If you follow my blog at all, you know that I’ve participated in both NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo for the past several years. If you’ve read my most recent blogs, you’ll know that I’ve been struggling to finish writing my latest book for several months now. Even dedicating both Camp NaNos to this book didn’t do the trick.

I find that writing is often akin to jumping on a treadmill—I keep going without actually moving forward. With this latest book, in particular, I already had the ending written and just couldn’t seem to get the story to go there. Yes, I wrote—thousands and thousands more words than I wanted to write. And I was still just as far away from the end as I had been when I started. Or so it seemed.

I’m glad to say that I finally made it (and completely changed the ending, of course), and in celebration as well as exasperation, I would like to document this latest writing experience via some memes that must have been written by some poor souls who’ve had similar experiences.

 

So you get an idea for a book, only to discover that

But

Yep, Madeleine L’Engle. At least you get it.

And Dory has some valuable advice, too:

So you do, but sometimes

Or you read over what you wrote yesterday and wonder,

Because

And there are those times when the page stays blank because of

But no matter what,

So your days start to look like this:

Through it all, you have to remember that

By the end of the process, you think this is a pretty good approximation of your mental state while writing:

You’re glad you stuck with it, however, because

But you’re not quite there yet. You still have to