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Participating in NaNoWriMo Triggered Something in My Brain
And I’m Going to Find it Again.
In 2015 I participated in my first NaNoWriMo challenge, fully expecting to fail.
National Novel Writing Month: 50,000 words, 30 days, No excuses.
Because I was expecting to fail, I took on a second challenge in parallel to document my progress in a brief daily journal. I knew I had some traveling for speaking engagements sprinkled throughout the month, which I expected would slow down my 1667 words per day goal. I thought if I documented each day, I would be able to retrace my steps and identify my failing points so that I could overcome them in a future attempt.
I didn’t fail. I hit the 50,000-word mark on day 21! Woo-hoo!
Twelve years later, I’m in a “working through the stuck” mode. Staring at my computer screen this morning, I wanted to write, I have too many ideas to write about, but trying to figure out how to begin again.
I do this every so often. I get stuck. I question everything. Then I go back and look at where I’ve been and what I’ve documented through my writing, and I realize it’s all still in here. It’s all still ME. I just got a little derailed.
I call back to the wisdom of Ray Bradbury’s Zen & the Art of Writing all the time, and yet, I still…
