It's That Time of Year Again...

We're exactly one week away from November today (a fact that is kind of blowing my mind!), which means that in seven days NaNoWriMo begins. Does NaNoWriMo ring a bell to any of you? Maybe you remember that is stands for National Novel Writing Month. Maybe you remember that people can sign up to participate and then write a 50,000 word novel during the 30 days of November. And maybe you remember that I participated in it two years ago and EVEN successfully finished my 50,000 words.

But probably you didn’t hear much more about my “novel” beyond that. Partly, that’s because 50,000 words isn’t really what most of us would consider a novel. I think it was about 80 pages. The other reason you probably haven’t heard much about the one I finished is that I haven’t even looked at it since the end of NaNoWriMo two years ago. The best explanation I can give for that is that I hated what I’d written. For a couple of reasons. One is that I had spent an entire month writing what felt all like backstory. I was more than fifty pages in and there wasn’t really a plot yet. Another reason is that I’d started NaNoWriMo a different year with basically the same story idea and hadn’t gotten very far before life got too busy and I couldn’t finish. Well the one rule about NaNoWriMo is that you’re supposed to start writing from scratch on November first. So when I started with the same idea two years ago that I’d come up with a few years before, I didn’t ever look back at what I’d written the first time. But upon completion of 50,000 words, when I looked back at the original attempt I’d made with that story I realized it was better. Much better. The actual writing was better. So I concluded a couple of things: I didn’t really want to keep working on what I’d done, and also I might be getting actively stupider now that I’m finally not in school any more. Ugh.

Anyway. I decided to give it another go this year, which is going to be extremely challenging since I don’t even have a laptop these days, but we’ll see what happens. I’m planning to just write it all in a Google doc.

I’m for sure not using the same idea I had for a different year (even though there aren’t really any of those left, anyway) since that was ultimately a disappointment last time. I don’t have any great ideas for a novel this year, but I decided that I want to challenge myself and my creativity in new ways. I think I’m going to experiment with magical realism. Magical realism can be present in many artistic endeavors of all different types, but as wikipedia describes it “often refers to fiction and literature in particular, with magic or the supernatural presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting.” Some of the most well-known writers of magical realism are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie. I’ve read quite a few YA novels that fall into the magical realism category in the past few years. Some examples are American Street by Ibi Zoboi, Bone Gap by Laura Ruby, and all of A.S. King’s books.

During a playwriting class I took in college, I had to write a scene where something not physically possible happened. It was sort of different, because the intent of the prompt was to write something that wasn’t inhibited by the constraints of performing it onstage. The point was to write something that would be a challenge to stage, that would require every member of the creative process to be inventive and figure out how to make the idea come to life. I ended up setting my scene on a space station that loses gravity at one point. So not exactly magical realism. But that writing prompt was challenging and fun and made me want to do something like it again. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Maybe I’ll end up liking what I have done at the end of November more this year. Maybe not. Maybe it’ll be one more piece of writing I never look at. Maybe it will be what finally gets me really writing again on a regular basis. Only time will tell. But it all starts a week from today.

As an aside, if any of you know really great places to write in Maine, I would love to hear them. I found the last time I did this that sitting alone in my house wasn't really my best writing plan. I'm also taking suggestions for music to listen to while writing.

(Also, this picture has nothing to do with NaNoWriMo I just like having a picture in every blog post and this one has books in it and a quote from a book that I read and liked once.)