October Experiment: Love in the Time of Nanowrimo: Life, Books, and the Conservation of Mana (Patreon)

Greetings and salutations, mad fictioneers! It’s that time of year again, when the woodsmoke and candy wrappers blow on the crisp autumn wind, when the chimneys quiver at their winters’ work to come, when the trees turn gold and red as bonfires, when the hay lies in the field, as neatly rolled as Princess Leia’s hair, when all the pilgrims of all the nations long to write 50,000 words in 30 days, and all the world is Nanowrimo.

Now, I’ve done my Nanowrimo pep talk before, all official-like, for the event itself. I’m not going to go over much of what I said there, because, you know, I already said that stuff. I’m not going to give you the whole GO TEAM GO locker room speech. I’m just going to talk about writing fast, what it can mean, how to do it without hurting yourself or others, and how to get through to the turkey part of November with something to show for it other than carpal tunnel and an ulcer. I know that there’s about a million and seventeen bits of advice on this subject out there, but I like to think I have something special, since Nanowrimo is, in a manner of speaking, my hometown.

Some of you may know that I started out my fiction career with Nanowrimo. Sort of. Kind of. the long version of the story is all there in the pep talk link. The short one is: I was that peculiar mix of punk rock and dumbassery that is defined as “being 22,” I had literally never written fiction longer than a few pages for classes (and reams of poetry) and I didn’t have a lot of time as I was moving across the country on December 1st, and I literally can never do any damn thing the normal, sensible way, so I decided to do it in ten days in October instead of 30 in November. What I produced, wholly improbably, became my first published novel, The Labyrinth, by a series of fortunate events. These were the heady early days of Nanowrimo, I posted on the forums under the name DesolationAngel because I was just THAT much 22 years old, it all felt very new and revolutionary. Now, of course, it’s so common that I can walk into any given middle school and half the 9th graders will be doing it for their fall projects and people regularly ask “are you doing Nano this year?” in the same tone they ask if I’m on a cleanse or into hot yoga.

The answer is usually: yes and no. No, I’m not officially doing Nanowrimo this year, or most years. But yes, I will be writing 50,000 words in November, and probably more. 50,000 words is not actually a novel, after all, more like a particularly chunky novella that loves to eat bacon and mayonnaise ice cream for breakfast. When you’re just starting out, 1667 words a day seems like this huge mountain to climb, a noble, lofty goal deserving of ice cream and cake and trumpets that shoot confetti made of ice cream and cake if you achieve it. But for me, as a full time writer with more deadlines than rice in the cupboard, I am more likely to think wow, I only have to write 1667 words today? Frickin’ sweet! WOOOOO VACATION! And yes, when I was a baby writer, I would have found the notion of anything under 2000 words a day being a light shift at the office terrifying and possibly nauseating. But part of the secret benefit of Nanowrimo is discovering that you can actually turn those numbers around. Maybe not every day, maybe not every month for the rest of your life, but it’s all deeply possible, and these days, given the amount of output most publishers and readers expect, it’s basically like basic training for the rest of your career. Once you learn you can do it, you won’t unlearn that, and at any point, if you absolutely have to crank out a novel in four to six weeks or the bomb in Roosevelt’s giant Rushmore-head will go off, well, you’ll know that old Teddy and his dumb glasses are safe in your hands. I continue to write entire novels in 30-60 days. Palimpsest was 30, The Glass Town Game was 60ish, Fairyland was 60, I could go on. I think only Radiance and the Orphan’s Tales took me longer than two months to write once all the planning was done, which is pretty totally key to this whole thing. The typing takes 30-60 days. The planning can take years, and does. So plan ahead, you need an idea before November 1st. 

