NaNoWriMo… 2009 is the year
NaNoWriMo is coming. November is National Novel Writing Month. Write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. That's only 1667 words a day, every day, for thirty days.
Five years ago, give or take a few days, I seriously considered writing that novel. I'd discovered NaNo the year before, but I was taking night classes and writing 20-page papers every week, which was a pretty good excuse to give it a pass. The next year rolled around, I bought the "guide book" ("No Plot, No Problem!"), and began to take notes for the novel, and when November 1 rolled around, I chickened out.
1667 words a day is a heavy commitment. And I was afraid of failing. That's a lot of my reason for never getting around to writing, but this time it wasn't fear of failing to write a good book, but fear of just failing to stick with it.
But here's the deal… it's five years later and I still haven't written a book. A year or so ago, I decided to get serious about writing fiction, bought myself an AlphaSmart "word processor" so I could get away from the distractions of Internet, and poked around at getting started. Just couldn't get it rolling. Last year, I took an online writing workshop, hoping that deadlines and expectations would break the "log jam" and get things moving. But it was a total waste of my money. The writing assignments were poorly focused, and I didn't get any useful feedback. That blew the wind out of my sails… I was counting on the accountability to get me , and all it did was frustrate me.
NaNo is a real deadline, and I'm planning on meeting up with the other local participants for the moral support and goading-on that I need. And my real hope isn't that I'll have written a good book, but that I'll have cleared that mental barrier that has kept me from getting started, so that I'm more comfortable with writing the next one.