Well, it’s over, and I’ve managed to come up with 50,779 words. I officially finished on 11/27/2007 at 18:41 EST.

It was quite an experience. I’m not as disgusted with my work as I thought I would be, although, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I do not think it is good by any sort of professional standards. But, I learned a lot from the experience.

First: writing first without worrying about quality is the quickest way to get your ideas out of your head and onto the screen/paper. It doesn’t matter if they are a little incoherent, or if they repeat themselves, or don’t quite strike directly at the heart of the issue you are trying to elucidate. Just get them down, and tinker with them later. If you wait until you have the perfect words in your head, you will never write anything.

Second: writing before you know exactly what you are writing can really reveal what you mean to say. By which I mean to say, you will surprise yourself if you just sit down and write. Many times I did not know what was going to happen next, until the words appeared on the screen

Third: Writer’s block doesn’t seem to be much of an issue for me. Not once during the entire month did I sit and stare blankly at the screen. Whenever I sat down to write, the words flowed from my fingertips. This doesn’t mean they were great, or even good words, but I got them out, and I can always go and edit them later. This may be the most important lesson, for when combined with the first two, I realize that my biggest block is not lack of ideas, but lack of discipline. I have always heard that the hardest thing about writing, and the most important thing, is to get your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard. If I make the time to write, I will become a better writer.

Also, while procrastinating, I found a thread of resentment running through the web. Apparently, there are quite a few people who really loathe NaNoWriMo. Most of their arguments seem to run in the vein of “There’s too much crap out there already, so why add to it?” I must say that I really don’t understand this at all. I’m sure there are people who finished November and are already sending their manuscripts to agents and publishers, but of the many thousand who “won” I’d be stunned if it were more than a handful. For everyone else, I doubt if most of their manuscripts will ever even see paper, let alone an agent’s slush pile. So why would any of this contribute to the crap heap? Maybe these people just are sick of seeing really bad writing (I know it wears on me), but I can’t help feel that they are more concerned that people are walking away from NaNoWriMo saying “I’m a novelist!” and that is what irks them the most. They are the arbiters of what a real novelist is and how dare anyone else have the temerity to say something like that about themselves without having been pre-approved by these arbiters!

And this guy must really hate me, if he were even aware of my existence. I especially like the comment, “to the NaNoWriMo people, writing a novel is like running a marathon, something difficult and strenuous that you do only so you can say you did it before you died.” True, this is one of the reasons I participated, but I also did it to see if it would help improve my writing skills. While I cannot say for certain that it improved my skills, it certainly illuminated them. Apparently, he thinks this way of looking at it diminishes the skill required to write a novel. In my case, all it did was clearly illustrate how difficult it is to write a good novel.

I do not think that my novel will be published in any way whatsoever, nor do I want it to be. I have not looked back at any of the words I have written since I wrote them, but I am certain that it is a bad novel. I do think, though, that in January I will revisit it and edit it, tighten it up a bit. The only true goal I have for the finished work is to one day perhaps read it to my child.

Which reminds me, if you did not pick up on it from my posts while I was traveling in England, S is pregnant with our first, due in March.

I am now half-way through November, National Novel Writing Month, and I just passed the half-way mark in my novel. Even writing the phrase “my novel” makes me chuckle a bit, as it just sounds so silly. But, I’ve been very surprised by what has happened.

First, I am actually writing every day. It has been many years since I did this, and I have forgotten how much I enjoy writing purely for myself on a regular basis. (This blog doesn’t count, as the writing I do here can hardly be called regular.) I figured that if I wrote 1,667 words a day, I would hit 50,010 on the 30th, so that was my goal. As you can see in the image above, I have passed 25,000 words, and am actually a few hundred ahead of my goal. [note: For those of you digging through my archives, it says 25,372 on 11/15/2007, and this image linked to a badge that displayed the word count. NaNoWriMo has since changed the path so it links to the current year's word count. I have deleted the image to avoid confusion.]

I have also discovered some amazing ways to procrastinate, including using Google Documents for the first time. Most of the novel is being written in the word processor, but I am also using the spreadsheet to keep track of my word counts. The procrastination comes into play when I do neat little things like plot my actual words against my goal in a lovely graph, as seen below:

As you can also see, this same type of procrastination got me off to a slow start. But, when I got upgraded to business class on my flight back from LA, I began in earnest. I also don’t feel too bad, as I just looked at the stats at nanowrimo.org and realized that I am actually quite ahead of the average, which seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000.

I have also learned much about what it takes to create a piece of pure fiction, from an idea all the way through execution. When I take a break and watch a little TV, I notice I am looking at it from the perspective of how the writer put it together. I am sure I will have more to say about this after I am done, but for now, it has made me far more supportive of the WGA strike. I am beginning to recognize how much truly bad writing there already is (and that includes most of the professionals now walking the pickets lines), and how important it is for the studios to have good writers working for them.

