National Novel Writing Month is one month away! So let’s get primed for November and talk about one of my favorite topics; writing! Yes, my dream is not to simply own a small little blog and live a wonderful, simple life. I want to write, I want to have others read and enjoy the stories that I tell. I want to share stories that challenge, stories that move hearts.
A novel is very much like an enormous house, and the words we use are the bricks. Line your bricks all in a row and you have a sentence. Stack your rows together and you have paragraphs. We use words to build the walls, the character, and the shape of our stories. Each word laid down with care, with a purpose, with a reason.
There are a great many words that we use to build our stories. These words do not arrive at their positions by accident, or by magic. They will not just fall onto the page. They will not spontaneously arrive, carried by some unknown force. A team of people will help give the building structure and form but the weight of the work falls on the shoulders of one person. The author. The author sits down and she works. She puts her bricks together, sometimes tearing down whole walls in the process. She is unafraid to get her hands dirty, she is driven to tell, to write her story. So she spends her days writing, and rewriting, and editing, and rewriting again. She works at laying her bricks down until the building is complete and the story told.
I want to encourage you to stop dreaming about when you actually have time to write your novel. That magical day is a fiction, the best time to write your novel is right now!
This is perhaps the single greatest reason why I encourage every writer to give the NaNoWriMo challenge a try. It takes a lot of work to build something magnificent but you will never get there without a start. WriMo is focused on one thing during the month of November, laying down bricks. Here’s how it works. At the start of the
I think of WriMo as the laying down of the foundation of my story. In a very short time, the story that was in your head is spilling out on to the page. Sometimes this will force you towards new and creative areas, other times it will try your characterizations and test the strength of your plot. What you end up with may not be very good, it may need a lot of editing, but the bones of your story are there, on paper. Real enough to touch. I have completed three of my novels thanks to the work laid down during NaNoWriMo and thanks to them have started on many more. It is a commitment but one I wholly recommend. After all, you are the only one who can
This year I want to encourage you to stop dreaming about when you actually have time to write your novel. That magical day is a fiction, the best time to write your novel is right now! This November I want you to grab that vision that has only until now existed in your head. I want you to wrestle it onto the page. Write. Rewrite. Edit. Rewrite again. Stop dreaming and start laying down the bricks of your story until that story is told. You might be surprised how far you can go with a goal, a sprint, and a little bit of encouragement.