NaNoWriMo Archives

Last November, I posted about how taking cello lessons inspired me to participate for the first time in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Since then, a lot of people have asked me how the experiment panned out. I’ve been waiting—partly from shame, and partly for the enhanced perspective that is the reward of time—to admit that I failed to produce a complete novel in a single month.

The last few days of November were excruciating. I woke up on November 30^th with my inner voice screaming, “You failed! You are a failure! A fail-y, fail-y FAILURE!” Like I’ve said before, my inner voice is a jerk.

There is something liberating about doing a thing you enjoy, even if you know you aren’t doing it well. It feels like skinny-dipping in the town fountain, or giving someone the finger: there’s a defiance, a recklessness to it. If you are a perfectionist, that is.

If you too are a perfectionist, you understand that it goes beyond high personal standards; perfectionism can be crippling. There are loads of things I’ve shied away from because nothing mortifies a perfectionist like a learning curve. We want to be excellent at everything, right from the get-go.

To wit: This was supposed to be The Year I Wrote a Novel. I’d made this promise to myself before; my hard drive is chock-full of false starts. Invariably, somewhere along the way I’d realize what a mess I was making. I knew the middle part, maybe, but not the beginning or the end. “You’re wasting your time,” a little voice inside my head would say. “Stick to short stories! You’ll waste decades of your life writing a stupid novel no one will publish. You’ll be the most embarrassing kind of person in the world: a novelist manqué!”

My inner voice is a jerk.

Tag: NaNoWriMo

NaNo FAIL; Or, How Cello Lessons Had No Impact on My Ability to Write a Novel

How Cello Lessons Convinced Me to Do NaNoWriMo