We are still back in the year 2006 at the beginning of the month of November. It’s late at night and I’m wide awake, scribbling wildly in my shabby green journal, struggling to keep the pen moving fast enough to spell out my thoughts.
November 1, 2006
Have you ever for a moment seriously tried to believe in something completely impossible? My novel is about believing in the impossible, though I did not intend for it to be so. I am reminded of something that happened to me when I was a child. Perhaps I was thinking of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis) or maybe I just had nothing better to do, but one day I sat in my room, looking at a picture of a unicorn drinking from a stream. I thought about how real the water looked, about how realistic the shadows were, how close to actual motion the picture was, and I tried to will myself into the scene. As I tried, this feeling welled up from deep inside, a feeling of hope and possibility and awe.
Though I ultimately failed to break into that alternate reality and escape this one, the feeling persisted. Indeed, it is still with me today. In the deepest, dustiest, darkest corner of my heart, I feel that if I could have believed it absolutely for even one second I would have found myself standing next to a unicorn.
So how fitting is it that the subject of my novel is believing in impossible things when the goal of writing a novel in just a month is so daunting as to appear impossible? As I watched the minutes tick by on October 31st and midnight rolled around, I felt a curious sense of blankness. Where I had been looking forward to this in October, now I felt the impossibility of it in November. How was I going to write it? Thanks to my fellow CT writers, I was shamed into writing. I had nothing else to do while I was at the meet-up and I would have felt strange leaving immediately.
So I wrote. I wrote garbage. I gave myself permission to write garbage, five pages of it. I did not care if my thoughts were in order or if my words were arranged grammatically. I did not care about spelling. I did not care if I repeated myself or skipped over parts. If I could not come up with the well-dressed word that I wanted, I used its raggedy cousin. I put my faith in the value of quantity over quality. I concentrated on the story. I just had to tell the story.
But my five pages became a mere 1200 words when typed into the computer. I refused to fall behind. I wrote more garbage. When I could not take any more, I went to bed. Then the magic began. Thoughts started popping into my mind, one after the other. Where before my novel had an unbridgeable hole in its center, there were now people and happenings, relationships I had not anticipated, thoughts I could barely recognize as my own. The story really began to unfold.
Now we have returned to the year 2007, but it is the above journal entry that made me decide to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, even though I previously said that I wouldn’t. It reminded me that writing is a leap of faith. You have to believe that you will accomplish your goal no matter how impossible it seems. It’s like that scene from the third Indiana Jones movie, the “leap from the lion’s head.” Indiana Jones had to have faith that he would not fall when he stepped off the edge of the cliff. When you’re writing a story, you can’t see all the way from beginning to end, but you have to trust that if you proceed the path will eventually reveal itself.
I don’t know that I have it in me to write salable material, but I do know that I need to write for my own satisfaction. It’s just part of who I am. I also know that the only way to become a good writer is by writing a lot.
Last year NaNoWriMo pushed me to take the leap of faith and also to write a large quantity of text, neither of which I’ve been able to manage since. I think I need the kick in the pants. There’s the risk that it will have the opposite effect and cause another 4-5 month dry spell, but I’m willing to take the chance. I still remember the sense of excitement that I felt as the novel began to unfold and I would like to feel that way again.