One day left. Hours really. And, are you ready for this??? I’m only about 400 words away from completing NaNoWriMo!! Yeah. I’m impressed, too. My latest novel is now 79,600 words! It’s gonna happen people!
But before I finish, I thought I’d reflect on the adventure that was NaNoWriMo for me this year.
I started it on a whim, not really all that serious about it. Yeah, maybe I’ll do it. I lined up all my excuses to explain why I wouldn’t finish it. They were good excuses. Excellent, in fact, so when the end of the month rolled around and I was still stuck somewhere around 30,000 words, I’d be able to explain.
With my safety net in place, I started writing. In the beginning the words just flowed and flowed. That was mostly because I’d been sitting on this story for months, so I had a lot to turn loose on the page. It felt good to finally write it down. And doing it in such a crazy rush, felt good, too. I was on a writing high that first week. Who cares if this isn’t my best writing. Just get it on the page, I thought. I’ll fix it later. That’s a very freeing feeling. Kind of like dancing when no one is looking. Or singing loudly while driving on back country roads. I was just flying over those hills and swinging my hips like I was still twenty and hadn’t birthed three babies.
And just when I thought I’d write the whole dang thing in a week, the election happened.
I was frozen in my tracks and waffled on how to proceed. I could let me emotions be a roadblock to my progress and just one more excellent excuse for why I didn’t finish, or….I could use that anger/sadness/horror/fear to drive my writing, just like a basketball team that lost the previous season by one point and goes into the next season FIRED UP. Instead, I went with another option.
I dove whole-hog into my story and pretended that the real world didn’t exist. I shut down social media, silenced the radio and television, nodded sagely while silenting saying “blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-I-can’t-hear-you” each time other people brought up the election results. I lived inside my story.
And you know what? With the exception of a really nasty character with a bad combover appearing in one chapter, it worked. I wrote like a madwoman, pounding out that wordcount right up until….Thanksgiving happened. Cousins and food and friends and wine and the prolonged presence of several foster puppies took over my house. I lost almost a whole week to gluttony and sloth and puppy poo. When I finally got back to my laptop I thought, No way. Ain’t gonna happen. Break out the excuses.
But I wrote anyway. Even if I was going to fall short of my 50,000 word goal. With three days left I still had over 10,000 words to write and I was stumped. I couldn’t see the ending and I was getting bored with my characters’ indecision. So much for NaNoWriMo. I couldn’t sacrifice my story just to get a winner’s badge.
And then yesterday, I sat down at the computer and I thought—just write something. Anything. Even if it’s a stupid idea, just slap it on the page and see what happens.
And you know what? The ending found me. It was nothing like I thought it would be. Once again those characters surprised me. They were much better people than I’d imagined them to be. The magic happened. This is why I write. I write for these moments when what comes out of my fingertips comes straight from my heart, completely bypassing my brain or my conscience or my grand plan. It appears on the screen and I think—wtf? Who wrote that? This is the magic I love about writing.
Remember that book, Harold and The Purple Crayon?
It was a simple little book with a purple cover. All the illustrations were line drawings. Harold starts drawing a picture and suddenly he’s in the picture and he’s creating a whole world and then he’s in that world. He encounters a forest, but doesn’t want to get lost so he draws a forest of only one tree. He’s hungry, so he draws apples on the tree to eat. But like any good story, there is peril! He almost drowns, but he draws a boat to save him. His adventures take him anywhere his mind wants to go. This is how writing works for me. I have one idea, so like Harold, I just start, and then I see where it takes me and if the story is fun/interesting/moving for me, then there’s a good chance it will be for the reader, too.
Would I have completed this story if I wasn’t doing NaNoWriMo? Probably. Just not in a month. What was so cool about doing it this way is that it forced me to keep going when I didn’t trust my characters or my crayon or the magic. And I learned that the magic will always show up. I just have to start writing.
Speaking of writing, I have 400 more words to spit out….
My Life in Paragraphs 
In my previous life, before pet sitting and such, I wrote 7 or 8 books…I’ve now forgotten! (One got a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, my crowning achievement.) But whenever I was stuck I took a walk, and the next sections often came to me fully formed. I had to get out of my own way, a process that was a lot like yours of just sitting down and writing and letting the story find you. There’s a little of that in blogging too. Almost as if we don’t know what we have to say until we’ve said it.
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Love that – ‘almost as if we don’t know what we have to say until we’ve said it.’ Exactly! Sometimes when I’m stewing on an issue, I have to actually start writing about it to figure out how I feel and what I think. Kindred spirits.
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I’m with you completely.
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