But by far the most surprising thing has been the writing itself. Every advice giver says about writing that you must put aside time to write. When you do so, that is when you figure out what you will write, and I have discovered this to be quite true. I have roughly outlined what the arc of the story is, done general character sketches and the like, but I never know what the story is actually going to do until the words hit the page. I had one character who I originally was going to make quite nasty, and it turns out that he might even be the hero of the story. I was going to give him a sidekick who was really quite dumb, but this sidekick has been no sidekick at all, and is one of the more intelligent characters of the book. The story itself was adapted from a string of letters I wrote to S (I started over from scratch, using only my memory and a few notes, lest anyone accuse me of cheating) while we lived on separate coasts, intended as a sort of playful, children’s book type love story. It has turned into something quite different, less of a love story and more of a parable about faith and free will. Basically the original idea of lovers being separated by a vast distance has morphed into a book whose central idea is based around the question, “What would happen if the children of Adam and Eve were to meet the Serpent?”

I have no illusions about the overall quality of this work. I know it is bad and am not harboring dreams of getting it published. But, sometimes, in the middle of a passage, I am really quite amazed at the idea, or words, or plot turn, that just hit the page. It is almost like there is something else inside me deciding where it wants to go. That sounds really lame and pretentious, as I have heard far too many artists make that same claim, but this is really the first time I have experienced it personally, and it is really surprising.

Anyway, thought I’d post an update. S and I are leaving the country on Sunday, and hopefully I’ll be able to spend some of the flight time cranking out more words. Unfortunately, I know it will be much more difficult, as I plan on posting here as well. I guess I’d better up my word quota for the next few days.

There are people who knew they wanted to be professional writers for as long as they can remember. I am not one of those people. In college, inspired by an Elvis Costello song while walking through campus, I began writing a novel in longhand. I filled about a dozen legal pads before abandoning the manuscript, because I realized I was using it more for procrastination during mid-terms than as a serious attempt at personal expression. I don’t think I’ve earnestly tried writing any fiction since, though one item on my list, #19 – Write a novel, would seem to indicate that I still have unresolved issues about it.

Soonafter college, I briefly considered trying to make a living as a writer; after writing a column for a local monthly magazine in the early 90′s, I quickly gave up that idea. I found that when writing was my job, when it was a chore, my enjoyment of it quickly diminished. I only enjoyed it if I didn’t care if anyone was reading it, and I could write whatever I wanted. (This is a large part of the reason I started this blog, probably a large part of the reason why anyone starts a blog.)

So, while I haven’t much wanted to be a professional writer, I have always wanted to write. I have sporadically kept a journal of some sort for most of my life, and when given an opportunity to write about something I like or am interested in, I will usually take it, paid or not. My biggest problem is that those opportunities rarely present themselves to me, and I rarely present myself to them. In other words, I don’t write as much as I would like to.

Ask any writer, go to any workshop, read any book about writing, and they will all tell you that the most important thing about writing is to get in the habit of writing. Set aside a specific time each day and just write. Don’t worry about what is going on the page, just let the words flow. Don’t worry about the quality, just make the time to write. As you get in the habit, you will start to develop as a writer, and the quality will improve over time. In other words, if you write regularly, you will write regularly.

Surprisingly, this seems to be the hardest thing about writing. In my case, nothing could be more true.

I seem to write only when inspired to say something. I often struggle, as it has been so long since I have tried to string a few words together, that the act of writing seems to be a burden in itself. (For an illustration of this, just look in the sidebar and see how infrequently I update this blog.)

Many of the items on my list require that I write. If I were to finish all of them, they could probably fill a good sized bookshelf. In order to finish them, therefore, I need to develop the habit of writing. I had been considering this for a few days, trying to figure out what time of day works best for me (apparently none), when I heard about National Novel Writing Month. The idea, if you haven’t heard about it, is to write a novel in 30 days. It begins on November 1st, and if you write 50,000 words by November 30th, you will “win.” Last year, nearly 80,000 people signed up, and 13,000 finished their novel. The idea is not to produce a publishable manuscript, but to just sit down, start writing, and finish. As it states on the website:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I’m not normally inclined to participate in these kinds of things, but this seemed like an opportunity I could not pass by. I will be traveling quite a bit in November, and the nearly 28 hours I will be spending on airplanes seems like as good a time as any to focus on writing a novel. I have little idea what I will be writing about, but I have a week to plan. Hopefully, when I board the plane to Los Angeles on November 1st, I will have enough of an outline to begin knocking out my first draft. If nothing else, I will at least be writing regularly again, if only for a month.