NaNoWriMo, Here I come

I respect my mother more than anyone else in the whole world (seriously, the whole world). So when she chastised me a month ago for not writing, I sat up and took notice. She has never been the type of mother who believes that all her children are immensely gifted at everything. She is a realist, down-to-earth, pragmatic and a voracious reader. She told me that I was wasting my God-given talent by not writing enough, and that made me sit up and take notice.

I have always been a writer. It has taken many shapes and forms, but has always been in there somewhere. Studying engineering at University was a big deviation from that path, and truth be told, were it not for this blog, I am not sure I would have found my way back anytime soon. I never stopped reading though, that has been one of the biggest constants in my life. I go through roughly 2-3 books a week, and in extraordinary circumstances e.g. Pottermania or extreme boredom that quota can be ratcheted up to 4.

When I read something that truly resonates with me, my first thought is always “I wish I had written that”. This leads me to conclude that the drive to create prose is still within me, buried deep somewhere. The difficulty I face however is I haven’t written fiction in about 10 years. Writing is like a muscle for me, the less I exercise it, the creakier it becomes. And so I find myself writing clunky unnatural sounding dialogue. Words that make me cringe as soon as I type them. My inner editor is at war with my creative muse.

I think I have found the perfect cure for that malady. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). NaNoWriMo is a creative writing project that was born in the San Francisco Bay area in 1999. The idea is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. You must begin on November 1st and finish on November 30th in order to ‘win’. There is no prize for winning (you get a printable certificate to say you won), so there is no point in cheating. The real prize is the personal gratification, and for me, the impetus to pour 50,000 words out onto paper as they appear in my mind without stopping to edit, structure or fret.

This is no mean feat, to achieve my goal, I must write ~2,000 words a day! I have trouble with keeping my blog up to date, so how on earth will I manage to complete this task? Plus I am still laptop-less, so I can’t really write on the go per say, unless I do it long hand. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained right? And so, I commit myself to writing 50,000 words in the month of November, and hopefully I will come out with some semblance of a story, something that is on its way to being a rough first draft.

I will keep you guys posted on my progress, as I will definitely need some cheerleading to help me cross the finish line. I would love to say that I will post excerpts of what I am writing as I go, but it might be too awful to share with the world. I will have to play that one by ear…in the time being wish me luck as I venture into the world of deadline-intensive creative writing. Let’s hope my mother is right about this…I trust her instincts, she is almost never wrong. Wish me luck!