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Why I won’t be participating in NaNoWriMo this year

Just in the nick of time I’ve decided: I’m officially not participating in NaNoWriMo this year (that’s National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated, and it happens each November).

And it’s not because I don’t love NaNoWriMo, I do.

But the thing is that while I love the idea of NaNoWriMo, the reality of it is that I’ve participated the last two years and I’ve never finished a novel.

I’ve never “won” NaNoWriMo.

And I can tell you right now that I wouldn’t win this year either.

And that’s the thing I don’t like about NaNoWriMo. It’s a no-holds-barred, no-excuses-allowed race for the goal of 50,000 words in less than 30 days but I know right now that for me such a race is unsustainable.

And in part that’s because I’m too busy and not willing to make the sacrifices that would be necessary (getting over my distaste for writing on the bus, giving up on sleep and my already-meager social life).

But here’s the deal: I’ve been there and done that.

If you’re familiar with my story, you know that I went to some university or other and obtained a pair of advanced degrees in just a handful of years.

So no, I’ve never written a novel. But I’ve done the sleepless nights and the coffee-until-you-think-you-might-be-sick. And I’ve done the bit where you hang out with groups of people working frantically to achieve the “win” before the deadline.

I’ve been there and done that and I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to do that again.

(But if I ever am, you can bet I’ll be taking another crack at NaNoWriMo!)

What’s dangerous about NaNoWriMo is that it invites burnout.

There was a lovely post recently over at Writerly Life about “carrying the fire” of your writing. And I think this is a lovely metaphor, because the most important thing to do if you’re carrying the fire is to keep it burning.

You must not let it burn out.

On that same post I left a comment in which I wrote (paraphrasing a bit here):

My time spent at university… left me in a place where I was emotionally and physically exhausted and totally disconnected from my creativity. I found it was easy to make the mistake of diving back in too fast and all at once, and I learned that I burned out easily if I pushed too hard, and that the price was usually months of paralyzing writers’ block and creative stagnation; however, now I feel like I’m finally approaching something that works sustainably. Am I writing daily? No, not usually. Am I writing as much as I wish I could? No, not that either.

But I am writing. Each week I find the time to write, and maybe it’s just a page or two, but to me it feels a lot like victory.

I think that, at least for now, the trick to carrying my fire is not to fan the blaze to the point of burnout, but instead to make peace with being the bearer a smaller, more sustainable flame.

And that is, in a nutshell, why I’ve decided not to participate in NaNoWriMo this year.

(And yes, I still fully intend to write a novel some day!)

I’d love to hear from you! Are you planning on participating in NaNoWriMo this year? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments below.

Girl, age 11

When she’s 11 she climbs trees and splashes in mud puddles and runs races in the pouring rain. When she’s 11 she thieves apples from the neighbor’s tree and puts earthworms in the neighbor boy’s hair and she laughs because nothing has ever felt so free.

When she’s 11 she builds forts. She topples couches and ransacks closets for sheets and blankets and sleeping bags. And then she fills the living room with imagination until it becomes a jungle that can only be crossed if she slithers through on her belly like a snake.

When she’s 11 she lives each moment fully and she looks forward toward the adventures she is sure will be waiting for her at ages 12 and 13.

And at age 11 she can’t imagine beyond that because then there is high school and surely that is so. far. away.

But at age 11 the future looms vast and oh so bright that sometimes it hurts her eyes, but even that is exciting.

–

At age 11 she falls from a tree and it hurts and she falls from the monkey bars and that hurts too. But at age 11 she doesn’t let these things stop her because at age 11 she still remembers that not-so-long ago she learned how to walk and she still remembers what it was to fall down and get up and fall down again.

At age 11 she isn’t afraid of falling and she still dreams of flying and sometimes when she wakes up in the night she jumps from her bed because she’s still half-convinced that if she could just jump high enough she might discover her wings.

And at age 11 maybe she’s just starting to doubt because she’s done a lot of jumping and climbing and falling and maybe she’s struggling just a little to hold onto that hope.

But at age 11 she’s still trying, just in case maybe this time is the first time she’s right.