The fact is, without Nanowrimo, and later, the Blue Lake Books 3 Day Novel Competition, which I emphatically did not win but which some guy who put how fast he could chug a beer in his bio most definitely did, I don’t know that I would have gotten it together to write a novel as young as I pulled it off, and it’s entirely possible I never would have. I desperately needed that outside pressure of a deadline, and when you’re just plunking your wee toes in that deep, horrifying ocean, it’s brutally tough to discipline yourself without any help. I am the actual Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock when it comes to personal organization, hanging on by the skin of my old-ass banana peels since 1979. I needed the structure, I needed the numbers, I needed the framework in order to commit and finish something. People often ask me how I can write so fast, but the simple answer is I learned to from the very first book, probably because if it took any longer than 30 days I would get mired in real life and real misery and real attention issues and never finish it. In a very real sense, I owe just about everything to Nanowrimo, and that isn’t necessarily my best feature, but at least it’s sort of statuesque, if you look at it from the right angle, at the right time of day.

So if you’re doing Nanowrimo, I want to help. This whole Patreon thing is sort of a HELP ME HELP YOU kind of deal, you know? And if you’re not, then maybe some of this will be useful whenever you decide you need to get something done quickly, or want to just push through a block, or in any other fashion need to write like the Flash with the rickets when there’s a sale on at Nike.

I started typing up a list of things you need to get through Nanowrimo. I was gonna make it all cute and funny, like a recipe. Ingredients: completely unreasonable self confidence, a tolerant spouse and/or children and/or pets. But I realized that all my advice is actually the opposite of throwing stuff in a pot, which is basically how I like to think of everything in my life, because the only thing I do half as well as writing is cooking, and there’s probably a whole therapy and Overeaters Anonymous session to be had about that. My Nanowrimo regimen is all about pulling things out, putting them away, tossing them out the window.

To write a novel, or even a beefy novella, in 30 days, the most important thing you can do is get rid of anything that slows you down.

So here they are, the SLOW TRAFFIC—CONSTRUCTION signs that are most likely to park themselves in your autumnal commute to the promised land of a finished novel.

SHIPBOARD LIFE: This is the toughest practical one. (The toughest psychological one comes last, as it should, the bastard.) Regular life still has to happen while you write. It simply will not stop happening. This will become even more true and challenging if you do manage to make a living as a writer. Time proceeds at 1 second per second, and there will never be more than 24 hours in a day. One of my favorite passages in any novel is from Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, and it is how I think of writing time, of writing life: as shipboard life. And I love it so much I’m going to copy the whole thing out for you. 

Most of the terraria offering passenger transport around the solar system were extremely fast, but even so, trips often took weeks. This was simply too much time to be banging around aimlessly; doing that one could easily slide into a funk or some other kind of mental hibernation. In the settlements around Saturn this sort of thing had sometimes been developed into entire sciences and art forms. But any such hebephrenia was dangerous for Wahram, as he had found out long before by painful experience. Too often in his past, meaninglessness had gnawed at the edges of things. He needed order, and a project; he needed habits. In the nakedness of the moments of exfoliation, the intensity of experience had in it a touch of terror—terror that no new meaning would blossom to replace the old ones now lost. 

Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise, and this was Wahram’s desired state: to live in a pseudoiterative. But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, and interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art. No matter the brevity of a trip, the dullness of the terrarium, or the people in it, it was important to invent a pattern and project and pursue it with all his will and imagination. 

It came to this: shipboard life was still life. All days had to be seized. 

If you have a family, especially one under the same roof, be that spouse or children or pets or roommates or parents or siblings or all at the same time, saints and ministers of grace defend us, you will have to have a talk with them about exactly what you’ll need over the next 30 days. What shipboard life will be like, and how they will feel about it your new pseudoiterative. Communicate your needs. How much uninterrupted time. Whether or not you’ll want someone to read your pages or listen to you babble out the plot. Which of your chores you can still do and which you might need help with. This might be a hard conversation if you’re a slow writer to begin with, but the great secret of Nanowrimo is it’s only 30 days. Most people can put up with most things as long as they know there’s an end point. Writing is a peculiar and lonely profession, and you must respect and acknowledge that by giving yourself to it, you will be giving less to everything else. But it’s for a good cause, and there is an end. You can do anything for 30 days. You can eat nothing but asparagus. You can train for a 5k. You can spend two hours a day at the gym. You can lose ten pounds. You can gain twenty pounds. You can learn the capital of every country in the world. 

