You Don’t Need NaNoWriMo

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It’s that time of year again, when the leaves are changing, the temperature’s dropping, and established and would-be writers around the country are hunched over keyboards and stacks of paper, pounding with slowly numbing fingertips on worn keys as they push, strive, claw and crawl to make the 1667 words per day needed to add up to a 50k word novel at the end of 30 days.

It’s NaNoWriMo, and that means if you travel in writerly circles, as I do, your feeds are blown up with this weird unsayable moniker, with the braggings and boastings of those who are shattering their daily word count goals, and the wails and lamentations of those who aren’t. It’s cacophonous and wearying, viewed a certain way, or inspiring and invigorating, viewed another.

Personally, I won’t be partaking. I didn’t last year, I won’t this year, and I don’t see the need in years to come, for that matter. But that owes more to my personal feelings on what motivates us than it does to the little internet carnival that NaNoWriMo has become.

As a motivational tool, I think NaNoWriMo is pretty awesome. Anything that can get people thinking creatively and telling the stories locked away in their dark, squishy little hearts is a good thing by me. And there is certainly something empowering about seeing the hordes of writers taking to the internet, each with a dragon to slay that is unique and personal and wholly their own, but which is at the same time a dragon that the writing community sets out to slay together. Swords made of words, axes of pages, slings and arrows of plots and characters all fly at the beast with the intensity, voracity, and — it must be so — insanity that the task requires.

People working together can accomplish things that, apart, they never could, and one of the really neat things about NaNo is how it transmogrifies writing — almost by definition a solitary, lonely act — into a communal rite.

And that’s pretty cool.

But the task is gigantic. It’s a moonshot with a trebuchet. A marathon without a day of training. A climb up Everest without a pack. And while the challenge surely motivates some, it’s too much by half for others. To make 50k words in 30 days requires 1667 words every day, no weekends off, no mental health days, no excuses. It’s no surprise, then, that the path to the dragon’s lair is littered with the bodies of the fallen, the strewn pages of the slain, the half-formed words of the faint of heart.

And that’s a shame.

But writing takes all stripes. Some are motivated by the challenge while some would break themselves upon it. Personally, I know that attempting a challenge like NaNo and failing would fill me with more writerly self-doubt than already hangs over my head on any given day.

I’m also leery of the gimmickiness of the whole affair. Whether you’re an accomplished or aspiring writer, going balls-out to draft 50k words from scratch smacks of spectacle rather than substance. It reeks of bluster and swagger rather than actual accomplishment (“I’ve written a novel this month, what did you get done?”). There’s a desperation behind it, I think; a frenetic surge of energy that cannot be sustained.

Really, what bothers me about NaNo is the same thing that bothers me about New Year’s Resolutions, birthday gifts to the self, and any other extrinsic sources of motivation that we come up with to push ourselves out of our comfort zones: the fact that they’re arbitrary and manufactured. We choose this day or that month to try something new, to make a change that we have apparently been wanting in our lives, but why that day? Why that month? Does the fact that it’s a new year make it easier to lose weight, start exercising, keep a cleaner house, stay in touch with friends, reconnect with family? Of course not. Does the fact that it’s November make it easier to write fifty thousand words? Naturally not, doubly so if you live in the U.S. and have the Thanksgiving holidays to contend with. We take these steps, we attempt to make these changes, not necessarily because we’ve decided it’s time for ourselves to do these things, but rather because everybody else around us is doing the same thing.

But here’s the thing. If a change is what your life needs, the day to make that change is today, whether today happens to be January 1st or the beginning of NaNoWriMo or the first day of Lent or your birthday or just another day in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable month (I’m looking at you, June.) If you’re ready to start writing a novel, why put it off until November? If you want to start exercising, or gardening, or reading more, or cherishing the lamentations of your enemies or whatever, why put it off until January?

We only get so much time on our little blue speck. You owe it to yourself to do everything you can to make your life better in the time that you have.

If writing a novel will make your life better, then you should be doing it already. Whether it’s NaNoWriMo or not. (Although, again, to reiterate, if NaNoWriMo motivates you within your existing desire and work toward writing, then, hey, go for it.)

And if you’re kicking around the idea of eating healthier, exercising, whatever, and you’re just looking for a good time to start, or you’re waiting until you’re ready, well… we’re never ready.

