I’m a winner!

On the 29th of November I crossed the finish line of Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month). Between Nov 1st and Nov 29th, I wrote 50000 words. YAY!!! I did not finish the story that I was telling, but I am pretty close. I don’t think that I will get back to it right away though. I have been neglecting too many other things in my life while I participated in Nanowrimo.

While on this journey I have learned a few lessons about writing and about achievement in general. Whenever I have written any fiction in the past, it has been when I was inspired and enthused about the storyline or characters. While writing for Nano, I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the right mood, free time or phase of the moon. You have to keep writing through the parts that you don’t necessarily like while trying to make them somewhat interesting. You have to write through the scenes that make you cringe, like when your character makes a bad mistake and you can’t abandon them when they need you. Even though you have no idea how your sad, little wimpy character is going to defeat two armies, you have too keep writing. On most of my previous novel attempts, I have stopped when I got to one of these tricky scenes, waiting for the brilliant inspiration to get me going again. Of course, when you leave your little invented novel world, you forget all about the woes of your character and he or she is forever suspended over a pit of molten lava while you watch reruns of the 70’s show. So, instead I have learned that I have to write through these moments no matter how stupid and ridiculous my solution sounds. I can always rewrite a scene and it is much easier to rewrite a scene than to still have a whole book to write because I stopped.

These lessons are also applicable while writing more serious topics like my one remaining research paper. (BTW-Two papers were published online in Oct and should be out in print soon. YAY!) This last paper was supposed to be the one that I was going to enjoy writing the most because it was the most interesting topic. However, it is also very complicated and I keep getting stuck. I have not worked on it since the end of August. I was waiting on that brilliant moment where I would know exactly what to write. Meanwhile, I was thinking about everything but my paper. It turns out that I am not brilliant and so will not be receiving any brilliant flashes of inspiration. This means that I will have to get back to my paper in the old fashioned way of multiple draft, caffeinated beverages, and moments of beating my head on my keyboard. Today, my first Nano free day, I organized my office and found all of my notes for my paper. Tomorrow I am going to write many bad, confused sentences and probably wind up with a piece of drivel that I would have been ashamed of even back in highschool, but I am going to write and apply for jobs and go grocery shopping and start Christmas shopping and fix my file cabinet and… OK, I guess I will have to shorten my to do list first.

Learning about writing was not the only lessons I learned from Nano. I relearned the lesson that if you want to get anything done, turn the TV off or get a roommate obsessed with football. I also learned about pursuing a commitment. You would think that this is something I know about, having committed to and finishing a doctoral degree, but that was different. There was no time limit imposed except the pace I set for myself. In the case of Nano, I had to write 1667 words a day. It was so easy to fall behind and rarely easy to keep ahead. The first week was actually pretty easy, but so it is with most commitments I make, such as exercising. The second week, I skipped a day of writing to watch the election. I caught up gradually though and even got ahead of the word count. Getting ahead was the worst thing that could have happened to me. I got complacent. This was easy! I was so good that I would have a book in no time. Just like when you congratulate yourself on exercising every day for a week and decide that you can skip a day because you don’t feel like getting out of bed, so I decided that I could slack off a little and write with the TV on. Of course, I got behind again and this coincided with some really difficult scenes in my book. I had to invent ways to keep myself going, wrote some of the worst crap in my life and started staying up until 2 am to make my word count. So I found that I did better when I was a little behind and could not become complacent or confident. I also realized that if you want to get anything done in this world, you can not slack off for even one day, because one day becomes two and then three and then forever.

So, what about the story that I wrote? Well, it’s pretty terrible, but it has potential. During Nano, I received email pep talks from many of my favorite authors and I am going to share a bit of one with you.

I live in Barre, Vermont which calls itself the "Granite Capital of the World." Outside our town are enormous quarries, so when I speak in local schools every child has a mental picture of a granite quarry. "You know how hard it is to get granite out of the quarry," I say. "You have to carefully score the rock and put the explosive in to make the great granite block break loose from the face of the stone. Then you have to attach the block to the chains so that the cranes can lift it slowly out of the hole and put it on the waiting truck. That's the first draft. It's hard, dangerous work, and when you've finished, all you've really got is a block of stone. But now you have something now to work on. Now you can take your block down to the shed to carve and polish it and turn it into something of beauty. That's revision."

But first you've got to get that block of granite out of the earth, friends. You won't have anything to make beautiful until you do that. Now go back to work.
--Katherine Paterson

So that is where my novel is, almost since I haven’t quite finished the story yet. I have a rock that still needs a whole bunch of work. I have made a commitment with one of the other Nano winners to enter our novels in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest (www.amazon.com/abna). Hopefully by then it will no longer be a rock, but a beautiful statue.

But first, I have to find a job and write my last research paper…