My apologies for not writing in such a long time. November was consumed by NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Then came the holidays, hard on its heels. And as if that wasn’t distraction enough, we were hit with Snowpocalypse 2008™, the mother of all snowstorms. It was a mother, too; blanketed Portland in sixteen inches of snow for which we were completely unprepared. My dogs loved it, but by the time our white Christmas came around, all anyone could do was grumble about how much we missed the rain.

Thankfully, the arctic air has moved on. Over the last day or so, that beautiful blanket of white has become billions of gallons of gray Slurpee, heaped up along the roadside right where you were planning on turning left. Frankly, you don’t want to hear my bitchin’ about the soggy mess the snow left behind. Hell, I don’t even want to hear it. So in the spirit of getting things back to normal, I thought I’d finally report back instead on this year’s NaNo.

In case you’ve forgotten, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel of 50,000 words or more during the month of November. I participated back in 2005, and although I did in fact “win” (meaning I made my word count), it was somewhere on the pain scale between a root canal and having my foot run over by a bus. There were days when I just couldn’t face writing, and others when I had to have marathon sessions to try and make up lost ground. I flailed at my plot, beavering away blindly in the hope that something readable would magically arise from the steaming pile. By the time November 30th came I had a ridiculously rough draft of perhaps the first third of a novel, but by god it was 50,000 words!

This year, I decided to approach it differently. Since no one in their right mind expects to pen something that’s actually readable in 30 days, I chose to make wiser use of my time. Instead of charging into prose, I began outlining my next novel, free-writing on characters, motivations, and plot for all of November.  I didn’t try to lay down pretty words, I just noodled on what I might write once I got around to it. The result was a much less stressful NaNo, a happier Bill, and the kernel of an idea that’ll make a good story one day. By not investing a lot of ego in the words themselves, I gave myself permission to ramble aimlessly. Ah, liberation! This is the shitty first draft that Anne Lamott was talking about, only shittier than even she ever imagined.

My progress throughout the month was steady. Last time out, I learned a simple but valuable lesson: when I’ve got a hard word count that must be achieved, the only way to get there is to hit my daily goal, each and every day. By Nov. 30, my word count tracker on the NaNo site resembled a well-constructed set of stairs, marching evenly from start to finish. I didn’t hit a home run every day, but I stuck to my guns and saw the project through. Along with the warm feeling of accomplishment, I now have an unequivocal answer to the age-old question do I have another novel in me? You betcha!

This is the point in the story where I come charging into December, all fired up from November’s success and started churning out pages like a whirlwind for my current novel. I wish. Instead, it was like building up a head of steam and running full-face into a brick wall. The switch from loose noodling back to writing actual prose was jarring, and it felt like all the progress I had made in thirty days leaked out of my fingertips in seconds.

There’s a happy(ish) ending. I’ve gone back to writing the very first drafts of my scenes longhand, which recaptures some of the freedom I felt during NaNo. Something about the process of writing by hand feels oddly less permanent and weighty than typing onto a screen. So, after a lot of moaning, I’m back to my novel at a pre-November pace again. It turns out that writing is like trying to sneak up on a rabid wildebeest… you’ve got to constantly switch directions, maintain the element of surprise, and always, always stay downwind.