NaNoWriMo: Or, How I Decided to Stop Worrying and Write

The same day I wrote The Novel (A Breakup), I signed up for NaNoWriMo. I've had my year-and-two-months of pouty self-doubt, and it's time to get back in there while I'm young. Confession: I have tried Nanowrimo — as it will be called here, because I am not coordinated enough to fit in all the capitalization — twice before, and I didn't finish either year. Third time's the charm, right?

I'm off to a good start, because — Confession #2 — while bored and frustrated in my Korean language class on Wednesday, the first paragraph popped into my head. And then another. And then another. The next day, the outline of the book appeared to me as though in a celestial vision. (Knowing these characters, that is the only time "celestial" will be used to describe any part of this process.)

Boredom is my muse. I strung together stories when I was a kid, but it wasn't until late middle school/early high school that I started writing regularly, and I did it because I hated most of my classes and needed a good way to distract myself. I doodled paragraphs in the margins of my grammar textbook, fleshed out personalities in my science notebook, wrote and rewrote scenes during my math classes. I kept this habit up in college, although my writing-during-class was more sporadic with the campus-wide WiFi turning my laptop into a portal to elsewhere.

I guess it's only fitting that it took another frustrating class to unlock some long-buried creativity. When I started writing, I didn't even intend to write about the plot I was toying with for November — I just wanted to escape to anywhere else for a few minutes. But hey, I'll take it.

I was so caught up in actually writing again that I hammered out the first 500 words without thinking, only to realize that I'll have to toss them out and start over on November 1 to stay within the limits of the contest, which is fine. The wasted page was more than worth the realization that I can do this, that I'm excited to do this. Fortunately, I've got lots of plotting to keep me busy until everything formally starts on Sunday.

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Writing-related excitement is following me today, it seems. After I posted today's entry in my teaching blog, I followed one of Wordpress's "possibly related posts" and wound up at a character development exercise at Mots Justes. That led to a nicely spent few hours unspecified chunk of time surfing around the interwebs reading writing- and Nanowrimo-related articles. Here are some of the ones that held my attention:

• Freelance Writing Gigs: 45 Free Things for Writers
• Routines for Writers: Bigger Paper, Bigger Ideas
• Write to Done: SOLVED: The Outlining vs. Organic Writing Debate
• Terrible Minds: NaNoWriMo: The Debbil’s Adbocate — a really interesting post that's balanced, but fairly critical of NaNoWriMo; a good read before starting.

One last note — the Terrible Minds entry above cited the The Gist: Quantity and Quality: a musing on perfection, the enemy of the good. Since I stopped working on my last novel, I've been waiting for perfection, determined not to disappoint myself again. In the process, I've had a disappointing year without words of my own. Here's to a better one next year.