So today, Jen over at Conversion Diary blogged about NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month, which is November -- and just tackling writing projects in general: "I felt God nudging me to write this post, like he was saying, 'There is someone out there who needs to write a book. I gave them this great idea for a story, and they keep talking themselves out of putting it down on paper.'"
Raises hand.
Ugh. I have been so tempted to do NaNoWriMo so many times, but never have...and the ideas for books (both fiction and non) in my head are nearly endless (years ago...YEARS! ...I had an idea for a Catholic chick-lit novel, and got so much encouragement from people I talked to about it (even a Sister of Life), but did nothing). But I'm just so afraid that I will run out of time in the day to get writing in because of excuses (work, trying to work out more, the experimental cooking I never do, thinking about projects, daydreaming about things, reading other people's books that are probably better than anything I'll write and watching TV shows that have started up again...b/c some of us don't have/can't afford a DVR to watch them whenever we want and fast forward through commercials...sorry, I digress, whinely), or that even if I try, everything I write will just be sheer, unmitigated crap. Excuses, excuses, excuses.
I actually started two different story lines a couple of weeks ago, all fired up because I had not one, but TWO fiction ideas that are completely disparate (one science fictiony, the other historical), and after a couple of frenzied hours flipping back and forth between two Word documents, have proceeded to do absolutely nothing with them.
Work ethic, thy name is mud.
NaNoWriMo might actually help me here, seeing as it's deadline driven, and the panic of deadlines is something I find helpful when trying to complete tasks (House cleaning, it can wait. Oh, but someone will be over in 35 minutes? I become a frenzied whirlwind of house-straightening). And you have to achieve a certain word count per day, so it isn't like you can procrastinate until November 28 and then just write 50,000 words by midnight November 30. No, really, you can't: you sign up and write into a system that keeps track of your progress. Also, you can't start it and write into something you've already started; you have to start with a completely new topic.
You know, because that's not intimidating. The list of how NaNoWriMo works gives all sorts of advice, with #7 being "This is not as scary as it sounds." Uh huh. I keep thinking and occasionally blogging about how I don't do enough writing, so perhaps I should just go for it. I overthink to the point of inaction so often that anything is better than nothing, right? Right?
