Positive you won’t hit your NaNoWriMo goal this year? You owe it to yourself to keep trying anyway.

At the moment I’m writing this, I’m 42,488 words behind on my goal for NaNoWriMo. On my lesser goal? I’m 24,772 words behind.

Yeesh. That’s a big deficit. And if I can’t hit my goal, what’s the point of writing anymore at all? It would be much nicer to just take the holiday weekend off. On a normal year with my normal writing time available to me, making up those numbers would be no big deal. But absolutely nothing about this November has been normal.

I’m terrified by current events with news getting worse everyday and anxiety for my kids and their future is all-consuming. I’ve hit the limits of my poor put-upon body and my life is in total upheaval as we’ve been kicked out of our house by construction. We’ve been packing and dealing with the flurry of buying, staging, selling and moving until everything is a sea of complicated contracts and packing tape. The toddler’s cheese has been moved Big Time and she’s completely out of sorts, keeping us up at night and acting nuts all day, all when I have less energy, brain power or good health moments than ever before to deal with it. My life was, frankly, a mess this November.

Even if the end is finally in sight, everything feels pretty darn terrible right now. Taking time to write when I have so little time as it is seems insane, especially when my goal looks so far away. Friends and family keep asking why I’m still writing with all the other chaos going on. Why don’t I stop and free myself of the one source of pressure I can actually control right now? I started to wonder why I wasn’t taking their advice.

The answer came from an unlikely place.

My three year old was rapidly getting frustrated trying to get one of her toys to sit on the tiny doll house couch the way she wanted it to. I came to the rescue before she could completely Hulk out. The tableaux she’d set up? A tiny Daisy Duck was propped up on the small sofa with a pillow behind her back, a blanket on her legs and the little pink computer from Minnie’s Pet Salon on her lap. Pretty much exactly how she’s seen me every night this month when she comes in for her goodnight kiss.

“Daisy is trying so hard to work on her NaNoWriMo,” she told me, “but she keeps sliding off the couch!”

You’ll be happy to know that Daisy was righted in time to get some words down on her novel. And while sliding off a couch that’s not quite the right size for you is an excuse as good as any for giving up, Daisy was determined to get some writing done anyway.

But, more importantly, this made me realize that the act of setting a goal and working towards it to the very end is about more than the goal itself. It’s about an example you set. Even though my NaNoWriMo work this month has come at the expense of time with her when she needed it the most, my daughter is aware that I have a goal and that I’m working towards it. That I am still going, even when it’s hard, even when quitting would be way easier, because it is important to me. If I quit now, if I give up instead of trying to give it my all until the very end, what kind of message does that send to her? For that matter, what kind of message does it send to all the Wrimos in my region who depend on me to be their cheerleader, their guide to the dark forest that is navigating your first novel?

But even if there were no kids, fledgling writers or anthropomorphic cartoon ducks that were looking up to me, there’s still one more very important person I have to set an example for: Me.

It’s the me of the past that has quit before, that ducked out without truly giving it my all, because it’s so much easier to walk away than to fight until the end. I need to show that me that I’ve evolved. That even if I ultimately can’t hit my goal, I can try my darndest to get there with the time I do have.

It’s the me of the future that needs to know I CAN do it, even under adversity. Every time I don’t quit, it’s another solid block in my foundation as a writer, that knowledge that I have done it before and can do it again, that pushes me to do more and better.

We made a commitment this month to our writing and set ourselves a goal for getting there. The days left in the month may be few in number, but they are there all the same and we owe it to ourselves to see this challenge through to the end. There is far more satisfaction in falling short of your goal when you know you tried your hardest than in giving up within sight of the finish line.

Every word you get down is a victory no matter what your final total is. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to hit my goals for this year or not. But that’s not going to stop me from trying. I owe it to myself to keep on writing until the very end and so I will.

Will you join me?

Photo by Dana Lookadoo – Yo! Yo! SEO