You can write a book.

If you work full time, decide ahead of time whether you’ll be writing your 1667 before you clock on or after you clock off or after everyone else has gone to bed, and whether your lunch hour is a feasible writing hour as well. (When I wrote The Labyrinth, I was working 10 hours a day as a professional fortune teller. Which is, honestly, excellent practice for being a fantasy writer and probably the subject of a future experiment. People don’t usually show up for 8 am psychic readings, so I usually read from 2pm to midnight. I wrote in the morning before I went into the shop at the local Starbucks. Then, when on shift, each reading had a hard twenty minute timer, and as it was tourist season in Rhode Island, I usually had at least two readings an hour. Which left twenty minutes of those hours to myself, two hundred minutes a day, roughly three and a half hours. So as soon as a customer left, I would pull my laptop out from under my velvet-covered table and write till the next one came. I made all these decisions and calculations ahead of time, figuring that not only couldn’t I afford to lose those 3.5 hours, I couldn’t afford to lose any time figuring out my schedule during the writing window. You will, naturally, have to make different calculations, as I assume few of you work with velvet and cards and people who want to know what their future husbands will look like.)

CARE AND FEEDING OF THE SEMI-DOMESTICATED FIRST WORLD WRITER: It’s hilarious how long it took me to figure this out. If you’re going to squeeze a book marathon in and around the corners of the rest of your life, sort out how you will be fueling yourself ahead of time. Meal-prep. Buy things that are easy to cook but not so completely unhealthy that’ll have a heart attack on November 15th. HYDRATE. When you really get into a book, these can become annoying details, but you still have to take care of yourself. Ship life is real life. Having to decide what to eat and drink every day takes valuable writing time, and more important and subtle than that, it takes valuable mana. More on that in a moment. And don’t you go wrinkling your nose because I got my gaming all up in this fancy literary seven layer cake. LET IT HAPPEN.

CHOOSE YOUR WEAPONS: Gather your tools head of time. If you discover Scrivener part way through and want to switch from Word or Pages, it’ll take time to learn a new program and adjust. Decide where you’ll be doing most of your work—bedroom, kitchen table, home office, cafe, your desk at work, library, etc. Figure out what music you’ll want to listen to, if you like working to music. Make some playlists. You do not have time to do this while writing 1667 words a day and juggling the rest of your life. Settle on a routine. Or, if you’re like me and do your best writing while you’re DARINGLY and BOLDLY writing where you’re not supposed to be writing LIKE SOME KIND OF MADMAN WHO DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE RULES, at least scope out some good nooks and crannies to sneak into. I highly suggest typing rather than longhand—any benefit you might get from writing longhand, if you enjoy that sort of bizarre savagery, will be cancelled out by the extra time it will take to type it into a computer so that anyone else can read it. Outline longhand, type the manuscript. And take a moment to thank the muses and all the tiny gods of art and inclination that you are a writer and not a sculptor, actor, or other fine artist. No other method of self-expression has such low overhead costs as writing. For practically no money, you are in business. The chances of knowing about Nanowrimo without already owning a computer or having access to one are basically nil. You don’t need anyone else to make it happen, just you and your head. Paper and pens and even laptops cost so much less than marble, oil paints, studio time, cameras, or the small army of personnel and money that go into any professional theatrical production. We few, we lucky few. (JK we are not few.)

