Found my 2019 NaNoWriMo draft last week and it stops mid sentence on page 34
I was digging through an old hard drive in my mom's garage in Sacramento last week and found the novel I started for NaNoWriMo back in 2019. I got to 11,400 words in 6 days and then just stopped cold, the last line is literally 'and then she opened the door to'. Three years later I still remember exactly where the story was going but I can't bring myself to reread the 34 pages because I know the writing is rough. The weird part is I opened it again last Tuesday and actually typed two new paragraphs before closing the file. Has anyone else gone back to a dead draft and just picked up from the middle instead of starting over?
Did you end up keeping those two new paragraphs or did you delete them right after? I did the same thing with a draft from 2017, sat on it for years, then one night just started writing from the middle like it was no big deal. The thing nobody tells you is that the start of a draft is usually the worst part because you're still figuring out the voice, so by page 34 you were probably finally hitting your groove. Picking up from the middle skips all the throat clearing. Honestly the 6 day sprint to 11k words is more than most people ever get done, so the draft is not as dead as it feels.