Monday, October 31, 2011

NaNoWriMo

Conversation I had with Jensen at aprox. Midnight the other night.

“I think I’m actually going to do NaNoWriMo this year,” I said trying to keep my voice down as to not awaken the rest of the household.

“NaNoWriMo?” Jensen asked through a mouthful of un-chewed chocolate cupcake.

“Nation Novel Writing Month. It’s when you try to write an entire novel in November.”

Jensen nearly choked on cupcake. “CRAP! I forgot about Sketchtober!”

I forgot about the sleeping people. “It’s October twenty-ninth in a few minutes!”

“Yeah. I was supposed to sketch something every day.”

Anyway. Jensen is my shero and I may have talked her into making up for her unconscious dismissal of Sketchtober by doing NaNoWriMo with me. She has a more concise idea than I do, it seems.

Right now, the biggest problem I’m having is that I can’t decide between the ten ideas I’ve narrowed it down to. The point of NaNoWriMo is to just write, write, write and try to make it a complete story, even if it’s not a great complete story. That’s probably what I need right now. Some, straight-up, self-indulgent, organic writing.

I’m one of those writers who believe that writing is more craft than anything else. If you’ve got talent as a writer, that probably means that you’re clever. Good for you.

“How’s that working out for you?”

Really creating a good story needs more than just cleverosity.

Still, that being said… it’s nice to take a break from being technically good every once in a while and just create something for the pure enjoyment of it. That’s the book I want to write this month; pure enjoyment.

Basically, what I’m getting at is that I don’t want to waste one of my really decent ideas on this.

But... that may be the only kind of idea I care about enough to be married to it for the next month.

Time Stamp: NaNoWriMo starts in a little over five hours and I still am not totally sure what book I'm writing.