CHOOSE THE FORM OF THE DESTRUCTOR: While you are not allowed to compose any of those big, beautiful 50,000 words before November 1st, you are allowed to outline the shit out of them. Now, I’m not a big outliner. I never have been. If you’ve been reading these essays for any amount of time at all, you know I am a deeply disorganized person. Outlining seems SO HARD to me. Much harder than writing a book. And I feel confined by them, like a wrestler in a cage match. But with Nanowrimo, this isn’t much of a choice. You don’t have time in 30 days to come up with everything on the spot. (Unless you can. Sometimes I can. I did with The Labyrinth and with Palimpsest. But it’s been awhile since I could pull that off.) The biggest slowdown is when you hit a snag in the plot or research. If you’re writing something set in Restoration England, you better have that research locked and loaded by 11/1, because ain’t nobody got time to get your Pepys in a row once you’re churning out words. So plan ahead. It doesn’t have to be a complicated outline or even a complicated book. Before I wrote The Labyrinth, this was literally my thought process: what is the loosest possible plot/idea on which I can hang everything I want to do with language? A maze sounds good. Cool, here we go. Now, if you have read it, you will notice that The Labyrinth is preeeetty thin on plot. It treats plot like an absentee parent that suddenly wants to be part of its life again even though plot still drinks literally the worst quality gin imaginable and has worn the same baseball cap since 1973 and also smells like something that was once brie. This was what I wanted to do at the time, it was sort of a manifesto of mine, since I was, as I’ve said, HILARIOUSLY 22. But it was perfect for Nanowrimo. I wrote whatever I could think of, because anything can happen in a magic maze. I kept it to one POV protagonist, because I was working fast and barely knew how to fiction and couldn’t handle more. (There’s zero shame in not being able to handle more, Hermann Hesse famously said he couldn’t manage more than three characters in a room at any one time. Y’all don’t have to be George Martin all up in this.) If you’re only aiming for 50,000 words, I wouldn’t advise more than two POVs, simply because that shit gets out of hand fast, and you’re just trying to finish a complete story. 

But don’t let the planning eat the book. It’s easy to lose yourself in research and naming everyone’s great-great grandfather’s sword and drawing everyone’s coat-of-arms in your note book like pop stars’ faces. That stuff is intensely fun, without any of the horrendous pressure of, you know, doing anything with it. While you should outline and plan, leave room to surprise yourself. Saddle up with just the barest bones of what you need to get through the cattle drive without running dry, but don’t weigh yourself down with the weight of your whole world. I almost never know the ending when I start a book, or if I do, it’s about the only thing I know. I am constantly trying to hide bits of the story from my own brain, so I continue to entertain myself while writing the book. If you can’t wait to find out what happens next, you’ll keep writing. If you know everything, it can feel like a chore you’ve already finished. So find that sweet spot of preparation and the great wide open. 

TAKE THE EASY A: Play to your strengths. Now is not the time to go full Madonna and reinvent yourself. Save that shit for New Year’s Day. Are you good at language? Focus on that. Plot? Awesome, twist something up. Have you spent half your life doodling dragons, fairies, robots, pomegranate-people from the south side of Mars? Write about that. Lean in to the skills you’ve already got. Don’t make it any harder on yourself by deciding that, despite reading and writing science fiction for your entire life, to be a Real Author (tm), you simply must write a tense family drama about divorce in the suburbs. Indulge your kinks, your obsessions, your private demons. No matter what you do in the rest of your life, this book is All About You. Roll around in all the things you like best. Or hate most. Fiction is always better when it’s personal, when it comes, not from the heart, the heart is an idiot, but from the bones, from the sinew, from the meat, from the bile. And don’t let anyone tell you SFF isn’t just as personal as anything else! We just hide it underneath the dragon horde and the starship engine and in the murder basement of the haunted house. Say what you like about the artistic value of Stephen King, but you know an awful lot about his life if you’ve read more than one or two of his books, because he lays it all out there like a patient etherized upon a particularly filthy table. If you’ve got a wound in your mother, as my buddy Jacques Derrida once said, write about her until you feel better. Make her a manticore if you want, nobody will judge, and she’ll be less mad at Christmas. If you’ve never felt good enough to compete with your brother, whip you up some Prince John redemption arc. If the current political situation is giving you ulcers, write about some bloodthirsty redcaps, my friend, and you’re home free. Write about your pains and your joys. They come easy, and they are rich ground. A lot of people make funny noises about “fiction as therapy” but listen up: it’s not therapy if there’s wizards in it. 

