Nano

One problem with blogging about the past is that I don't always have much regard for chronological order...

There's this thing called National Novel Writing Month, which is a challenge to write a novel 50,000 words or longer during the month of November. In other words, it's madness. This November, Ben and I decided to try it. It seemed like a good time to do so: we weren't in school anymore, and neither of us were really working much. It all seemed very promising. We were making the beginning of our winter so productive!

We both chose old, neglected, but much loved projects for our novels (which is allowed as long as all the writing you do is new, which worked out because whatever either of us had written was so old that a new draft was necessary anyway). I wanted to use Nano as an opportunity to compete a draft of a fantasy/science fiction story I've been trying to write for, like, probably half my life. I had already been trying to get back into it before we decided to do this Nano thing, and it just felt awful to abandon it and spend the next month furiously writing something unrelated. I stand by this decision, but I think it was ultimately the reason for my downfall.

Nano is meant to be an experiment in writing. This is made very clear. You are not meant to get a great novel out of it. But you are meant to over caffeinate, go a little crazy, churn out a lot of nonsense, discover some great ideas, and learn a lot about yourself and about writing. Sounds nice. But the NaNoWriMo experiment doesn't work terribly well with ideas that you love. And let me just tell you, I love my story. I love it to itty bitty pieces--so much, that I am afraid to work on it because I'm afraid of failing, which is why I have never completed a full draft. Focusing on a daily word count (1667 is the magic number that will get you to 50,000 by the 31st) did help me lose some of my inhibitions about writing, but it was very difficult to write badly enough to generate that many new words every day. I just couldn't let go.

I also fell behind immediately. The first week of November we hosted three couchsurfers--one guy by himself and then a pair. It was the first time we were able to host anyone and we didn't want to pass up the opportunity. The first surfer was a distance biker and he invited us to accompany him on a forty mile ride to Aquinnah and back (which was beautiful, but nearly killed us). I have no regrets about any of that, but it did get my writing off to a bad start.

I made it to 27,650 words before I decided I was not going to make the goal of 50,000 by the end of the month. It was the most progress I've ever made on a draft of this story (not the most words, but definitely the most progress). I now have a clearer idea of what I am going to do with this story and how to do it. Somewhere between zero and 27,650 I discovered new ways of telling the story, new characters, new plots... so many ideas that will make it so much better. I've never felt so good about it before.

Deciding that I didn't want to try to make 50,000 by the end of the month didn't mean I was giving up. But after that decision (and after Ben also reached the same decision) I just lost steam. I haven't worked on it since--and this happened around the middle of November. It's difficult now to find the motivation to begin again. I opened up the document the other night and realized that I could barely remember where I was going with a particular passage that had been left unfinished.

I'm looking now for a way to recreate that frantic dedication that came from a contest like NaNo. I'm good with deadlines and pressure, which is what allowed me to do so well in school, I suppose, but that's really not how I want to live. I have plenty of time to work... but no motivation. Where does motivation come from?