What I Learned from Not Writing 50,000 Words in a Month

A friend inquired recently how I did participating in National Write a Novel in a Month (otherwise known as NANOWRIMO).  She asked if I completed my novel and I had to reply "no".  I told her I wrote 14,000 words and was still writing and she offered her kind support.  14,000 words is better than no words , which is what I accomplished the previous two years that I signed up.  And it is more than I have written since I was in high school.  In high school I started my first novel between junior and senior year.  Over the summer before my senior year I spent each summer night hunched over my grandfather's old electric typewriter banging on the keys, going through tons of white-out; my Sony Walkman playing Michael Jackson, because he was still kind of cool then and not quite as weird and well, white.  I started writing Chapter One and completed 60 pages single spaced.  I was very proud of myself.  I still have that manuscript.  It is a little tough to read now since it would appear that I was drowning in a sea of V.C. Andrews novels at the time and could possibly have become her ghost writer.  It is drippy and sappy and harsh but we all have to start somewhere.
   
In my senior year I took a creative writing class.  My teacher,  Mrs.C., was slightly eccentric, enthusiastic and carried her own writing filled notebooks around with her.  It was her best advice to always keep something to write with close at hand.  I have more notebooks than I care to admit to.  Pretty journals and regular style notebooks, leather bound or paper bound.  Not all of them filled but mostly filled or on there way to being filled and some just contain lists of things to do.  I even love to write lists.
   
A few weeks into the class I approached her and asked if she would consider reading something I had written.  She smiled and exclaimed ,"Of course."  Then I dropped the 60 pages on her desk with a thud and her smile faded, only slightly.  She regained her composure and asked what I had written.  I explained I had spent the summer beginning a novel, half expecting her to laugh at me, but she didn't.  She took my 60 pages and tucked them into her bag and returned them to me the next day, complete with corrections and praise in red ink on every page. She also wrote a note I have kept to this day, encouraging me to clean it up and submit it to a publisher.  I never did because shortly after that amazing confidence boosting note came a visit with my guidance counselor who, in one fell swoop undid all of the wonderful things Mrs. C had done.  She cut me off at the knees with a curt reminder that my grades weren't that great and getting into a college that offered journalism was a long shot.  She also wrote that down for me so I wouldn't forget, but I managed to lose that piece of paper.
   
I resented that guidance counselor for many years but as I have gotten older I have realized that along the way we meet people who are in the right profession and then there are those who are not.  Perhaps she wasn't where she wanted to be.  Perhaps her day had been terrible and listening to one more high school kid talk about what they wanted to do was just that proverbial straw on an imaginary camel's back.  When  it comes down to it, although it is nice to be lifted up and encouraged it is not up to anyone else to create a path for you.  The only thing that kept me from doing what I wanted was allowing my mind to keep replaying that moment over and over again, a constant drone playing in my subconscious.
  
It became second nature to talk myself out of writing anything.  It became an internal dialogue that played over and over.  Negative thoughts breed negative behavior, perhaps not directly your own but you bring that negativity into your being and it settles around you, like dust on Pig-Pen.  Negative thoughts have been proven to have an impact on our over all emotional well-being and also our physical well-being.  We can talk ourselves into being sick as easily as we can talk ourselves into being a failure.  When we learn to talk to ourselves in a positive light, to let the good shine through and push the negativity aside we find ourselves with more energy, emotionally upbeat and more fun to be around.  This becomes a wonderful cycle.  The more you feel confident, the more you exude that confidence and the more people will want to be in your presence. When we allow ourselves to fall into negative thinking, when we give credence to things perhaps someone else said to us it drags us down and begins a cycle of bad feelings, physical pain, even depression.
   
When I was little I had a record player in my room. Each night I played "A Boy Named Charlie Brown."  If you left the arm off the record player the record would just keep repeating.  Side one was the best part of the story.  Charlie Brown enters a spelling contest and he wins.  His friends carry him home and sing his praises.  I never listened to side two.  On side two Charlie Brown goes off to the city for the National Spelling Bee and loses, spelling beagle wrong.  Oh the irony and the negativity.  He comes home alone and no one meets him at the bus, no one to greet him and tell him he did his best.  I hated that side.  It was enough to make me cry, it made me feel lonely and cold.  So it was side one, over and over and over.  I could recite it for you, if you wish. 
 
Just like Charlie Brown couldn't blame losing his spelling bee on anyone else, I certainly cannot blame the fact that I have not yet written the great American novel on an adult from my past.  I can say that I allowed that one negative encounter to hold me in a place that said," you probably can't do it so why try?"  Of course there are those who can be told they can't accomplish something and run right out to prove someone wrong.  I wasn't that person.  I was more like silly putty.  You could write something down and press me into it and it would stick.
 
It was after I became a mom and I heard myself saying over and over to my small children, "don't say can't, you can do anything you want, just try." that I started to wipe away those long engrained thoughts for myself.  A conversation I had with my friend and fellow blogger, America's Next Top Mommy, http://americasnexttopmommy.blogspot.com/, brought me to understand that writing wasn't about writing what someone else may want to read, writing was about doing something I loved.  Putting words together, creating an atmosphere, making sense of my own world.  She was the one who encouraged me to start a blog, something at the time I thought was kind of silly and wouldn't be worth it in the long run.  I have been wrong before.  And once I stopped trying to write to please others and once I changed my inner mantra from "I'm not that good at writing."  to "Who cares if I'm not good at it, I love it!"  the more I wrote and the more I just enjoyed the process.
   
While I was trying in November to crank out that great American novel I received some of the best advice from one former high school friend, who is a published author,  he wrote on my Facebook page "Just get it all out, make a mess, don't worry about page 10 lining up with page 96. Just put it on the page. Then you go back and get to work."  It was perfect.  It is easy to make a mess.  It is easy to let the words flow even when they don't make sense.  All this time I really thought I needed to start at Chapter One and work my way through.  So I just wrote whatever moved me and strangely enough I found that I liked what I was writing and liked my characters and wanted to get to know them better.
 
Someday I may finish the novel.  Someday I may write something completely different.  I may never do more than write on this blog.  But I am content.  I am content with what I write.  I am content with where I have been and where I am going. I am content that I had one teacher who thought I could do it and I am glad I had the chance to share what I had written with her. For now I will just stay on side one and let Charlie Brown keep winning while I keep writing.