The End of a Challenge.

November flew by at a ridiculous rate. In fact, this whole year seems lost to chaos, panic, and unrest.

We’ve all had to adjust to the constant threat of sickness, unemployment, crazy motherfuckers everywhere, lost opportunities, loneliness, Zoom friendships — needless to say we are all suffering from trauma in one way or another.

I, for one, have had a difficult time concentrating and have been forced to adjust my writing style to accommodate 100% work-from-home mode. It hasn’t been easy, just like it hasn’t been easy to keep hope alive after losing a couple of big screenwriting shots. I have pivoted toward prose so that I could continue the writing craft without getting too down on myself. That pivot has lent itself to other doors opening, including new freelance gigs and a book of short stories being published in January (details soon!).

It’s also created an avenue for myself that I never considered. I started NaNoWriMo for the purpose of forcing myself to accept a challenge and follow through. I tend to find it fairly easy to start something and ditch it halfway through. When the day comes that I’m not in the mood, I usually don’t. But for the month of November I held myself to a higher standard and gave myself permission to write without judgement.

My process often includes editing whilst writing. I will enter a writing session by reading back what I last wrote. Then I’ll unintentionally find shit that needs to be redone, so I’ll redo it, and before I know it I’m an hour in and haven’t written a new word. By then I might be frustrated and stop for a bit, or I’ll go even farther back in the pages. I’m sure you can imagine how much I get done when I work this way.

Sometimes I’m incredibly productive, and can write pages and pages without a thought. But it’s not often. For me, the process is work. It’s work I love, but it is work.

For NaNoWriMo, I made the conscious decision to work in a completely new way each day. That is to simply sit and work off the last word I wrote the day before. And working on the project every day for 30 days helped my stay engaged enough in the story that I didn’t feel that I needed a reminder of the tone or where I left off. I didn’t consider how convoluted the story may be, or that I needed to fix a plot hole or character weakness. I accepted that I would edit once the pages were complete.

I hit 50,000 words yesterday, after a marathon session (because I skimped the day before), and still have about 5,000 or so words to go until the thing is finished. And then, as you know, it won’t be complete. I’ll have to print it out and read it through and grimace and cringe and throw up a little in my mouth at the crazy shit I wrote. It won’t be like other novels I’ve read, it’ll be in my neurotic, jumbled, non-linear voice, but it will be a whole ass novel that came from my mind.

The story I wrote started as a screenplay, and maybe now I’ll have a firm grasp of what it would look like as a movie and go ahead and write the thing as such. Or maybe I’ll realize that the story doesn’t lend itself to a film narrative, that there isn’t enough action or imagery that could be captured on the screen-page. No matter what I decide, it will be a challenge that I accepted and finished.

I hope that if you have challenged yourself recently that you feel good about the outcome, and if not give yourself a break, this year has been a real shit demon.