A Win and a Beginning

There’s a magic to this NaNo business that I need to get a handle on in the next few days. It’s a clear and obvious sort of magic, but I haven’t yet learned to make it work for me.

This is my second year participating in National Novel Writing Month, and I’ve gotten so much from it. The month and the challenge – to produce a 50,000 word draft of a novel – will be over tomorrow, and I already have my technical Win. Like last year, it was a tremendous success for me. I started the month with an idea, and over the last four weeks I’ve worked and built on that idea and have sketched out a novel that’s full of ideas and substance. And I’m very happy with this beginning. I hope that the parallel to last year ends here. Because then, I barely advanced with the work over the course of the following eleven months. The mindset that worked so well in November evaporated, and I never figured out how to get it back.

What’s obvious is that it has to do with a deadline and a commitment. Both this year and last, starting with those two elements and a good idea, I was able to force myself to the keyboard multiple times each day, and to press to add an average of 1,667 words to the manuscript each day. After November ended, I wasn’t able to do so. And now, after having re-visited that very productive mindset, I’m at least a little clearer about what shifted that I can’t allow to shift this time around.

During Nano, I’ve granted myself permission to fail. I keep writing even when I don’t believe in what I’m writing, out of the commitment to get the words out and to hit the 2,000 daily that I aim for. I sometimes feel flat, uninspired, a little bored or even miserable as I’m producing those words. Because I don’t feel I’m writing well. The inner critic is very present and very loud in my head, telling me with every key stroke that I’m producing crap.

But rarely does it turn out to be crap. There’s always something there that I can use. Some few sentences, or a description, a character or an insight give me material that actually carries the work forward, that successfully fills in a gap in the narrative, the plot, or in the guts of the piece that I was trying to fill. Which then fuels me to push on, so I go through the entire thing again.

In normal time, there are several ways in which my process would differ. First of all, I typically don’t force myself to keep writing when I feel that I’m writing crap. I might go at it for a short while, but rarely beyond two or three hundred words. And if I do press on, it’s generally going to be with a fresh start, after abandoning what I’ve done that I don’t feel good about. I don’t write far enough through that pain of ‘writing crap’ to have anything to look back on the next day, something I might realize isn’t as useless as I thought it was.

Another difference is that during these Novembers I’ve been able to really put off any editing. I start the month knowing that I won’t be doing any through the entire month. It is really ‘out of mind’. So I continue writing free, able to think of it all as play, experiment, exploration, knowing that in the editing process I may change any or everything.

What it comes down to is that Nano incentivizes me to write much looser than I normally permit myself. And in the looseness lies the magic. I allow ideas to intrude sentence by sentence, make up characters on the fly, bring in or ignore key elements, or zig where I intended to zag just moments before.

Already, I’m feeling the signals of approaching anxiety that’s of a totally different flavor than anything I’ve felt all month. I did feel anxiety during the month, but forced myself to write through it. As I’ll have to force myself through the tightness that’s threatening now. I feel optimistic because I have a better understanding of it than I did last year. And the greatest gift of NaNo is the self-confidence it inspires. It’s amazing to have a rough draft of a novel where a month ago there was barely a scenario. It inspires great faith in the creative process and in my ability to enter into it. Every Day. And day by day.