Me, fiction writing, and The Dream
Here's the thing about me and that novel. It's a dream. And I'm afraid that I'm going to be a really crappy novelist, or even if I'm not, that I won't be able to find an audience. (I don't need to make a living or be famous, but if nobody wants to read my work, there's not a lot of reason to write.)
If I never write that novel, I keep the dream alive. I never realize the dream, but I never have to kill it by discovering that I can't write fiction. I know I'm a risk-avoider, and I have to make a conscious decision to take risks that I am unreasonably afraid of. Apparently the short-term risk of finding out I can't tell a story on paper weighs more heavily in my mind than the risk of never even trying. Not trying is something I can do today, with the comforting belief that I'll try tomorrow. Today is always yesterday's tomorrow.
So this is me, making a conscious decision to take that risk and either see the dream bear fruit, or finally prune it and move on to something else.
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.