So, I have a graduate degree that says I’m a writer. I also, as of this writing, have four and three quarters* novels, two screenplays, two nonfiction books and a heavy stack of short stories and personal essays under my belt that say I’m a writer. (Granted, none of these have been published, but we’ll get to that.) I have a small stack of pay stubs from an independent newsweekly in Oklahoma City, a defunctified column on a heavily-trafficked and very awesome website, and some very sweet friends and family all of whom say I’m a writer. I have business cards that say both 1) that I’m a writer, and 2) that I am delightfully nuts. Also, two pages in U.K. Cringe** and a partridge in a something-or-other tree.
What I don’t have is a publishing contract. But I like to remind myself often that publication isn’t what makes a writer, any more than a recording contract doesn’t make one a musician, Britney Spears. Still, as much as I enjoy my day job, I also dream of quitting it to live the life of a writer full-time. At present my love for food and shelter, coupled with my 20-plus-grand in student loans***, make that dream a non-reality. I’ve made my peace with this, but I refuse to accept that this will always be the case.
Two years ago I signed up for NaNoWriMo, a delightful internetting project where you try really hard to write a 50,000-word piece of fiction in 30 days in November. Then, I got about 2,000 words before I fizzled.
Let me walk you through what it’s like to write a novel: it sucks, it’s hard, and once you’ve achieved a word count of which you should be proud, you realize, suddenly, clearly, that the entire project is crap and the world very likely might end unless you delete every word of it off your computer immediately. At least, that’s what it’s always been like for me. I come up with a story and some characters that I love, and at the start, I’m off and rolling, really enjoying as these people I’ve created do their thing. But then, about halfway to three-quarters of the way through it all, I suddenly see that what I’m doing is harmful and might actually spell the doom of Western culture. My impetus to write, my love for the project, all that energy and excitement fizzle out, and I’m left with a half-finished project. If not for the academic requirements of graduate school, it’s entirely possible I’d never have finished a single thing.
Until this month. I agonized over doing NaNoWriMo again. I had a story I’d conceived awhile back that I vaguely thought I’d like to try. It was a sort of religio-fantasy sort of C.S. Lewis/J.R.R. Tolkien kind of thing, and as I thought about writing it I grew terrified that I’d become a fantasy author. But the world was clear in my mind, as was most of the story, and I told myself to write the story just for the fun of it.
On my desk I also had an index card with a sentence fragment, another idea for a story. Other than this one sentence fragment, this one piece of the idea, nothing about it was solidified. It was gelatinous and unformed; it was a sentence fragment on an index card. Writing it would be harder, I knew, not something I could do just for the sheer joy of writing but a real project.
I chose the second one. I grew up reading Lewis and Tolkien and all kinds of fantasy lit, and I love it. But I’ve been writing it all my life; my first several long-form pieces of fiction, written in my early teens, were fantasy literature. Having finished three and a half* pieces of work that I tried to locate solidly in the "Literary Fiction" arena, and having been consistently frustrated with the results, it was tempting to retreat back into what I knew.
But I just couldn’t. I knew if I wanted to move forward creatively I had to challenge myself. And so, a week or so before November began, I sat down with my sentence-fragment index card and started to see what came out.
Oh, you guys, it was all crap. It was terrible. So I backed off and just wrote a two-page sketch of some of the characters who might exist in my sentence-fragment universe. I liked what I had, but the temptation to retreat was strong. I put the sketches down; I waffled.
Then, on the first day of November, I started again with this story. My first scene, for once, wasn’t awful, and I continued. Then, we went to North Carolina, I got deathly ill, and for a whole week I didn’t touch the story. "That’s it," I thought, "another NaNoWriMo over before it’s even begun."
It was a little freeing. But once I was feeling better I got out my calculator, subtracted the number of words I had from 50,000, and divided by the number of days I had left. The result was that, in order to reach 50,000 by November 30, I’d have to write about 2,200 words a day, less than 600 more than the normal daily count of 1,667 (50,000 divided by 30).
"What the hell," I thought. Even if I fell behind, even if I could consistently only get a thousand or so words, by the end of the month I’d have a huge chunk of novel. So I sat down and wrote 2,500 words. The next day I wrote 4,400. Then the day after that I wrote 2,000. It was spectacularly inconsistent, but it seemed like magic was happening.
I fell in love with the characters. I wrote a few scenes that brought me almost to tears, and others that made me laugh out loud for extended periods of time. When I was completely lost as to what came next, I just wrote a paragraph, and somehow the story opened itself up to me. Every day, things happened. Then, on November 30, I crossed the finish line and got this:
I WROTE FIFTY-TWO THOUSAND WORDS IN NOVEMBER, Y’ALL!! And the best part is, they weren’t crap! Every day when I sat down to write I found myself excited about what came next. Most nights when I was done I was sad to put it down, and only did so because I knew it – and I – needed 24 or so hours in which to breathe.
The story wasn’t quite done at 52,000; it’s still not quite finished. It probably will be tomorrow, as I only have two more scenes to write before I think the plot is over. Then I plan to put it down until Christmas break, when I will pick it up and edit it thoroughly. Then the hard part begins – trying to sell it.
I’ve never written anything I believed in so completely. As of now the story is what Anne Lamott calls a "Shitty First Draft," just the story as I got it down on paper, and in my mind I’ve already identified some problem areas; more will show themselves when I sit down to read it, I’m sure. But that’s okay – they aren’t anything that can’t be tightened up. But as of tomorrow – or tonight if I’m feeling frisky – it’s done. Once I’ve edited through a few drafts it will be time to let others read it; hopefully those others will be agents, then editors, then paying customers.
I’ve always, since I was very little, believed I was meant to write. This month I’ve done that in a way that I never have before. I’ve surprised myself by doing work I’m deeply proud of, and in the process I think I’ve discovered a new process that I’ll put into place in the future. I’m excited, and more than that, I’m grateful.
*I should just say four, except that I took the one I used to earn aforementioned graduate degree and started rewriting it from word one. I’ve got about 50,000 words on it, but the story is now only partially-done and needs some rethinkage before I plow forward. Hence – four and three quarters.
**MAKES A GREAT CHRISTMAS PRESENT. ORDER YOURS TODAY.
***I don’t know why it never dawned on me to get a 1600 on the SAT.
