The Writer Must Try Again

I joined up with NaNoWriMo for the first time this year. I was pretty excited about it but already, in week one, I have let my enthusiasm flag and my work slow. I had expected - somewhat unrealistically - that I would sit down and bang out the required words each night with no problem. *Snort* What I found was that sometimes I didn't know where to go, and because I perceive this novel as important to me (as opposed to a random idea I dreamed up specifically for NaNoWriMo), I hesitate to take any risks. This is problematic and I think that now that I am recognizing it, I can address it. After all, no one will hold me to what I write this month. The point is just to write! To experiment, to dream, to visualize, to evoke. I look forward to trying again.

So, I have not even broken 2,000 words on a day when I should have around 8,335, but I am hopeful. Maybe I will even throw a prayer or two up to St. Lucy.

Good luck to all NaNoWriMo'ers everywhere. We are all in this together! And it's a beautiful thing.

P.S. I excerpted the following from a pep talk email I received (as a NaNoWriMo member) from author Jonathan Stroud:

Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies. There is nothing better for me, nothing more uniquely satisfying in the whole process of making a book, than the sensation at the end of each day—good or bad, productive or unproductive—when I look over and see a little fragile stack of written pages that weren't there that morning. A few hours earlier they didn't exist. And now they do. In a strange way this is more actively thrilling than even holding my finished, printed, book in my hands. It's where the magic lies. Alchemists tried for centuries to turn base metals into gold. Every time we sit down and put words on paper, we succeed where they failed. We're conjuring something out of nothing.