I Won! National Novel Writing Month 2012

My fifth NaNo win! I am so proud. This one rounded out at over 51,000 words, and I actually finished it off last night with an ending and everything!

And now, tonight, I feel lost and terrified. What will I do now? I just frantically texted my amazing NaNo buddy* the big question -- without the challenge of NaNoWriMo, will I be disciplined enough to finish editing together a real rough draft? Or will another year go by when I don't?

The pep talk from Nick Hornby yesterday gave me heart. My favorite bits were:

It’s a mess, the arts. Critics don’t agree with each other, readers don’t agree with critics. And real writers—if I may become definitive for a moment—change their minds about their own worth and talent somewhere between two and seven hundred times a day.

I’m trying to tell you that your own opinion of your work is entirely irrelevant, and so is the opinion of others. You have a job to do, and that job is to write a novel...You need a story and characters and something to say about them, although it’s possible that some of these elements won’t arrive until after you’ve begun. You don’t need an agent or a grant or a publisher’s advance, and you don’t need to know whether your book will be studied at university in two hundred years’ time.

(I never do that last bit. Nope, not me. Ha!)

One of the biggest things I learned this year during NaNoWriMo is that contemplating my plot and characters is all well and good, but actually WRITING 50,000 words of the novel will put me farther down the road than any amount of just THINKING. I also learned that writing in quick 15 minute sprints helps me put the pedal to the metal and just GO. At the end of 15 minutes, I have 800 more words than I did before.

As they say, you can edit a shitty rough draft, but you can't edit a blank page. Well, I now have 51,000 more words of a shitty rough draft to edit.

Here's to small steps after small steps!

*I also learned that having an equally-committed writing buddy, even five states away, is an enormous motivator and a ton of fun. Thank you, Cristina Pippa! When I was 500 words from crossing the 50k line, I had to post on her Facebook wall. It just didn't seem right to go by myself.

How to Decipher a Toy's Target Gender

Chris spotted this on Facebook. I love it. My thoughts exactly.

Bring It

If you can't raise consciousness, at least raise hell.

--Rita Mae Brown

Timing: Martin Luther and A Young Kamikaze Pilot

Saturday marked the anniversary of Martin Luther's birthday back in 1483. He's known for the Ninety-Five Theses (short for "Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences"), his famous attack on the Catholic church and its various practices that he found to be against the word of the Bible. Also famous was the way he delivered the treatise -- he nailed them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Evidently this was the custom of the day, but when we were taught about this as children, the practice seemed overdramatic and awesome.

Luther's Theses are widely regarded as the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation, and, of course, a branch of Protestantism took its name from him.

What most compels me about his story is the element of perfect timing that fueled the spread of his work. He wrote these Theses right after the printing press had been invented, which meant that his words could be and were reproduced widely and read all over Europe, driving the spread of his ideas and the movement launched from them.

He could not have planned this timing. His ideas simply came to light at the perfect historical moment for them to make their maximum impact.

This is the kind of thing that haunts me at night.

Coming at this idea from another direction:

There's a character in Empire of the Sun (a movie I watched repeatedly as a pre-teen which is now etched into my memory, along with J.G. Ballard's source novel) that also haunts me. It's the opposite of Luther's story. A young Japanese boy with dreams of becoming a kamikaze pilot finally gets the opportunity, and goes through the pre-flight ritual -- but it is too late; the Japanese have surrendered. The time for his dream has passed. He is devastated.

This really freaked me out when I was younger. (Along with about a thousand other images in that story. But that's a whole other blog post. Or a hundred. Seriously. What pre-teen watches and watches and watches a movie about World War II internment camps? Me, that's who.)

In my 20s, I was obsessed with timing. What if my unique gifts in the world had come along at the wrong time? What if the world didn't need what I had to offer? What if I had a great idea for a book or movie but it should have come out a hundred years ago, or a hundred years from now?

I'm a little older now, and I feel more restful about the idea of timing, simply because I understand that the forces of history are completely out of my control, and that's okay. There are many elements of timing that I can control, including my basic belief now that I can and will find the compatibility of my historical moment and my unique talents.

The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

--Frederick Buechner

Finding that divine overlap can feel like a long process, but I take hope from the millions who have done it before me, and most of them past their 20s, unlike the elite American wunderkind fantasy.

Another key element of timing is that perhaps there is no way to know the legacy of your timing during your lifetime. In which case, the work simply continues, and you navigate by pleasure and gladness.

Have you experienced these sweet spots of your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meeting? How did you know you had found that place?

What Comes Out

Nine days into this year's NaNoWriMo project, I'm baffled by something about my writing.

I consider myself to be a funny person. I mean, I'm not a comedienne or sketch comic, but I've got some sense of wit and timing. I say things that make people laugh, fairly regularly.

But when I write -- and this probably includes my writing on this blog -- it is all Serious Seriousity. Contemplative, solemn, earnest, transparent, sober. My shit gets real. I mean, much of it is beautiful, haunting, and honest. But my characters don't really traipse through the landscape lightly, cracking jokes or being funny.

This surprises me to no end. I'm going go on faith and assume that what comes out is what is supposed to come out.

Are you ever surprised by what you create, based on the way you are in the rest of your life? Anyone out there living a peaceful, harmonious life who composes death metal? Or any accountants who also sculpt grotesque figures?