You just have to go and do it.

Seriously.

Right now.

Go slay the dragons.

Unexpected Response

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Chuck’s challenge this week: a horror story in three sentences. And since I’m still on a sci-fi bent, why not sci-fi horror?

Three sentences almost doesn’t merit a post here, but it’s a thing I wrote, so here it is. In fact, I might do a few more. These are fun.

Unexpected Response

When we first aimed our dishes at the sky, we feared we might not find anybody. Then we found somebody, and we feared they might not understand us.

Now they’re here, and there is not enough firepower in the world to save us.

Collecting Fireflies

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I’m flolloping around in the doldrums of the wake of finishing my first draft.

There’s depression here. An aimless, impotent feeling. I’ve gone from working tirelessly on a singular project day in and day out to … well, not. To working on side projects, to taking a little time to refocus and rethink your goals for the next few months, and I’ve felt a little lost.

It’s a lull, to be sure; a haze as transient as the weather. Still, it sucks at the feet like a bog, a slow inevitable creep of inertia. I sit back wondering if I’ll be able to make myself do it again, if I can make myself go through another six month draft, another three month edit, a brand new project, a rehashing of an old one. And I don’t know! I really wonder if I have any more good ideas in me, any more stories waiting to be told, or if I’m deluding myself that the ones currently in the telling are worth the time I’ve spent on them. Maybe every idea has a bit of validity, but by the same token, every candle in the darkness gives off a little light. The hope, of course, is that I’m not a candle in the darkness, but a raging forest fire, or at least a cozy little bonfire around which some lucky individuals might sometime warm their hands and their hearts.

But these times of respite are important for the body, mind and soul. Because as I find myself not exhausting myself on a capital “P” Project, I find there’s a little more time in my day for thought, for aimless and okay-to-be-aimless writing, for reflection, for the cultivating of new ideas, for the reviewing of old ones.

I keep a little Evernote file for potential future story ideas. (If you’re not using some sort of brain-dump software like Evernote, you should be.) Some of them are just a couple of words, some are great sprawling paragraphs. Any time an idea strikes me (and ideas striking are about like neutrinos striking screens deep below the earth — they happen millions of times a second, but only incredibly rarely does matter actually contact matter and cause a reaction) I jot it down.

Well, today came one of those lightning flashes, so I reached for the old bottle. And while I was stuffing this particular lighting strike into the jar, I took a peek in there. And there were over a dozen little fireflies buzzing around in there, dinging off the walls; some with the reckless lunatic energy, some as massive and indomitable as barges.

So I feel a little bit better about the lull I’m in. It’ll pass soon enough, and it’ll be time to get back to work, catching more fireflies, stuffing them into my jar, selecting some for release back into the wild.

Hooray for Time

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Scientists have determined that the exact measurement of time at the molecular level is impossible.

In other words, time is complete and absolute bunk.

At no time is this more evident than Daylight Savings Time, an outdated and archaic practice that arbitrarily picks a day in the fall and stretches it by an hour, then arbitrarily picks another day in spring and shrinks it by an hour.

Now, a lot of people go about gleefully talking about the extra hour of sleep they get when we “fall back”, which is fine and dandy. But those of with kids know the truth.

DST means NOTHING.

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The kids are still going to wake up when their rhythm tells them to wake up, regardless of any “conditioning” or “preparing” you might have done.

My wife and I thought we were clever. We had slowly been pushing the sprouts’ bedtimes back since about a month ago, so that they could go to bed at the same “time” regardless of the numbers on the clock face.

HA.

Last night was Halloween, so any sort of regular sleep schedule was out. And this morning sprout #1 woke up to poop, which he cannot do by himself yet even though the attending adult is nothing more than a cheerleader and heinie-wiper. Oh, did I mention that he was up thirty minutes before his regular time, which was a full hour and a half ahead of the clock time?

Not only did we not gain time, we actually lost time on this exchange, which has me superjazzed about “giving the hour back” in Spring, let me tell you.

Meanwhile, it’s currently seven PM and it feels like midnight.

Thanks, Obama.

Seriously, DST is a joke. You want a non-arse-over-elbows, earth-specific time anomaly to get psyched about? Try the leap-second.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Strange Seasoning

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We’re coming into one of the strangest times of the year for the writer: the Holidays.

