Get it out there!

Don't worry world, my long absence from posting has a totally reasonable explanation: I've been totally absorbed in finishing my first book for National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. Nanowrimo.

I've started Nanowrimo novels before, probably four or five times, and never come close to finishing one.  In fact, before this year, I'm sure I never made it to five thousand words (the target is 50,000 for adults, and 30,000 for teenagers).  Time and time again, I've been a victim of my own tendency to strive for perfection; I'd develop a hook that I loved, work on ideating and outlining the entire story, map out the characters, and get so bogged down in details and frustrations that I lost interest in the project before I had enough momentum to sustain any continuing effort.

I hadn't even initially planned on getting involved this year, but a colleague of mine, an English teacher, assigned her students to participate in the young adult edition.  I was inspired by the challenge she laid out for her students and by the response that many of them gave her - I saw students that I thought would never be drawn to that kind of creative endeavor getting excited to put keys to keyboard and create something.  I jumped in as a sign of solidarity, and this time I tried to do it differently.

I did start out with the rough outline of the plot arc for the book, but I put much more energy into churning out words and less into strategizing, and all of the sudden magical things started to happen.  Characters that began as random last names chunked onto the page started to develop personalities and back stories; subplots grew out of nothingness and tied the threads of my ideas together.  It didn't all happen at once, but it happened.  I realized about two thirds of the way into the month that I wasn't really happy with the ending I'd originally envisioned for the book, and as the story evolved, the ending changed in my head three or four different times.  I didn't really know exactly how it was going to go until I was down to the last ten thousand words.  But it came together, and even though I'm sure it has some rough edges, I have to say that I love it.  I love what I've created, and I love that for the first time in a long time I took something from conception to decisive completion.

That's a big part of the mojo behind Nanowrimo, and honestly I think it's tremendously important.  The perfectionism trap is all to easy to get sucked into; a quick google search will show us 25 other versions of any idea we might come up with, and the inherent drive for comparisons sucks out all the motivation that might lead us to do things that enrich our lives.  Elizabeth Gilbert's most recent book is all about this concept; its bold subtitle, "Creative Living Beyond Fear", is a sweeping call for all of us to answer.  The joy of creation doesn't just live in the quality of the product; it grows out of that liminal space between maker and product, touching the artist as she works as much as it will ever affect the others that might follow after to consider and consume the final result.  

I learned to let go of the linear picture I had of my own creative process this month; planning didn't just precede writing.  The two existed in a dynamic cycle.  I found myself naturally transitioning between periods of intense productivity and long stretches of reflection as the fruits of the last writing spree ripened to inspire deeper streams of thought.  I've included the automatically generated graph of my word count by day below, for those of you that take on a project in the future and find yourself frustrated that progress doesn't flow smoothly for you.  You'll discover your natural rhythm, as long as you force yourself to dive in and try to create something.