, she took in the beauty of the wildlife
either side of the road. The leaves where changing colour, not yet
ready to make their journey to the ground. The different plants
caused the grass to seem full of life. When she looked closely, she
saw a grey squirrel dash up a tree.
It was a fair and just statement, and was the reason why it hurt. Why he hadn’t said it earlier, she didn't know. Perhaps it was because he was a good man. The fact that he said it now when she was so vulnerable and confused was enough to unnerve and strip her down to the very core of her womanish heart, and leave it raw. Michael had never said anything like that to her before, nothing that impaled her on a stake and made her wish she hadn’t lived long enough to hear it. She had known he was holding it back from her for a long time, doing his best to keep it away from her and get over it, hoping the feelings would go away soon. There had been plenty of times she had felt the words rise to his lips, seen the throat muscle catch and his Adam's apple stop them right at the last moment, a hard stop thick with unspoken sound.
I sat at a small imitation wooden desk in a stuffy classroom with a few other kids I had never met before; we were all taking a test to get into the same college. I glanced sideways at the classic black and white clock on the wall to my left; one and a half more hours to go. I sighed heavily before turning the page of seemingly endless test and reading the next tedious open-ended question. It read;
"Write a short narrative on a single day that changed your life forever."
Martin was standing outside the courtroom, as he desperately wanted to avenge his Brother Paul's murder. He waited there for hours and wanted to kill Richard, who killed his brother. By then he saw Richard was making an exit from the court.
Karina fumbled furiously for her keys, her bag was a horrid mess. A boiling pot of old notes, some useless papers, crude poems and stories, candy wrappers and a lot of other things she just couldn't bring herself to throw away, a lot of them useless really. A soft drop of rain landed on her forehead as she felt the smooth rectangular card at the bottom of the mess. She hurried into the station.
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For Authors: October 29, 2014 Issue [#6634]
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No wonder most of the stories and poems which I've written in that manner gets noticed than those that I've planned to write. Hmmm...very helpful discovery. Thank you! 
I need enough structure so that I know where the story is going and what's generally going to happen or I'll get lost on the blank page and be too indecisive about where to go. But I also need enough freedom to discover things so that it doesn't feel like I'm just transcribing what I've basically already written. I like to be somewhere in the middle... the closest thing I can compare it to is like driving directions, where I know where I'm starting, where I need to end up, and the general direction I need to travel... but not so much that every street and turn is planned out. 
