If you're like me, the idea of taking on new creative projects is really exciting. If you're like me, you charge forward to start biting at your creative endeavors and cram them down your throat with what I can only describe as sheer madness, because you showed up to a bull pen with dentures. And your shop teacher from middle school is there, trying to get advice from you on how to iron pants. Dreams are weird like that.
I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo in July. If you don't know what that is, check out nanowrimo.org, and enjoy the feelings of hopefulness, adrenaline, and fear.
Before NaNoWriMo, the longest writing project I had ever undertaken happened in the 8th grade when I wrote a 100-page script-form parody of Lord of the Rings, which I called "Lord of the Donut Hole Rings," because I am a writing genius. And the One Ring was a donut. Come on, don't tell me you didn't see that coming. (PLOT TWIST: FRODO IS ALLERGIC TO GLUTEN.) After my project was completed, I handed it in as a normal end-of-term writing assignment at school, to the visible anxiety of my English teacher. After that, I started to turn my parody into an epic hand-drawn flash video on my home computer, but I had to stop after about three minutes of the parody, because I didn't know how to condense data when you create a flash video, and it would basically crash the computer every time. I didn't say I was a computer genius.
The entire time that I was creating LotDHR, I felt nothing but fearless joy, ambition, and delight at what I was creating. The actual act of sitting at a computer and typing up page after page of middle school-grade Lord of the Rings jokes was the happiest thing I could have been doing at that point in my life.
My NaNoWriMo experience was different. All told, I made it about 8 pages in during the month of July, although I did have a fully-developed plot map and all of my scenes written on little note cards, numbered in sequential order. I might still finish this story someday, but who knows. I think I only really tried for the first week and a half of July, and almost that entire time, I was anxious, afraid that I would fail, and afraid that I would create something so irredeemably crappy that my friends, family, and every literary person ever would point their fingers at me and call me, "The Worst Writer Of All Time, For Sure, For Probably Forever."
At some point, probably towards the beginning of the third week, I admitted to myself that I was just not going to get the novel done. I mean, writing a novel in a month is a pretty insane mountain to climb if you're starting from a place of, "Sometimes I Feel Anxious When I Think About Writing In My Journal." Don't even get me started on thinking about writing a blog. Like this one.
Despite all my fears about writing, and despite the fact that I got nowhere close to my NaNoWriMo goal, I'm proud of myself that I'm actually talking about it. Who knows where I'll be a few years from now--I hope I won't still feel this way about writing, and it's really up to me to make sure that I ignore that fear and do it anyway. So, I think that's what I'm learning.
In other news, I got accepted into a school's online BA in English/Creative Writing program, which I will hopefully start at the end of October. The final decision hasn't been made yet, as my husband and I are still talking about the changes that it'd mean for us. However, it's likely to happen...and, how do I feel when I think about the prospect of eliminating the guilt that I've always felt about starting college and never finishing, and that I want to work on my own writing but don't know how?
Fearless Joy. Ambition. Delight at what I'll create.
