The Clinton Captivity and NaNoWriMo
I remember being a lot younger and listening to Rush Limbaugh talk about the Clinton White House years like the way they talked about the hostage crisis in the Middle East during the Carter years.
Authors have a different sort of captivity; our captivity to words. No matter what, we have these stories going on in our heads…stories that won’t give us rest until we get those words onto the page.
In November, we make the captivity worse by engaging in a bit of extra curricular insanity called NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month wherein authors and wanna be authors are challenged to push their limits…to write an awe inspiring 50,000 words. No one at NaNo expects that their words are going to be ultra polished, perfect prose-not with that sort of output in 30 days or less. And we do face it, we attempt this feat knowing we are going into the winter holiday season. A lot of us lose an extra two or more days due to Thanksgiving.
But what NaNo really does is challenge us to reach beyond our comfort zone, to stretch when it is far more comfortable to do as we’ve been doing the past eleven months.
So, far, early on the 7th day of my NaNo captivity, I’ve topped 8,200 words on a brand new novel (totally, brand spanking new, not a word written previously on it). 41,800 to go.
Can I do it? I don’t know, but I’m hopeful. I’ve got more on my plate than ever before, but I also feel more organized. And hey, I’m already averaging more than 1,000 words a day.
Lucynda