under construction

Whether or not I manage to complete NaNoWriMo, I tend to stay away from blogging in November. Either I'm too busy writing, or I can't get the novel to work and writing in general becomes imbued with pressure and guilt and worry. It's been the case for the last few years that I've written a lot less in Writing Month than any of the months surrounding it, and - spoiler - that was the case again this year.

I thought it would be different this time. I had pages full of characters, plot points, set pieces and stupid puns. If I got stuck on one thread, I had at least three others to dip into instead. I started November with more than enough prep notes to spin into 50,000 words, and yet what happened was exactly the same as last year - I wrote just enough words on the first two days, several thousand on day three, and then nothing. I panicked for the next two weeks, assuring myself it could still be done if I really applied myself, there are always those nutters who write the entire novel on the first day, I couldn't give up on it yet. But I did. At the end of the month I had about seven thousand words I don't care about and will probably never look at again in my life, and I have to wonder if maybe NaNoWriMo isn't the best way for me to get stuff done anymore. Maybe in my current state of creative block, setting myself ridiculous deadlines to finish whole novels isn't such a good idea. Maybe there's a better way to get fiction happening again.

This conversation keeps happening between my boyfriend and me:

HIM: You know, if every time you said "I might write about that" you actually wrote about it, you'd have quite a lot of stuff.
ME: But it would all be ridiculous.
HIM: What's your point?

It keeps crossing my mind that a definitive life change point like this would seem to present an opportunity for me to start carving out an identity as a Person Who Writes. I wouldn't expect it to pay any bills for some time, but when I think about what I really want to do with my life, it always comes back to that. I've imagined having all kinds of jobs, but if I think about any of them for more than a few seconds I find that I'm imagining writing about the job instead of doing it. Writing is my destiny, as my drunk father told me a few months ago over a bottle of Glenlivet, and perhaps I don't need to create the definitive example of my skills before I start sharing it with other people (that half dozen or so pages of Actually Really Good Writing I came up with six years ago has got a lot to answer for). There certainly seems to be a subset of people who are amused by hearing the nonsense I come up with, and that might be enough to start off with. When I can come up with a name for it, there will be yet another blog, probably not on Blogger, devoted to non-personal writing. It's time I stop hiding this part of myself in case it isn't good enough.

So now I've said it in public, I'm committed to it.