Oh holy hell, it’s National Novel Writing Month again.
For someone who dabbles in the written word and certainly enjoys reading well-written works of others, I’m surprisingly ambivalent towards this yearly extravaganza designed to promote the art and the act of writing. If there were such a thing as “National Write a Few Essays in a Month Month,” I’d be much more inclined to participate, but assuming that the people in charge of it would be sticklers for good writing, NWaFEiaMM is never going to be, at least not under that title.
The whole idea of National Novel Writing Month ("NaNoWriMo" if you're either cool or actually trying to save time) is really just that -- you write a novel. In a month. According to the official site, the goal is for said novel to be 175 pages or about 50,000 words. That's steep. In one of my typical Anti-Thoughts, I aim for about 800 words and usually end up with something around 1,100 because I have some problems with verbosity and will occasional take four or five words to say something that I can probably say in one or two. That, and sometimes I explain things that don't really need explaining.
Sort of like that, actually.
My point being, 50,000 words is a hell of a lot. From the vantage point of someone that’s never attempted to write a novel, it strikes me that the act of writing something that long is the equivalent of running a marathon – it takes lots of preparation, dedication, and ultimately, medication (of some sort) to make it through the process. This is not for me. I am not a marathoner. I’m not a half-marathoner (i.e. novella), either. At best, I may be up for a 5k sort of short story thing, but even then I’m probably going to finish it at a walk and wind up in varying degrees of pain and whininess as a result of the effort.
No sir, essay writing is the event for me – a nice, leisurely walk that probably leads to a coffee shop or beer emporium. You can go at your own pace, stray from the course whenever you like to explore something new, and if you don’t end up where you intended, it generally doesn’t matter so long as you’re not altogether lost.
That being said, I’ve had some really unfortunate experiences associated with writing even short works. The most notable of these happened in eighth grade, (although what isn't unfortunate about eighth grade?) when I was chosen by my language arts teacher to "try out" for a writing competition called Power of the Pen (which still appears to be around). For the trial, I had to write a several pieces in a set amount of time, all in a different style dictated by the competition's format. Okay, no sweat -- I cranked out a couple of things that were probably terrible, one of them being a "clever" little piece about a caveman that "discovers" the sun in the sky and proceeds to make some sort of big deal about it. I don't really remember the story, I just remember thinking I was terribly clever -- an activity that I devoted a lot of time to in those days.
I didn't have a lot of friends in eighth grade.
Whatever it was that I wrote was apparently good enough to make the cut, so along with a handful of my scholastic peers (most of whom actually WERE clever) we took a little trip on a Saturday to a middle school in a neighboring district to compete with… THE POWER OF THE PEN -- which, when you think about it, didn't make a whole lot of sense since we were writing with pencils in those days. This was an era when different varieties of Apple IIs roamed school hallways on wheeled carts, occasionally gathering in packs of ten to twenty to form early computer labs. Computers were rare enough that you never got to use them for typing or "word processing" as it's now known, so when you wrote papers and stories, you wrote them by hand -- in pencil, so you could fix mistakes. Yeah kids, I know -- you think I grew up in the dark ages.
The process of the competition was pretty straightforward and somewhat familiar – write a story or essay of a certain length in the allotted time, but this time there was an added challenge in that it had to be on a specific theme. This was a problem for me in that to this day, I don’t take well to being told what to creatively write about – given enough time, I can BS my way through just about anything, but for it to be good… well, being given an hour sitting at a desk in a classroom jammed full of other people trying to do the same thing as me wasn’t going to work. What I did accomplish was to spend a good amount of the allotted time trying to look thoughtful. That, and develop some severe hand cramps from writing pages of material in pencil, sloppily pulling the nub across the paper in a hurried attempt to finish my overly-contrived work in the time allotted. Twice that morning and once in the afternoon I sat through the same scenario, generally wishing that I was anywhere but there and wondering how I’d wound up there to begin with given the fact that I really, really didn’t like to write.
No, really. I had a serious disdain for writing -- be it educational, creative, or otherwise personal -- pretty much all the way through my scholastic career. It wasn't until the end of college that I really developed an interest in writing as a pastime. So to have to sit there and crank out material while on the clock and creatively handcuffed... Sufficed to say, I didn’t advance to the next round of the competition. I firmly believe that I probably had the ability to write well back in those days, but not in that format. I would have the same sort of experience about five years later when I tried to test out of the required general English class in college. “Read this thing and write a 500 word essay on it. You have 45 minutes. Go.”
Hello, semester of College Reading and Writing.
Thankfully at this point in my life it’s rare that I don’t have creative freedom to write whatever I want. Something on the scope of NaNoWriMo is pretty daunting, though, and the thought of having to write that much in a given amount of time makes my wrist ache with memory despite the modern luxury of word processing. Plus, the idea of having to write that much on one topic or story is mind numbing. I’ll be staying here in my comfortable little world of essays and shorts, thank you very much – because now that I’ve run the course with this piece, I can save it and move on to the next literary idea.
(Which I can only assume will be clever.)
