I don’t know how other writers feel, but I find it very difficult to maintain interest in a long-term writing project. This is a major reason why I decided to switch my primary genre from fiction to poetry. I can start a poem and even if it takes me several days to write it, I’m usually enthusiastic about whatever sparked it for the entire process. Then it’s finished and I move on to the next exciting piece. (Revisions are another post.) But long projects? Ugh. I get all excited at first, write like a fiend, fingers burning up the keyboard, sentences unrolling like red carpets in Hollywood and the feeling is sweet, and then…one morning I wake up and look at my computer and pretty much everything on earth seems more interesting than working on my project. You know, like cleaning the cat box? Or maybe using one of those snake thingies to get all the slimy hair out of the shower drain? Or how about I offer to clean my 17-year-old son’s toenails with a toothpick? (Ew. I crossed the line with that last one, didn’t I?) The point is, after a certain amount of writing, it gets reeeaaaally…well…HARD.  And this is why it has taken me three years to really get going on this memoir business.

What I discovered doing NaNoWriMo (which I finished, by the way, with an insane 15,000 words in the final two days after taking an entire week off–GO ME) is that if you make getting the words on the page your absolute, number one priority and completely disregard every other aspect of the writing, then it can be done. You can get through the slog part of it. Which is, more or less, everything after the first fifty pages. (There have been a few dramatic parts that have gone faster…I’m generalizing.) The thing about NaNo is that nothing matters except words on the page. It doesn’t matter if the words suck, if your plot sequence makes sense, or if you even know what the hell you’re writing about. Because all of those things can be fixed after the fact, during revisions. During NaNo, and especially that final, two-day push of Doom, I occasionally found myself thinking I’m writing this in the language of a 3rd grader and absolutely none of it is original. Or I’m writing this entire story in chronological order, which is probably not the most effective way to tell it. Or I really don’t remember how this event actually happened, so I’m going to have to make some shit up and then people will burn effigies of me in the village square and I’ll be the new James Frey.

And then I would remind myself that none of that matters, because I can figure it all out later. I can rewrite with better style, re-order every scene, and ask people who were there what happened (I have a multi-page document of questions for my parents) AFTER THE ROUGH DRAFT IS WRITTEN. See? The hard part (for me) is getting the foundation on paper. After that is when the real creativity and skill come in.

By the way, if there is a slog part to revisions, don’t tell me, ok? Thanks.

So NaNo is now over, and I have around 54,000 words on the page, but I’m only half to two-thirds of the way through the story. Lots of slogging ahead. But those first 50,000 words taught me something super important, which is that if I sit down and write my 2000 words per day and care about nothing but WRITING 2000 WORDS of what I think my experience was, I can get this thing done. And it’s actually working.

Someone else will have to clean the cat box and attend to my son’s nasty feet, I’m afraid. I’m too busy writing.