NaNoWriMo: The End…?

As of this morning, my NaNoWriMo word count is 45,458. I’m right on schedule for hitting 50,000 words by Monday. There’s just one problem: I don’t know how the novel ends.

It’s definitely getting there. About two-thirds of the way through I hit that “point of no return,” the crisis moment where the story has no choice but to barrel toward its conclusion. And I think what I wrote this morning might have been the climax. Then again, yesterday I thought what I wrote then was the climax. And while both are full of the drama and falling-apartness that final chapters should be full of, neither moment was what I had envisioned the climax being. The protagonist’s problems haven’t gone quite as far as they can. Which probably means neither of these are the actual climax, and I’m still building toward it. Then there’s that whole matter of an epiphany that needs to come afterward. I’m sure it’s going to take more than 5,000 words to address all of this.

There’s no rule stating the novel has to be exactly 50,000 words—in fact, many people participating in NaNoWriMo have already gone over— but since I haven’t really figured out how it ends, that’s not helping me at this point. Often when I’m working on something, I can dance around the ending for a while until all of a sudden, it comes into focus. That hasn’t happened yet, and with today being the 27th, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen before November ends.

I guess that doesn’t matter. I’ve still written almost an entire manuscript in a month, having started out with only the loosest of premises. The story has emerged through determination and discipline and (ironically) very little in the way of cosmic inspiration. Even if the ending doesn’t become clear to me between now and Monday, I’m still going to cross the finish line. The goal was to write a 50,000 word “novel” in one month, and barring a catastrophe of epic proportions, I’m going to reach that goal. I’m ridiculously proud of that.

In retrospect, it wasn’t really that hard. Yeah, I had to force myself to work on it every morning, but it’s not like I spent hours a day on this thing. Now that I’m trying to make my living as a writer, that was an important lesson to learn.