On the Starting Line

Get, Ready, Set, and . . . GO! That’s what I should be telling myself, anyway. At midnight, National Novel Writing Month begins and I will be just one of about 300,000 writers who are racing against the clock to reach their 50,000 word challenge and earn the right to call themselves a winner. What’s the prize? Good, old-fashion bragging rights, baby. Yep, that’s right. There’s no shiny trophy, or sparkling crown. Although, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? No, all we get is the right to say: we did it. 
We typed our fingers to the bone, or dealt with cramps in our hands from spending hours bent over a notebook while scribbling away at whatever plot twist we’ve just thought of.  Perhaps we found ourselves standing in the dairy section of the grocery store when inspiration hit, or maybe it was a song that we heard on the way to pick up the kids at school. 
During the process, we crawl and fight our way through one day to the next, spending every free moment we can trying to meet our daily word counts. Some days we do; others we don’t.  But still we don’t give up. We keep pushing ourselves to try harder, to stop editing ourselves as we go, and encouraging our fellow writers to keep trying. 
In the end, when we find ourselves at the finish line, we sit back in our chairs and smile. Because after thirty days of stress and pressure, we know that just accepting the challenge made us winners, that we poured a part of ourselves into our characters, and had fun. In the end, we write because it’s fun. We write because we love it. And we write because it’s who we are.