Aaaaargh… what will this f*ing protagonist do next? How in hell will he extricate himself from a near certain lengthy prison sentence?
With the sun slipping low towards the shadowy horizon, the ideas, the muse, were roaming free and unwilling to return to the stall of the barn inside my head.
Five years ago this coming month I sent myself a (figurative) ransom note.
I embarked on a month-long odyssey to write a 50,000 word novel along with 3 or maybe 400,000 others in the online pilgrimage to writing called NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month.
Hopeful hundreds of thousands of quietly sequestered souls across the globe sought inspiration and profound thoughts in the bedrooms and home offices of their own towns and boroughs and landscapes. My writerly setting was this dry, fruit tree and vineyard-draped valley with a narrow lake snaking through it in a tiny Canadian town called Summerland.
The simple gist of the composition adventure is to begin… and finish… writing a novel during the month of November.
Anyone can enter.
Anyone can do it. Even you. No cost. Sign up here.
All you need to do is sit and compose an average of 1,666 words each day.
Black and white. Yin and yang. So simple and so difficult.
Here, let me give you some context.
I pull together this blog once a week and it usually slides in around the 1,000 word mark.
Typically it takes me about 5 or 6 hours of writing and editing, obsessing, drinking lattes, then writing and editing, obsessing some more… That means for NaNoWriMo I was writing about 1.5 blog posts EVERY day for a full month.
Easy peasy, right?
Sure. Easy if you’re supernatural JK Rowling or Stephen King, people of intense focus and creative ability and stamina.
Stephen King wrote a great book on the subject of writing called, appropriately… duh: On Writing.
King may be a “pulp” writer and sit low on the esteem scale with some out there (there are many of his books that even I don’t like), but he’s an unimaginably productive and creative freak of nature.
A Bonanza of Creative Brain-Force
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We are writers and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know
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My NaNoWriMo novel attempt, The Temper of the Times, was the story of an adult man who testifies in court against the accused rapist of his boyhood sweetheart. Years later, he is sent to jail himself after killing the paroled rapist in self-defense, while his former girlfriend is torn between her defender and her frustrated Peruvian-born husband-physician whom she brought to live in her west coast Canada community.
Interesting? Maybe. We’ll never know as the 50,000 words (YES! I completed it!) I wrote over 30 days languish in a drawer… a sticky drawer where I lack the drive to bring it home.
NaNoWriMo is akin to being in solitary confinement of the Orange is the New Black prison for 30 days.
As I sat in my home office pecking away faithfully day after day I found myself daydreaming of slipping self-directed ransom notes under the door seeking rescue from the bonds I had voluntarily shackled myself with.
I reminded and coached myself constantly with cliched platitudes… nothing good comes without pain or struggle… patience is virtue… hard work is its own reward…
Writing should be a pleasurable activity. I love blog writing.
Writing should be stimulating and intoxicating, self-examining and saintly. I attempt to do that in my weekly blurbs.
Writers are romanticized in books, TV, movies… it’s a pseudo-bucolic life of intellectual stimulus and reflection and creativity. I think romantically about myself all the time, that’s how I became Master of My Own Domain at 13!
Participating in NaNoWriMo is like becoming an anthropologist: an unexpected yet powerful self-discovery tool.
The #1 greatest take away I stumbled on in writing a couple of thousand words every day for a month?
I have an enormous respect and admiration for the writers out there who toil in quiet solitude developing ideas and intricate stories and pictures based on their life experiences and observations, or from extensive research and study.
The second greatest lesson was more of an internal discovery.
I’m not cut out for writing novel length stories. The intense, patient focus needed is foreign to my genetic composition. Sure, I can do it if necessary but it doesn’t take me to a happy place in any way similar to the joy I feel in participating in 5 or 6 very different activities, like running or blogging or playing guitar, in a day.
It’s like the staring game that kids play… who will blink first. I’d never win.
Stupid, I’d think. Let’s move on, there 10 other neat things to do.
Stephen King can sit on his ass for 4 or 5 hours every single day (including Christmas, he’s a workhorse) and massage his mind and writing muscles. I’m impressed.
But my massage comes in a potpourri of snippets running wildly off in different directions.
The ancient Greeks originated the maxim: “Know thyself“…
Benjamin Franklin in his Poor Richard’s Almanac observed the great difficulty of knowing one’s self, with: “There are three things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.”
NaNoWriMo was a 30-day trial of steel and diamonds for the lessons it taught me. If you try it out you may find the same.
I’ll finish up this mere 1,000 word blog post with a few questions for you to ponder.
How well do you know yourself?
How do you unearth your internal answers?
Have you tried writing a ransom note to yourself where you’ll set yourself free only after you’ve made the discovery that sets you on fire?
Man On The Fringe 
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