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November is apparently National Novel Writing Month! This is the month where all of the authors who've been stalling on their writing projects get off their asses and give it a good college try. I'm seriously going to try, but I'm not sure how successful I will be.
For those of you who haven't spent any time attempting to write a novel (not a technical book, because I think inspiration works differently on those books), this might seem kind of shocking: Writing is a scary process. The act of writing makes you vulnerable, and if you're not comfortable with that vulnerability, it can literally make you sick. If the story you have in your head is one that you love and one that you're passionate about, it makes it much worse. Every time you sit down and write, even after you've gotten over "white page syndrome", many authors are completely paralyzed by the feeling that their words are not doing justice to the story in their head. This is even before optimizing a draft or figuring out if the grammar works or other details like character development or suspension of disbelief. None of that matters if you can't get past the gut-wrenching, crippling fear that is writing. The difference between unpublished authors and published authors usually has very little to do with skill, and very much to do with the ability to persevere and write consistently and frequently. This is essentially the difference between a story builder and a story teller. There are hundreds of thousands of people with the ability to be excellent story builders, but less who become story tellers and I suspect it has a lot to do with the emotional involvement and the vulnerability of writing a story that you love. If you don't feel vulnerable when writing your story, then your story might not be good enough. (disclaimer: personal opinion, please don't shoot me.)
So on that note, I am going to try my best to write a couple of scenes per week this month and see how that turns out. If I can manage to get 8 scenes out of this month, then I think November will have done its job. Writing is also a lot about momentum - the more you're writing, the more you want to write. If you're in a rut, it's very, very hard to get out of it.
Wish me luck and Happy National Novel Writing Month!
