It's not the end of the month. There's still over a week left, and so the only way to say this is "I'm a quitter." I'm not finishing my novel (which is at ~23,000 words, and so at about page 80). But I have reasons for doing so, which I'm giving to you:
1. Forcing a person to sit down and write 1667 words a day constricts creativity. Since there is this huge deadline in such a short amount of time, I'm required to push out words faster than I can think of them. To the NaNoWriMo people this means that your work will be about quantity not quality. What this means to me is: "I'm not even allowed to think about my novel, I just have to write frantically and hope a story happens." I've determined that the way I write best is in sporadic chunks: a couple hundred words here, a maybe a thousand there if I'm really feeling the muse. Mostly, though, I find if I sit down and write a few hundred good words in an hour then I have accomplished something. I don't feel accomplished writing 2000 words that have no meaning to me.
2. There comes time in a person's life when he should write a novel. This is not that time for me. I'm in the midst of college, trying to hold onto life financially and mentally, and so I need to make smaller, more manageable goals. I'm pushing myself to focus on the short story now. In fact, one of the characters in the novel has turned himself into a short story. By asking myself to write a short story in two weeks is a much more attainable goal, especially when I have books to read, papers to write, and tests to study for.
3. There is a great deal to learn as a writer before attempting the novel. Maybe for some authors (Dan Brown perhaps) there was never that period of learning, but like my example author, that can be the quality of the writing suffers. There is structure to every novel (and a lack of structure is just as important as structure), a building of events, a creation of a cast, and I need to learn about this before writing a novel. What I know how to write is a short story (although how well I write them is something different). I plan in the future to read novels as a writer would: figuring out how the author made the book and why what (s)he did worked or didn't work. Does this zap creativity? No, if anything it will show me what works, and what rules I can break to create a whole new reading experience.
Maybe these aren't good reasons for quitting. A person could easily tell me, "These are just excuses so you don't have to push yourself." Well, person, to you they might be excuses, but to me, it's a matter of priorities, and I can always write a novel later, when I feel comfortable writing one, and using my own timeframe.
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