On impossible endeavors, and what to expect 20 days from now

November is such an exciting month.

It wasn't always this way. Back in 2001, and all years previous, November was a low point in the year, second only to February in dullness, greyness, and general interminability (it's a word now folks.) Then in 2002, a friend with a penchant for discovering interesting and curious things online emailed me this link: www.nanowrimo.org. That one email changed my Novembers forever. ("Forever", in this case, is defined to mean the span of time between 2002 and 2005, and possibly longer.) Now they are thrilling, agonizing, infuriating, triumphant, despondent, panicked, giddy-- almost anything except dull.

In case you haven't compulsively checked the link already, I'll explain that November is the month when a handful of lunatic writers decide every year to attempt writing an entire 50,000-word novel in thirty days. The "handful" is getting quite large, with tens of thousands of people signing on from all around the world. There's a large forum where we all come to share our lunacy and procrastinate. It's great fun. There's no prize for those who make it-- except that you get a bright purple 'winner' banner in the NaNo forums.

The purpose of this exercise is to get people who have always talked about wanting to be writers to sit down and actually write. If you're trying to produce 50,000 words in thirty days, it's fairly certain they're not going to be terribly good words. It's a madcap dash, where you must throw all considerations of form and aesthetics aside and make a break for it. It requires laying aside perfectionism, self-criticism, and attention to detail, and just slopping words onto the page as fast as they'll come. In my three years of participating, I've never even made it to the halfway point.

My problem is, as most of my problems in life are, three parts pride and two parts laziness. Laying aside perfectionism and self-criticism: not so easy. Damn near impossible sometimes. There are many, many areas of life where I'm willing to do a merely decent job-- content as long as I don't utterly disgrace myself. Writing is not one of these areas. It's a toss-up whether my perfectionism is more suffocating when it comes to writing or when it comes to relationships. God may know which one I have a harder time with; I certainly don't. For whatever reason, writing is the act that lies nearest to my soul, and it wounds me to even think of doing it less than magnificently.

I am fortunate in that my two worst qualities, the aforementioned pride and laziness, tend to take the edge off one another. Pride motivates me to work harder at most things than my laziness would otherwise allow; laziness encourages me to let go of things that my pride would otherwise keep an iron grip on. In writing, though, the two simply tag-team to sabotage me. When I am wearied of perfectionism, I slump into a refusal to do any work at all. When I build up my motivation again, pride leaps in to freeze my words before they ever reach the page.

This is why I have "failed" NaNo three years in a row. This is also why I continue to attempt it, even when the outlook for finishing isn't good (this November's agenda includes editing nearly a whole book of my father's, writing a newsletter, and a trip out of town, as well as possibly being responsible for my family's Thanksgiving dinner). It's important that I give myself this month every year-- not so that I can let all my writerly inhibitions go and work with both abandon and diligence, but so that I can practice doing so. I'm still not very good at it. I think my record is around 20,000. But I'm getting better. And one of these years I will develop the courage and dedication to achieve the purple banner. And that will mean that I'm just a little bit closer to being able to live and love effectively, and to make a little more successful my raids on the inarticulate.