Sunday Salon: NaNoWriMo

No, not those Canadian bars.

Last year, a few months into starting this blog, I heard of National Novel Writing Month -- the attempt to, in just thirty days, write a 50,000 word novel.

I used to write quite a bit. I had a little green notebook with a sparkly cover and I wrote poems about my Barbies and my stuffed animals in it. When I got a little older, I wrote poems about the boys I had crushes on. I started several different stories, although I never finished any of them unless they were assigned for class. In college, I won a writing award -- but it was for a research paper. My writing diminished and diminished, until I wasn't even really writing in a journal anymore. I decided I was a reader, not a writer. I was content to enjoy other people's stories, not my own.

But as I started blogging, making a point to do a little bit of writing every day, I started remembering the thrill of putting words and phrases together. I still considered myself not talented enough to actually write a story, but one day I found myself surreptitiously buying one of the black marbled composition books that I used to use in my high school creative writing class and scribbling in it every so often. A few months later, an idea for a story started percolating in my head.

I've tried and tried to write the scenes from this story, and I've gotten a few down. I've even bought a few books and done a little research. But I've never gotten very far, for a few reasons. First of all, I feel like all my research has to be done, but I am not even completely sure where the story is taking me. Secondly, I keep thinking to myself, "But I'm not very good! Why spend all that time on something that will probably never be published, will probably not come to anything?"

But six months later, I'm still thinking about that story. And so I've decided to make the jump and try to do this NaNoWriMo thing. I don't know if the story will turn into anything that anyone else will want to read. I don't know if it is even remotely plausible for me to try. But I'm realizing that at this point I don't have anything to lose. I don't have to show it to anybody -- I don't even have to finish if I end up feeling like it's a waste of my time. I need to mentally remove the guilt element and just try it. I'm used to only attempting things that I know I will be good at. I don't like trying things that I could fail at. I like security.

But hey, I can encrypt documents on my computer with a password, and at any rate, if I fail, I think I'll be in excellent company. So... NaNo on.