I've been absent from this little collection for a while because this year I've entered the NaNoWriMo challenge. National Novel Writing Month but it's a particularly enjoyable acronym I think. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days; the month of November. At first the notion is absurd, then somehow exciting. It must be possible. Here is a site that will give me numbers and graphs and show me how much those few hundred extra words a time can make the difference. I'm a list maker and a word count break-downer so it was too good for me to refuse. I want to write everything like this. With a little count down bar that tells me three hundred more words will take a day off of my time.
The other big bonus (and continual millstone) is that for this to work, and be as painless as possible, I have to write every day. There are no days off. When published authors tell you that the secret to being successful is writing every day I never doubted them but neither did I ever really understand. Whatever else you are, whatever else you do, you are a writer, every day and that sinks into your psyche pretty fast.
The joy of NaNoWriMo is that you need to get the words down. It's a rough draft and so every day you write. The questions, the should it go this way or this way can't be mulled over endlessly; a decision must be made and the words written down. There's no time for the doubt to set in. All that can come at the end.
For me it's a chance to write something that I have wanted to write for some time. Last year I travelled to a place where everyone's lives were changed by something big and bad. I've been trying to make some sense of it ever since. I found myself toying endlessly with these half ideas and difficult thoughts and then here I was exactly a year on from my trip and faced with the reason to get on and bang out a story. I chose my point of view, jotted down a few general points of direction and sat down to write. The first two days were heady, I lived a high of excitement that I could finally make sense of this. I could lose myself in my imagination and also in a real world that had meant so much to me, if only for a tiny moment of life. Fusing these two aspects gave me an energy that I haven't written with since my teenage years. I rediscovered what it's all about. Since then of course the day job and real life have intervened making writing feel challenging and occasionally chore like on some days but the story is shaping up and the thoughts are forming themselves nicely. And to think all I needed was a word count stats page to get me going.
