Why NaNoWriMo?

It’s 7:30 pm and I just put the baby to bed. A quiet peace descends almost instantly over the apartment as I quickly pick up all her toys and start doing the dishes. I still need to make and eat dinner and somehow I just can’t put my feet up until the apartment is clean. And I have to write about 2000 words tonight before I can relax. I groan inwardly. Why had I made this ridiculous commitment?

Every November, thousands of people across the world participate in NaNoWriMo. It’s National Novel Writing Month, and these crazy individuals decide to commit to writing a novel in 30 days. 30 days, 50,000 words.

When I first heard of NaNoWriMo I was ecstatic. “Sign me up!” I crowed and spent 7 feverish days thinking how wonderful this was and how surprisingly easy it was.

Then I hit a wall and couldn’t make it much further. It began to seem silly to sacrifice my sleep (sleep is very important to me) and time spent relaxing while I slaved away at a self-inflicted assignment. It felt like school again. Isn’t creativity supposed to make you happy? Maybe I just don’t like writing as much as I thought I did. I gave up at about 15,000 words.

I tried again the next year. I made it to 22,000. Once again, my heart just wasn’t in it. Plus I had a job – I was a first year English teacher, so the only writing I was doing was lesson plans and corrections on papers.

The next year I didn’t even sign up. What was the point? It would just stress me out unnecessarily and make me feel guilty – which is so weird, because why would you feel guilty for not writing a novel in a month?

This year however, I was determined. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it; I could make the commitment and follow through. Also, I wasn’t working because I was taking a year off to spend time with my beautiful brand new daughter. What excuse could I possibly make?

Turns out a lot. While staying at home with my daughter has been a delight, it’s also surprisingly exhausting. Often, I would try writing during her naps so that once she went to bed for the night I could relax. Suddenly I was shirking all sorts of responsibilities so that I could cram in an hour or two of writing every day. Because I tried to write in the mornings, I was going grocery shopping, running errands, and taking walks later and later or sometimes not at all. Then there were those days when it just didn’t happen and there I was, with my eyes wanting to close, or my mind just wanting to turn off with a book or a TV show instead of plunking out some truly terrible prose that I knew was no good – all for what? So I could say, “Hey everyone, I wrote 50,000 words of crap! I will never ever show this to anybody, and I didn’t even manage to finish my story, so I didn’t even technically write a novel in a month. But I got a cool certificate and this little bar on the NaNoWriMo website turned purple when it used to be blue!”

Yeah, that was pretty much the reason.

The day I finished NaNoWriMo I was elated. I made it to 50,000 words and my husband, daughter and I went out for eggnog lattes. I felt successful, I felt proud that I had seen it through to the end, but most of all I really felt relieved that my time would be my own again, that I could invite my sister over to hang out at the end of the day instead of sitting by myself grumpily writing – or worse, ignoring what she was saying and wishing she would leave soon because I still had to write my 1,667 words before bed.

But two days later, I found myself itching to write. It was December 3^rd, and I hadn’t written in 2, going on 3, days. I wanted to pull out the computer and delve into sentence formulation again. I missed it.

There are many people who have a lot to say about how NaNoWriMo isn’t worth it. It leaves you with a crappy novel, it makes writing stressful rather than fun, makes creativity a to-do item instead of a delight, it’s a rather futile activity. Surely, it is all these things for some people.

BUT.

But they say it takes 30 days to make something a habit, and I’m pretty sure writing on a regular basis is a habit for me now.

And I’ve read over and over again that writers don’t always like writing. They need (as in a deep down, soul-wrenching need) to write though, and so they do it anyway. That’s a lot like NaNoWriMo.

And if we aren’t doing anything creative because we keep putting it off, maybe we need to add it to our to do list – so we actually will do it.

My husband and I often talk about how strange it is that human beings know something is good for them, know that once they get started on it, they will enjoy themselves and feel good because of it, yet we refuse to do this thing. The best example of this in my life is exercise. I hate exercising. More than the average person. I will come up with almost any reason NOT to exercise. Which is strange, because when I work out, I feel great. I’ve trained for and run a half marathon before – it felt wonderful and I felt healthy and had a good body image for the first time in my whole life. But as soon as the half-marathon was over, I stopped. Then I did kickboxing for awhile. I hated going, but loved it once I got there. I would drive home from work and try to think of excuses that could get me out of going to kickboxing class. My husband pretty much made me go, and I always thanked him afterwards (though I cursed him inwardly while I was driving there) because I felt so good, and I’d really enjoyed it.

