NaNoWriMo

Des­per­ate Times=>Desperate Measures.

That’s all I can chalk it up to. I am “doing” NaNoW­riMo, oth­er­wise known as Nation­al Nov­el Writ­ing Month.

Every year in Novem­ber, bazil­lions of authors around the world com­mit to writ­ing a nov­el in the month of November—50,000 words is what they rec­om­mend, I believe. It seems like a rather arbi­trary num­ber, but cer­tain­ly it’s a fair amount of words to get down on paper in a month. The very idea of this has seemed equal parts ter­ri­fy­ing and ridicu­lous to me in the past. 

BUT…let’s just say that the Cur­rent Novel/WIP has had some trou­ble in the area of get­ting words on paper. It could be that its author has become quite crafty and sophis­ti­cat­ed in her pro­cras­ti­na­tion and research diver­sions. It could also be that it’s been a heck­u­va year. What­ev­er the rea­son, it is now time to haul some serious…words onto the page.

I have dis­dained NaNoW­riMo in the past. Snob­bery comes eas­i­er than words for me. When I con­sid­ered mak­ing the move this Novem­ber I spent an inor­di­nate amount of Octo­ber’s writ­ing time read­ing the archive of Pep Talks on the NaNoW­riMo web­site. I could­n’t help but notice that the authors I most admired did­n’t actu­al­ly do NaNoW­riMo, but rather stood in stu­pe­fied awe/disbelief of those who did. (They also gave grand pep talks to these peo­ple they clear­ly did not quite under­stand.) “See!” I thought. “This will nev­er work for me—care­ful writ­ers devot­ed to craft and vision and art can’t just slap words on a page and expect that it’s going to turn into a novel!”

And I still believe this to be true. How­ev­er, it is infi­nite­ly eas­i­er to write a nov­el when there are some words on a page to work with—be it 5 or 50 or 50,000. They can be crap­py words devoid of any­thing artis­tic or lit­er­ary, but they are still a start. The art comes with the revi­sion. Dear God, I hope the art comes in the revision.

I had a decent start on this nov­el before I began, so I’m not doing NaNoW­riMo in its purest form. I am just try­ing to get dang near the fin­ish of this unwieldy sto­ry. I’m count­ing chap­ters, not words. I have no use for the badges and the meters and graphs on the web­site. I’m just doing my best to sort of throw up on the page every day and sim­ply keep going.

And here’s the thing: when you do this every sin­gle day, which I have for a whole week now (yes, even when bone tired on Sun­day night), your head and heart stay in your sto­ry in a dif­fer­ent way. I know this is prob­a­bly not rev­e­la­to­ry to any­one but me, but I’m kind of astound­ed by it. It gets eas­i­er every day on some lev­el. I know where I am, I know where I’m going. I’m let­ting my sub­con­scious hang out. I’m using brack­ets lib­er­al­ly (i.e. [put some­thing here that makes sense]). I am not chastis­ing myself for a wan­der­ing point of view and incon­sis­tent detail­ing. I just keep going.

I’m sus­pi­cious that there might be some­thing to it after all.… I even went to a “write-in” at a local book­store. (This is so not me.) And it was a lit­tle odd…I don’t write in groups nor­mal­ly, but def­i­nite­ly not scary, and they had com­fort­ing snacks and they made me a but­ton for the mon­th’s jour­ney. I’m step­pin’ out, peo­ple! ‘Tis a new day!

Can’t wait to see what sort of mess awaits for me to work with in December.…