 

Author’s note: If you’d like to hear this piece in my own voice, check out the video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nERX7ijZJbQ&list=UUaSxUNXZlcurR4VKBdOc-vQ

As always, I’d love to hear from you! Let me know what you think of this poem in the comments below! (And if you liked it, please share!)

A letter to my teenage self

The thing I wish I had known when I was a teen…

Is that the world is both so much bigger and so much smaller than you think it is because I know that it feels like you are smaller than an ant and larger than the blue whale and what I want to tell you is that both of these things are true and that it is possible to still be beautiful even when you don’t feel that way because I know you and I know you’re feeling like you don’t quite know where to put your feet or how to move your lips to make people like you.

And what I want to tell you is to be brave and to worry less about what those other people think because the truth is that not everybody is going to like you. And you’ve got to learn to be ok with that.

And I want to tell you to stop and turn back and don’t go this way because this way lies madness and I found madness but I can’t tell you to stop because you’re no longer you, you’re me.

And what I’ve learned from you, and maybe what you’ll learn from me, is that we’re in this thing together…

 

And that together we’re going to do just fine.

 

Author’s note: You can hear me read this piece aloud in the video below!

http://youtu.be/8hBHW59ujcY

 

As always, I’d love to hear from you! Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Letter to the ancestress I never knew

I heard you.

I never knew you. I still today know nothing about you, and yet I heard you.

You were a voice that reached out to me from beyond the vale of three lifetimes as I retraced our footsteps and found my way back to the country I know you called home.

I heard your whispers in the trees on the banks of Loch Lomond and felt your smiles in the warmth of the sun on my skin as I climbed cliff-sides in the Scottish highlands. I felt the the brush of your breath across my skin in the cool night air.

I never knew you. I have never so much as seen a picture of you, and yet I felt your presence all around me.

—

I grew up a child edited out of my own past, and yet decidedly still connected to the personal history that lurked in shadows and unspoken places. I remained connected to those people and places, always once removed from the stories I grew up with, stories born of parents who did not speak of their parents, and of grandparents who talked only of themselves.

I grew up divorced from the personal history that ties each of us back to belonging, back to one another along the vast network of human lineage, back to the shared heritage that can be traced back to a pair of common ancestors: grandfather and grandmother of the human race.

I grew up alone; separated from this vast network of interconnected lives, of interconnected histories.

I grew up rootless.

—

And yet I discovered myself unexpectedly rooted, tied not to a story or a history of self but to a history of place.

I grew up rooted to a small patch of Pacific coastline, a land of ancient redwoods and rocky beaches and the vicious, aching cold of the ocean’s waves.

I grew up among the trees, and learned to speak with the tongue of that place. I learned to walk among her spirits and greet them in our shared voice. I learned to let the ocean’s rhythm soothe the pace of my own fragile and faltering human heart and learned patience as I watched the winter’s rains linger and the summer’s winds blow.

And one day in the summer’s sun I excavated my heart and buried it by the sea shore, where it might be lulled to sleep, cradled in the rocking palm of the ocean’s tides.

And then I left that heart behind.

—

I wrote the words because they asked me to and I said, “I live in a beautiful world and it has deeply influenced the person I have become. My house is nestled in a clearing, surrounded by redwoods and spruce trees. I live near the ocean, and when the wind comes from the west I can taste its brine on my tongue. This natural beauty has infiltrated my psyche and greatly influenced my outlook on the world. It is a part of me.”

And then the call and came I walked away.

I left behind those rocks and trees I knew so well and moved 3,000 miles away to a place from which I almost couldn’t feel the fragile flutter of my heart.

And I was rootless.

—

I never knew her story, and by extension will never really know my own, lost forever are those chapters of my pre-history.

I grew up in a culture that moves forward without looking back and in doing so I fear we leave behind our stories, our wisdom.

Who today still cares to honor their ancestors, to cherish the guidance left behind in foot-shaped prints upon the Earth?

And this is why I cannot help but wonder, if I could hear her voice today— a voice reaching out from beyond the veil of time—

What would she want to tell me?