NaNoWriMo is like that for people who tell themselves, and sometimes others, that they want to write, they’d love to write a novel someday, they wish they could get paid to write for a living, they wish they had time to write. NaNoWriMo can be the fuel that changes these people – myself included – from “someday” people into “now” people. Even if that means making yourself write an abysmal novel when you’d rather be sleeping.

A few excellent Goodreads quotes from people who know what they are talking about should sum this up nicely:

“Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.”
- Julie Cameron

“Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.” - A. Lee Martinez

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.” - Robert Haas

Time to stop being a waiter. See you next November.

P.S. If you do undertake the challenge next year, I’d love to be your writing buddy. My i.d. on the NaNoWriMo website is ashill. Hope to hear from you!

Why bother writing?

When I was little I spent an inordinate amount of time writing truly terrible fiction. I read frequently, but apparently much of what I read didn’t impact or improve my writing until I was much, much older. Meanwhile, ten-year-old me would craft story after story about heroines who were all named Laura or Elizabeth and all had extremely limited vocabulary, but somehow still managed to win the boy and defeat the evil headmistress at the orphanage.

Later, I reread my stories and realized that I was a terrible writer. I decided to spare the world any more attempts at authorial fame and stopped my creative writing efforts.

The older I got, the more the idea of writing a novel seemed absurd. I was far too practical for that. The odds of getting published were slim to none. The odds that I had talent even slimmer and I didn’t like the idea of doing of something that I was bad at. Sadly, this attitude has stopped me from doing many things in my life, from taking many risks that could have potentially been rewarded, and from learning things that would have helped me grow as a person.

I am not sure at what pivotal moment I started writing fiction again. I think one of my friends started talking about her own creative writing pursuits and in a nostalgic fit I broke out the laptop and tapped out some fairly decent – or at least not completely abysmal – prose. Then NaNoWriMo happened. I heard about NaNoWriMo from this same friend and was instantly intrigued – write a novel in a month? What’s more, write a novel in my FAVORITE month (November)? Why not! I made it to 22,000 words that month on a goal of 50,000. It was much harder than I’d anticipated. But the damage had been done and I was officially writing again. Not only that, I had two (TWO!) different story ideas bouncing around.

This was momentarily delightful, but soon writing began to seem like a waste of time – what purpose did it serve, after all? I certainly wasn’t going to be able to make a career out of it. The more research I did, the more evident it became that unless I was fast friends with someone in New York who happened to be an agent, it was unlikely that I would ever get published. So why rack up outrageous word counts on sub-par novels only to have them sit in a file on my computer?

My enthusiasm waned.

I trudged through a few different novel ideas, always running out of steam quickly once I reread my prose (once I was over 30,000 into a novel when I realized it was utter garbage and stopped the draft).

And therein lies my dilemma. I cannot separate the creative act of writing from my skill. I have the mistaken notion that art must well-done to be worth doing – a theory that complete ignores the artistic and creative process. A theory that ignores the pleasure derived from creating something out of your own head, with your own hands. A theory that claims that art is only worthwhile if it makes it out into the light to be appreciated (or despised) by others.

Recently however, I believe I discovered a cure to this debilitating viewpoint.  I read Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem, a manual on inspiration, the writing process, and quarantining your inner editor. Baty assures his readers that the joy of writing novels is found in using your imagination to tell stories, no matter how terrible, and just because you can. In short, writing is about the joy it brings you, not about any hoped for material gain or fame – and therefore, it doesn’t matter how good your novel is, it only matters that you wrote it.

And so, dear readers, I will henceforth no longer regard my writing as just verbal spewing on a page, but MY verbal spewing on a page, the spewing of which I very much enjoyed. I will find joy and entertainment in writing my novel instead of pride, which is far too fickle, and I will view novel writing as a new kind of literary therapy, as rewarding and entertaining as reading a book.

If you are lucky, perhaps I will treat you to a sample of my latest caper…it is about a young, dynamite blonde named Beth who works as an editor for Webster’s dictionary and therefore has an absurdly large vocabulary, but alas! her evil boss has it out for her and never lets her leave, which is why she has no love life -- until she decides to overthrow her boss and start her own dictionary!

Happy noveling to you all.