Something to Remember as NaNoWriMo Begins

Photo credit: The Cleveland Kid on Visual hunt / CC BY

I have a love/hate relationship with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which is a strange relationship to have when I’ve never attempted to participate. Partly that’s because I don’t write fiction, but even if I did, I chafe against many community initiatives—I’m just not a joiner.

NaNoWriMo is about more than that, of course, and I’ve long seen the good it can do. It leads to a couple vital things for the writing life: commitment and practice. I’ve always remembered this quote from Anne Morriss about commitment: “The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.” That, I think, is the value of NaNoWriMo.

Still, I see more evidence these days that writers feel pressured to produce—produce more in shorter amounts of time, especially in the indie author community. When I ran a guest post about how long it takes to write a book, it received more visits and discussion than any post that month. People are judging themselves harshly, and the resulting anxiety only makes matters worse.

In this month’s Glimmer Train bulletin, Rachel Heng enters the discussion with her essay, How I Wrote My Novel in Two Years and Other Accounting Tricks. She writes:

Many of my creative breakthroughs happened on my evening commute home or while sitting in a meeting room or walking through the fifteenth overpriced wedding venue that week. All those other commitments took time away from the actual writing, but what I’m realising now is they also gave my subconscious the room to figure out characters and worlds and plot problems. All the time I thought of as “wasted” had never been wasted after all. Everything goes into writing, everything is writing.

These days, I try not to force myself to sit at my desk for five or six hours straight just because I feel like I need to be Writing.

Read the full essay.

Also this month at Glimmer Train:

Writing What We Run From by Laura Roque

Strikethroughs and Strikeouts by Peter Sheehy