Also, do not be ashamed to map out a plot on one of the dress forms in the attic! If Chaucer did it, ain’t no wrong there. Print out the Hero’s Journey and staple it to your wall. Find a fairy tale or a Greek play or a myth or an urban legend and use it like a knitting pattern: your yarn, your size, your colors, but all the numbers already mathed out. That is how I taught myself to write short fiction, laboriously, like training wheels, letting fairy tales handle the plot while I learned how to do everything else. The point here is to make the book, not to reinvent the novel, which you can’t do anyway, no matter what my 22-year-old self thought. 

But the single most important aspect of all of this, everything I’ve written so far, is that it all contributes to what we’re going to call the Conservation of Mana.

Brace yourself. It’s about to get gamey in here. Don’t be scared.

TAP THAT MANA: Writing is making choices. That’s all it is. One choice after another. Small ones and big ones, and in the end, it can feel like there’s no difference, even blond or brunette has so much weight. This word or that? This POV or that one? Which genre? Which era? Which style? Twist the knife in here or there? Kill this character or let them live? Get these two (or three) together or let them stew in misery? How old is the protagonist? Who are you writing for—children, adults, both, neither? Title? Structure? Ending? How long is her hair? What color eyes does he have? Were their parents kind or cruel? What does this villain want? Where does this hero fail? What is this sidekick’s job? Do they have a limp? Do they speak three languages? Do they have crippling phobias? Which ones? It is very nearly endless, and you are responsible for all of them. 

Study after study has shown that humans have a limited capacity for executive function—how many choices they can make in a day before that mysterious little cog in our psyches is just exhausted. Even choosing between brands of toothpaste or what to watch on Netflix can deplete some of that choosing energy. Everyone has a different natural limit, as with most things ever. But there is always a limit. 

If you play Magic: the Gathering or Hearthstone or any number of games with the mana mechanic, you probably know where I’m going with this. In any given turn, you have a set amount of mana to fuel your actions, and once it’s used up, it’s gone till the next turn comes around. You can gain or lose mana depending on special circumstances—an attack from another player, a strategic move to give some up in exchange for a power move, a lucky draw that grants a surge ahead, a slow leeching poison, a death in the family, a toddler who needs your constant attention, praise from someone you look up to, a deadline, inspiration, depression, even random moves you have no control over at all. But in the end, you only have so much, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

If you’re coming to writing from a busy life, you can and probably will find it overwhelming to add so bloody many choices to your personal mechanisms. I can personally testify to having so much going on in my personal life that the idea of choosing whether to write in the 1st or 3rd person has brought me to tears. You’ll only have as much mana as you ever had, but now you gotta cast some high level spells, summon some big creatures, unleash some serious strategy. Everything I have said until now, and everything about Nanowrimo itself, with its emphasis on numbers and routine and defined goals, is meant to pare away some of those everyday choices—what to eat, what to drink, what chores to do and when, when and where to write, what to write on, what to write about, how much time to spend in and out of your book, what crap to buy at the store, how many calories to ingest or not ingest, how much of the day to devote to the other people in your life—to free up mana for the million narrative choices you’re going to have to make. Mana is precious. It is exhaustible, even if you think the only thing you want in the world right now is to write a book, a real book, at some point, you will be wrung dry, and your mana tapped, and you’ll want to have all of this to fall back on until you can get up again for your next turn. 

LET’S CONTINUE THAT METAPHOR WAY TOO FAR: I can’t help myself, when I find an analogy, I beat it to death in the street. Also I just thought of this right now as I was typing and it’s my experiment so I wanna take a hard left.

In Magic: The Gathering, there are five colors that correspond to different styles of play and aesthetics, with strengths and weaknesses, and most people are pretty partial to one or another, or a combination of two. They are: red, which is very aggressive, blue, which is all about control, green, which focuses on a slow build of giant creatures and late-game moves, white, which tends toward healing and building up your own lifeforce as well as lots of small steps, and black, which is mega-goth: death, decay, depleting your lifeforce in order to fuel big plays. 