The dreaded Holidays bring with them a legitimate army of distractions, obstructions, and pitfalls for the writer. Between a total disruption of the work schedule, extra obligations to spend time with the family you aren’t seeing regularly, and oh yeah, let’s not forget, here in America there are at least two massive debilitating food comas on the horizon. Time to write is hard enough to come by when things are normal, but things are hardly normal at this time of year.

Which is why I find it particularly sadistic to put a writer’s torture device like NaNoWriMo smack in the middle of it… but that’s a rant for another day. (I’m not doing NaNo this year, nor do I have plans to ever do it. I have better things to do with my time than subject myself to the slings and arrows of attempting to write an entire half of a novel [50,000 words do not a novel make] in the least writer-friendly part of the year. Further, if you need NaNo to finally motivate you to write that novel you’ve been thinking about writing, then maybe — maybe! — writing isn’t your thing. But there I go digressing.)

On a writer’s website I frequent, an aspiring writer, who seemed in true distress, asked the question in a state of near hysteria: with meals to cook, shopping to do, family to visit, kids to take care of, etc… how do you find the time to write through this time?

Well.

I may be a hopeless optimist, and I may be a tireless (or tiresome, depending on your point of view) motivator — I really do make myself sick sometimes with all the rah-rah-rah and YOU CAN DO IT speeches around here — but one thing I’m also guilty of is a bit of a blunt streak. Okay, maybe less of a streak and more of a huge angry puckered blunt scar. I don’t like to mince words, and most of the time, a harsh dose of the truth is a lot more helpful. (This gets me in a lot of trouble with my wife and, well, people in general, but at 35, I am who I am.)

So I responded the only way I could think to: The same way you make time any other time of the year. Sure, you’ve got Holiday Things clamoring for your attention to the left and to the right, like a swarm of needy toddlers who have just learned that you will actually come running the moment they say “daddy”. And yeah, maybe you’re more obligated to devote time to these Things than usual. But the way you take time to write now is the same way you take time at any other point in the year.

You prioritize. You set values on the things that matter to you and you allocate time accordingly. Maybe this is the year where instead of waking up at 3 AM to go Black Friday shopping, you sleep in until 6 instead, and get up to write while the rest of the family is fighting for their lives in the mad crush of humanity trying to get to the Tickle Me Elmos of this year. Maybe instead of sitting around watching the Lions lose on Turkey Day (a favorite national pastime) you sneak off to jot down a few words. Maybe you don’t have to cook EVERY SINGLE DISH for your family’s dinner, and with the time you free up, you can escape to your study (or your car, or your bathroom, or your wherever) to get some words on the page. You might upset a few people when you bust up their traditions, but you’ll stay on target for your WIP.

Or maybe you multitask and pull double duty. Wake up even earlier to do your writing before the family wakes up, or stay up late to pound the page after they fall asleep. Keep the laptop on the kitchen counter while you’re cooking and season your draft while you season the mashed potatoes. Jot notes on characters and plot points in your favorite organizational writer’s app while you’re waiting in line to shop at 4 AM. Granted, you do this, and you’ll certainly have some consequences: sleep deprivation and overly salty mashed potatoes at the very least.

Or a lunatic altered personality that grins vacuously at a computer while stirring a bowl full of, apparently, WHOLE UNCUT VEGETABLES. Who could be that happy? Who could use a computer at all in the kitchen without destroying it immediately with splattered sauce and flying crumbs?

Or, and here’s the really crazy part where we entertain notions that maybe we don’t want to, you don’t.

It’s tempting to think that with the time off you could or even should get tons of extra work in on your writing. But you don’t have to.

This is not me telling you to make like Elsa and let your writing go over the holidays. Momentum matters, and you’re gonna be turkey-drunk enough to have plenty of trouble getting back in the rhythm when the world returns to normal. By all means, write when you can. But the world isn’t going to stop spinning, and your novel won’t collapse, and your writing hand won’t wither to an ashen husk if you take a little time off.

Writing can be something like a second job, and we need time off from any job if we want to not lose our minds.

And let’s be honest: during these strange days, we lose our minds enough to begin with.

LOOK AT ME ENDING NOT JUST A SENTENCE BUT A WHOLE BLARG POST WITH A PREPOSITION

ENGLISH TEACHERS DON’T CARE WHEE

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.