On Not Being A Writer

Posted by Manda(rific) on November 1, 2010 in Assorted Ramblings, Ramble | 3 comments

Ah, November. How are you? It’s been awhile.

This time of year usually brings to mind two thoughts – firstly, OH MAN IT’S ALMOST CHRISTMAS (paired with, naturally oh-man-I-need-to-start-working-on-Vault-Christmas-Stuff) and secondly (unfortunately) – Great. Time to steer clear of the internet.

It’s NaNoWriMo time.

I hate NaNoWriMo, and not for the task of “Oh no, writing 50,000 words in a whole month!” thing or the “I’m going to WRITE a NOVEL!” thing… it’s the people that do it. Not all of you, of course, because at this present moment I’m sure at least one person is reading this and thinking BUT MANDA, I LOVE NANO AND DO IT EVERY YEAR AND I AM ON MY WAY TO BECOMING A FANTASTIC NOVELIST. I’m sure you are. Just sit back on the rug for a minute and grab your juice box.

I get the whole thing behind NaNo, of course. Writing on a deadline! Writing for the sake of writing! I can support that. Writing is good. We need more writing and writers and things and people who understand the general process. That part is good. The part that is not good is the people who put their entire life aside to write this novel (last I checked, a lot of the people who write novels professionally still manage to, you know, have a social life and friends) and worst yet, the people that think having written a novel equates to having written a good novel.

In fact, lets all just take a minute and head over to Chuck Wendig’s Blog and see what he has to say about the subject.  Chuck is a fantastic writer, and I mean a really fantastic writer. This guy makes money off of writing! He does it for a living! And he’s telling us – to… do it? What? Chuck, I had faith in you. What gives?

Anywho, a few weeks ago when all the NaNo buzz started going around, the story outlines, the plotting, I thought to myself – hey, maybe I should do this thing. This thought was brief, and lead simply to this tweet:

Refusing yet again to do NaNoWriMo this year – sure I’ll just end up with 50,000 words of worldbuilding/backstory with no novel to speak of.

And the internet responded with a resounding DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT. And Chuck says do it, and Maureen Johnson and John Green and all these other people say Do It and you know internet maybe I don’t want to write a novel, even though I kind of dig the idea of having a writing deadline while I have nothing else to do.

So here’s what I’m going to do, internet. I’ll NaNo with you. I’ll play your silly little games. I refuse to write a novel, though. That ain’t happenin’. Maybe I’ll write you 50,000 words (or try to) of some foreign land, or come up with my own World of Darkness add on (I can see it now – Rainbow: The Splendor, or Unicorn: The Alliance or something equally as … well, you know.) …but I’ll write something. I’ll see what I can do. 1,600 words a day isn’t really much for me. I mean, I’m verbose. I talk a lot, and I write more than I talk. So we’ll see how that goes. I’m going to spend some time doing some serious worldbuilding and you all can work on your extremely rough drafts of the next Harry Potter or something.

Maybe I can also achieve 50,000 words blogged in November, too. Would that be some great feat? 100,000 words? Do I get some kind of champion crown for that? A gold star, perhaps? Inducted into the Freelancer Hall of Fame?

So there’s that. We’ll call this…erm… MaWriAShiOWoAbAFiWo. Perhaps that’s too verbose.  I mean who would participate in MandaWritesAShittonOfWordsAboutAFictionalWorld, and it’s certainly not very catchy. How about just Manda’s Worldbuilding Adventure. With Unicorns. And Rainbows.

Here goes this. No promises. Are you NaNo-ing too? Post in the comments, we can suffer together. Oh, and follow Chuck on Twitter. Why? Because he knows whats up. You’re going to be a writer damn it, and so am I, and we-are-going-to-do-this-thing even if it means banging our heads against our desks. Write something, even if it’s not a novel. After all, we waste hundreds of thousands of words each week on things like Twitter and Blogging and emails and text messaging… we can certainly make the time for 1600 piddly words about… something. Shoe tying. Pterodactyl burgers. A novel. An Epic Poem. Something. Just write. Right?

November, bring it.
Worldbuilding Words Written: 0
Words Blogged: 761
Days Left to Go: 29