Yes, I’ve once again* entered that artificial arena of neurotic constraint and gratuitous creativity sponsored by the good (though by now addled) folks at Nanowrimo. National (though it’s gone global) Novel Writing Month. A 50,000 word draft of novel in 30 days. Join nearly 300,000 other dreamers doing the same thing and keeping tabs on each other at the Nanowrimo website, its forums, messages, Q and A, and so on. Giving out free advice, titles, sympathy, inspiration, horror stories and pep talks. The whole project runs on a shoestring. You can read a little more about the details here.
I’m at 10,500-something words right now, some 6000 words short of where I should be, if we were keeping score. Which I am. But not. 1667 words a day is nothing more than many novelists write all year round, so do not take too seriously the self-pity and the indulgent whining heard from your marginally stable neighborhood ‘Wrimo. He or she need do only one thing: keep writing. Nothing else is acceptable. “Someday I’m going to write a novel,” meet your moment (month?) of truth.
And, to tell the truth (available in good novels everywhere), I’m on my second plot, after severe crash-and-burn a few days ago, but at last words and ideas are flowing. All my strategies and tricks from three decades of writing went on strike and picketed my brain. But now I’m back (breakdown averted once again) and I’m on it. And that first story? Not stillborn, just arrested, delayed, challenged, developmentally disabled. “Differently scripted.” I still have hopes for it. With surgery, therapy, time … “Your children will disappoint you. Love them anyway.”
Novelist and blogger Chuck Wendig waxes vulgarly eloquent on the pitfalls of The Nanowrimo Simplification (sounds like a title for The Big Bang Theory) in this 2011 post, “25 things you should know about Nanowrimo.” For anyone interested, he’s dead on target, and the four-letter words underscore the realities of the writerly world.
Still, if you plant butt on chair and do the writing, in one month you will undeniably clutch in the form of hot little electrons what your dreaming-of-writing-a-novel-before-I die self did not have previously: material to work with, to cudgel and trim, exercise (exorcise) and massage into a draft of what could become a novel. With time and much more effort. O Grasshopper, the draft is only a beginning. But thou art now A Writer.
I’m off to drive my wife to a weaving workshop in Massachusetts. Then it’s back home to move the story forward another 500-1000 words before Sunday turns into Monday and its 1667 additional words. Wish me luck.
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Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month.
*Here’s one of several posts from my 2011 Nanowrimo experience.
A Druid Way 