September 2014 Book Reviews

fall color

Happy October! It’s officially Autumn here in Boston — the leaves on the trees have started to change color and I’ve broken out the lightest of my wool layers already. My early morning walk to the bus stop has become rather brisk.

Spring and fall are by far the more interesting seasons of the year in the Northeast. Summer and winter linger with months of either sweltering and sticky heat (though this past summer was unusually temperate) or freezing cold, but Spring and Fall are anything but predictable. A day with highs in the 60s might be followed by a day with highs in the 80s making a daily weather check imperative when choosing attire for the day ahead.

The transition seasons are unreliable, unexpected, and daily bring novelty to an otherwise mundane routine and I for one enjoy the whimsy of the process.

On the reading front, this past month has been a quiet (and therefore productive) one. The page count for this month comes to 1,859 pages.

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I actually read most of this book in August, but didn’t manage to finish it in time for last month’s book reviews. Honestly, finishing this book was something of an odyssey, and it’s a testament to the quality of Faulkner’s writing that I finished the book at all. Because the book is undeniably well-written; however, The Sound and the Fury is certainly not an easy read and, despite the fact that I am generally opposed to re-reading books, this is a book to read for the pleasure of a second reading. The first reading is necessary because, having waded through the murky narrative once (preferably with the aid of the book’s Wikipedia page…), you’ll actually know what’s happening the second time through. The story is broken up among four narrators and the first two sections are extremely muddled, the third is narrated by a truly detestable character, and the final section marks the only really compelling section of the entire work. Reader beware: The Sound and the Fury is not to be undertaken lightly.

 

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely is a book about some of his research results as a behavioral economist at MIT, and how the results of his experiments demonstrate that humans often behave in ways that defy “common” sense. The book is engagingly written (if perhaps a little too chatty for my admittedly academically-inclined tastes), and the research results are interesting. Some particular highlights: why a 50 cent aspirin is a more effective painkiller than a 1 cent aspirin, the magic of FREE!, and why money-mindedness allows us to justify our greed. The book is a quick read and I recommend it for anyone interested in a bit of lighthearted reading on the subject of human foibles and fallibility. For those less inclined to sit down with the whole book, Dan Ariely writes an advice column that is both insightful and entertaining.

 

Dune by Frank Herbert

So it seems a gross omission that I had not previously read Dune, seeing as it is one of the truly iconic works of the Science Fiction genre. And while I’ll admit that in terms of Sci-Fi/Fantasy I’m usually more of a Fantasy reader than a true Sci-Fi enthusiast, Dune manages to support an elegant blend of both genres. If you’ve been following along with my book reviews, it’s pretty clear that I’ve been on more of a contemporary (non-)fiction tear, so this book made for a welcome change of pace. The book is an interesting and extremely well-executed bit of authorial world-building and I can see why it’s become a classic.

I was reading an interview with David Mitchell (author of such works as Cloud Atlas and most recently The Bone Clocks) and he had this to say about creating believable worlds that are outside of the realm of your own (or anyone’s) experience and I think it’s more than a little profound:

“How to immerse oneself in the moment-to-moment nature of a time and place you’ve never personally experienced—and perhaps cannot?

Well, I would put a question to you. What’s the difference between you and your great great great-grandfather? What makes you different?

I think the answer is this: What you take for granted.

What you take for granted about your life, about your rights, about people around you. About ethnicity, gender, sexuality, work, God. Your relationship with the state. The state’s obligations and duties to you: Health care, education, recreation. What you take for granted about all these things is I think what marks one culture from from another, and one generation from another.” [Source]

It is exactly this that Frank Herbert does so masterfully in Dune.

 

Night by Elie Wiesel

Here’s another entry from my I-can’t-believe-I-haven’t-already-read-this list. Night is a book that needs no introduction. A harrowing tale of the author’s time in Nazi concentration camps, the narrative is at times viscerally cringe-worthy, and yet the prose carries with it a silence, a quietude, that is profound. The prose is stark and the description unflinching in the face of atrocity. It’s no wonder the book has become something akin to required reading.

 

 

I’d love to hear from you! Let me know what you’re reading in the comments below.

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