Getting My Mojo Back
For those of you who are not writers, November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel or 50,000 words (which is not actually a novel) in one month. The purpose is to spark creativity by forcing people to write intensely. There’s no time to pretty it up. You’ve got to right, man! If you already have a novel in progress, some people use NaNoWriMo to finish their novels.
Every November I try to participate, but then life, as usual, gets in the way, and I don’t end up finishing. This year I took a different approach. I didn’t try to write intensely; I just tried to write. I have a novel I’ve been working on for ummm… Okay, longer than I’d like to admit. One reason why it has taken me so long is that I’ve been a bit stumped about which way to take the characters and how to move the plot along. Some people might say scrap it and start over, but I’m 47,000+ words in. I’m as invested in this novel as the government is in AIG.
Since I was lost as to how to progress the story, I had suffered a bit of that dreaded disease that no writer dares breath aloud (rhymes with fighter’s clock) though I was loathe to admit this even in the depths of my soul. Because every writer knows that if you say it aloud or admit it to yourself, it is bound to be true. But I digress.
So I approached NaNoWriMo differently. I started working on an idea for a novel that I’d only written a few ideas for, and as anyone who follows me on Twitter would know, after rereading it, I declared myself f***ing brilliant. However, I only got a few thousand words into it when what I had hoped would happen happened. I woke up one morning with the answer to how to move my other novel forward. What had I done differently that had caused this breakthrough? I had put ass to chair, fingers to keyboard, and wrote.
I have the privilege of teaching at a community college that holds an excellent Writer’s Conference every November. This isn’t your run of the mill conference either. The faculty who put this together have gotten authors such as John Updike, Frank McCourt, and Maxine Hong Kingston. The year I attended we had Norman Mailer. Though Mr. Mailer was too hard of hearing to participate very well in the question and answer session, he gave an excellent lecture and reading of his last novel. The one thing I will never forget him saying was how a writer’s subconscious is an integral part to his or her writing. Even when you aren’t writing, your subconscious is. Therefore, you must write every day to keep your subconscious primed. If you don’t, your subconscious will stop showing up, and you will find yourself with a bad case of “fighter’s clock.”
I got stuck because I stopped showing up every day. I let my life get in the way. The eternal struggle for the unpublished author. A struggle that seems even more difficult for writer’s/mothers/career women. Struggling to find the time to write while finding the time to do everything else. I don’t have the solution, but I do know that I must put ass to chair, fingers to keyboard, and write every day, or I can’t declare on Twitter that I’m f***ing brilliant.
December 9, 2009 5:05 pm 
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