With writing for Nanowrimo.

Yes, alright, I’m sorry for the clickbait title, but my sister has started pretending to be unconscious when I try to talk to her about it, and I’ve already imposed far too much on my best friends (I love you ladies!) by nattering incomprehensibly on our group chat at odd hours of day and night.

And I’m loving the process of writing so much, I just have to talk about it.

What’s Nanowrimo, I (don’t) hear you ask? Why, that would be National (not for us in Singapore, but eh, irrelevant) Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write at least 1,667 words a day, so that by the end of the month, you emerge with a piece of writing that is at least 50,000 words long. It must be said that many published novels are quite a bit heftier than that, but the point is to get over the hump and emerge with enough of the work done that you’d be inclined to finish it.

I love that I took the whole thing up on a whim, almost like a meet cute. Writing a novel has been on my bucket list since I was seven and Mrs Seow wrote on my composition that I had a good ear for dialogue. (I feel like that ear has gone deaf, though. Alas, Mrs Seow.) In fact I was so certain I would not keep to the one rule of writing every day that I texted my best friends and asked them to be my accountability buddies. I made sure I left huge spaces for Nanowrimo in my planner, so I would be accountable to myself.

And I’m loving the actual writing so much. I’m loving entering this imaginary world which, honestly, feels more real to me sometimes than the actual world I have to live in. I’m loving that feeling when a plot point which had been a yawning blank suddenly takes on its shape as I slowly write to within a few sentences of where it happens—as though it had always been there, had always taken this shape, and could never have been anything else. I absolutely love the feeling when I hit a key moment in the story and the characters behave in ways which surprise even me—as if I weren’t writing, just recording something that genuinely is taking place.

And if this is sounding rather creepy—well, I agree with you that it is! Though I’m absolutely in love, I also live in terror that I’ll wake up one morning and find that the story is less prince/ss charming, more Leatherface. You know in horror movies when a possessed person tries to write down the things they dreamed, and then some other character looks at what they wrote, and it’s just frightening scribbles and shapes? What if this story turns out like that? Nothing intelligible, just fever dream ranting?

And it’s not like I’m completely blind to my love’s faults either. I’m pretty certain the opening chapters—yes, the crucial opening chapters—are far too exposition dumpy. There are scenes which, when I first completed them, felt like moments of pure genius—until I realised they reminded me of something I’d read or watched previously. But I’ve taken a vow to strangle the inner critic; I’m going to write this thing first, and worry about how it functions later.

I tell myself that—yet the terror is real. Because those are the faults I can see. What other massive, horrifying faults might I, with my rose-coloured glasses, and blinded by the honeymoon setting sun, not be seeing?

On top of that, even if the story does not turn out to be Leatherface or Carrie—where is this relationship going? I’m investing a lot of time and emotion into this relationship, but what happens next? Do we register for our BTO flat together? But what if we cannot afford the BTO flat, with the reality of publishing being what it is?

Barbara Poelle, author of Funny You Should Ask, says to make sure I have a Critique Partner, someone or better yet, multiple someones who are also writers, but not your friends per se, and who will therefore be able to provide professional feedback, support, and commiseration—hopefully in that order? I’m not sure where to find those so… Hey, students to whom I’ve given a bad grade on your essay in the past, here’s your chance to take your revenge! DM me for a chance to read bits of the thing I’m writing.

No, I joke, but it would, I suspect, genuinely break my heart a little if this thing turns out to be complete flaming garbage, or be treated as such.

Right now, I’m supposed to be writing a post on PlateUp! and what the game teaches us about systems, but like I’m doing so often these days, I’m really thinking about how to get my main character to the next key moment I think she needs to experience. This story and I are going to have to sit down for a serious talk one of these days about our future, but until then, let me bask in the sweetness of the little candy hearts and the pink glow.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash