NaNoWriMo 2012 participant badge
It’s November. You know what that means… Nope, not fireworks or Guy Fawkes or Thanksgiving or a clarion call to get your arse in gear for Christmas. Oh no. As 300,000 people around the world know…
It’s NaNoWriMo.
I have 30 days to write a 50,000-word novel. Quantity over quality: just writing, writing, writing in a race to the finish.
This is my second year. I won last year, hurtling over the 50,000-word finish line with a few days still to go. Don’t think I’m some kind of prodigious creative force, though: before November 2011, despite having a kind of inchoate desire to do something creative, I hadn’t actually written anything since I’d left school. I used to write stories all the time, or make up stupid poems about surfing frogs, but then somehow it just… fizzled out. Although I’d kept on reading and loving stories and books and adventures, I hadn’t done anything at all myself. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to.
I think, after a point, you wonder what you have to contribute. You think, ‘I don’t have any ideas. It would be crap anyway. Why should I bother?’ But still, there’s that itch…
NaNoWriMo gave me a reason to just do it. It told me it was OK to start with nothing and see what came out, (founder Chris Baty even wrote a book called No Plot? No Problem!, which came in very handy during the night-before-starting panic), and – I can’t stress this enough – it gave me permission to write really badly. That kind of freedom is dizzying. You don’t have to be brilliant to write. It’s a first draft; it doesn’t have to be amazing. This was a revelation to me! So, keeping my eye on the 30 November prize, I blasted through ten years of writer’s block like tunnellers dynamiting through a mountain. My urban fantasy novel The Forest Under the Library isn’t going to give China Mieville any sleepless nights, but it’s got some interesting ideas, and it’s mine, and I love it.
I took a break after NaNoWriMo last year so I could reintegrate myself into society and become a useful almost-wife and mother again. (My writing methodology: locking myself in the kitchen after baby’s bedtime with a laptop, headphones and a large glass of pink wine. A good short-term strategy but not viable as a way to live your whole life.) But I fully intended to keep on writing, whether it was short stories or maybe even revisiting my novel and fleshing it out. However, life got in the way and it just didn’t happen. Oh well. All the more reason to look forward to this year’s NaNoWriMo, so I could let out a year’s worth of pent-up creative energy in one incandescent month-long burst…
So why is writing so hard?
I had an idea I thought would be fun, I outlined the plot on a post-it at work yesterday morning, and I looked forward to getting home in the evening so I could start writing. Yet after I’d switched on the laptop and was faced with that blank, glowing first page, typing those first words was like wading through treacle.
Why is writing so hard?
I still made it to 2,292 words last night, which isn’t bad for a first night. But I remember last year when I sailed over 5,000 in that first evening and it felt like flying. Maybe, yesterday, I was just tired after a long day. Maybe I’m just not as into this year’s idea. Maybe it doesn’t feel like there’s as much at stake this time, because I’ve already proved I can do it. But there was also that old, familiar feeling: this is terrible. It’s unoriginal, it’s not going anywhere, nobody will ever read this. I’m a terrible writer. Why am I even doing this?
Doubting yourself is what makes writing so hard.
But maybe I’m not alone. Maybe it’s like this for lots of writers. Maybe it will always be difficult to lay down one word after another, slowly building up characters and stories, wondering if it’s any good, if it ever will be any good, whether you’re good enough to be a writer, whether you have any right to call yourself a writer at all. Does doubt lie at the heart of every aspiring writer? Do you have the right to write?
I suppose the answer is easy, though hard to accept and difficult to remember: you can write whatever the hell you want to. And if you write anything at all, you can call yourself a writer. And – crucially – it doesn’t matter if it’s good or not. Being a bad writer is a stepping stone to being a good writer. All the cliches come out: practice makes perfect; if you never even try, you’re guaranteed to fail. But even if you never get to perfect, it doesn’t really matter.
I’ll keep on building this year’s novel, brick by brick, word by word, remembering that it doesn’t really matter whether it’s any good. The point for me is that I give myself permission to do it. I give myself permission to write a truly bad piece of work. The only real failure, for me, would be letting my doubts and fears stop me from doing it at all.
So I’ll plug on with my NaNoWriMo novel 2012, even if sometimes it’s like a slog through Treacle Bog and if sometimes it’s like I’m zooming over the top of it in an F-15. Untitled Spy Caper! (note the exclamation mark) will get there in the end, even if I have to pickle myself in pink wine to to it. Only 47,000 plus words to go. See you in December…
The Inside Room 