I am sitting at my bedroom desk, an empty mug of coffee to my left and a copy of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls next to that. I've surpassed my word count for the day, and have just finished watching the first series of Peaky Blinders. It's moments like these, the quiet moments in the evening when I'm still working out what to do next, that I find myself going back to this journal blog thing. Sometimes I just stare at this blog and try to write something, but then I'll lose the words and I'll keep tapping that backspace bar until all the words are gone and the page is once again empty. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what to write about, but I feel I need to write something so here I am, tapping away and hoping I don't reach for that backspace before I make it to the end.
The National Novel Writing Month is well underway, and the first week has long since passed. From what I've picked up from scouring the website's forums, it's either the second or third week when people begin to lose steam, the enthusiasm that sent them hurtling into this new novel, that initial spark of inspiration. The reality that this is something that must be written one word at a time begins to set in, and the motivation starts to wane. Or so I've heard, anyway. Personally, I have yet to experience that, which is all the more surprising considering how I have a history of discarding new stories after writing no more than a couple of thousand words. No doubt I've mentioned this before, but it's all the more relevant now.
So far we've reached the 10th day of November, and I am fast-approaching 25,000 words - the halfway mark. This is undoubtedly the best effort I've done all year, and the enthusiasm is still the same as it was at the start. It's weird to see all these characters I planned, made notes about, detailed their back-stories and imagined some of the events that take place in the story, and see them suddenly come to life on the page. Unabashed excitement is the only way I can describe the moments when I introduce one of these new characters during my daily writing sessions, see them speak to one another and watch as the cogs and the gears of the story begin to turn and grind and all the ideas I see in my mind come into shape.
Okay, sure, it's still the first draft so there is bound to be all sorts of hokey dialogue and repetitious sentences and downright awful prose, but I made a promise to myself before I started last Saturday that I would not go back and re-read my work. That way lies failure, at least for me. One thing I've learned about my writing habits this month, and from what I've noticed about the things I've written in the past, is that I must not edit the material that I have until the first draft is complete and I can declare it's done. If I write a chapter, then spend the next day reading over it, making corrections, hammering and chipping away at every word and sentence until it resembles something pristine and perfect, then I lose that forward momentum and everything - my motivation included - grounds to a halt. Odds are I would then write another two or three chapters and be forced to go back and re-edit all the previous work I'd edited beforehand, anyway. Better just to get a rough first draft down and worry about making the corrections some other time.
Sometimes I wonder what sort of story this is going to be, and what it means to me personally. One thing I am certain of is that I am not writing with the intention of trying to get published. I'm not even sure if I ever want to be published, if I'm truly honest, but I feel like I need to write this nonetheless. It is a project that is making me happy, and causing me no small amount of joy to be able to sit and work away at it when normally I would be doing not a lot of anything. For me, the last few years have been a time of discovery with regards to books. Rather than stay within the confines of one genre, I started picking up stories I never thought I would ever read, let alone enjoy. I took a chance reading material from writers that I would usually just pass by without so much as a second glance when in a bookstore, and I found so much inspiration and enjoyment within those pages.
So I think that this year's NaNoWriMo is a love letter to all those stories that I enjoyed reading during my less busy moments, where I found solace during the winter, that helped to dispel some of the loneliness, that inspired me, taught me so much, made me feel joy, sorrow, love, hate, anger, beauty, horror, gratitude, warmth and all the other emotions that I could spend half the evening naming but probably exist in some thesaurus somewhere.
This year's NaNoWriMo is where I take everything I have learned, all of those emotions, bottle it all up, crush it all together into one seething mass and then hurl it at the blank page, and to see what kind of story I've written once those 30 days are over.
Only 20 days and a further 25,000 words left...