So figure out what kind of writer you are: aggressive, a big explosion out of the gate, dramatic and fiery and passionate, but tending to burn out toward the end? Controlled and cerebral, getting those 1667 words every day, no more and no less, methodical and planned to the last drop? Slow to start, an organic writer, not much outlining, a “gardener” who mills around in the beginning planting seeds here and there, hoping they’ll blossom, building up to a huge rush of inspiration and awesomeness toward the end? Someone who runs themselves ragged, burns through all their energy and personal relationships and mana just to get the thing done, and comes out utterly drained at the end? Or someone who takes very good care of themselves and others, maybe not making that wordcount every day exactly, but getting 500 words here and 600 there without major damage to anything or anyone else? Or a combination?

Knowing which you are can be hugely helpful in carving out these 30 days. Writing, when you really get into it and it’s all flowing and going and moving, is like falling asleep. It can take forever, glasses of milk, lullabies, the right mattress, the right meal beforehand, and you never know when insomnia will hit, but once you’re there it’s nothing but dreams. It’s all about finding out how to get yourself to sleep. So if you know you’re going to go hell for leather the first two weeks and then fall apart, you can prepare for that. If you know you’ll miss your goals in the beginning, but make up for it with a big push in the end, you can avoid berating yourself for not being perfect from go. If you know you’re going to focus so hard you let everything else in your life go, you can plan for that damage and minimize it. If you focus on the numbers and manage your time like a boss, you can relax, knowing you’ll make it, and focus on not getting overwhelmed by your planning. If you know you might not make that 50,000, but you’ll have something, 25,000, or even 10,000, at the end of the month and that’s enough, you can be just as proud of that as people who “win.” I tended toward mono black when I was just starting out, and it took years to wean myself off of thinking that it was the only way to get my stories out, to just burn my soul at both ends. These days I tend toward a green/black combo with a bit of red, but I sure wish I was blue/white. Maybe someday. 

Probably not, though. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. 

But no matter what deck you’re playing with this November, it’s all going to be about mana. About choices. About making those choices count. and that leads me to my final point, which is always and forever The Thing I Have To Say About Nanowrimo, from the days when I was DesolationAngel writing literary manifestos on the forums all the way through to now, to this Nanowrimo, this year, when I’m not “officially” “doing Nano,” but I have 65,000 words to write in the next thirty days, so I am right there with you like Marley’s ghost, shaking chains forged from all the sins books I’ve committed, promising that you, too, can have chains just as thick and strong as mine, and also possibly being a bit of undigested beef. 

I started with Nanowrimo. It is my hometown. It is where I grew up. It matters to me. And I’ve been saying this for 15 years now, and I’ll say it for 15 more, so listen to me. This is big. It’s scary. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you what they’re going to tell you on the official site. I say it knowing that for some people, it does add pressure, it can be intimidating, it can cost you mana. But I mean it so hard. It matters as much to me as whether that beautiful old theater in my childhood neighborhood gets torn down and renovated. 

Just because you’re writing fast doesn’t mean you can’t write gloriously. Fast does not equal bad. Slow does not equal good. 

Your Nanowrimo novel can be amazing.

Much effort and ink has been spilled saying that the only thing you have to do is write 50,000 words in 30 days. They can be terrible and awful and derivative and clumsy and just a huge bloody mess. There’s no pressure. You don’t have to write the Great American Novel. you just have to write. And that’s true. It is true.

But. 

But. 

What if they weren’t? What if they were astonishing, wonderful words, straight from the gut, the bone, the spleen? What if they were everything you’ve been waiting to say? What if this book, this one you’re sweating over right now, was fantastic? You’re writing them anyway. you’re making choices and burning mana and giving yourself repetitive stress injuries anyway. Why not try for great? If you fail, you’re likely to at least hit pretty damn good or even raw and true and crazy but there’s really something there on your way down. If you need to not worry about quality to produce, okay. But otherwise, why limit yourself at the outset by expecting to write crap just to meet an arbitrary goal that isn’t even really a full novel? There is so little life and so little time to write all the books you want to write. I know, when you haven’t written one yet, that that seems insane, but it’s true. There will always be more you want to say. So don’t waste this book. Say everything. Put it all out there. Make it count. It’s going to be a huge pain in the ass no matter what—what if you came out the other end with your first published novel, one that people praised for its brazen style, for breaking the rules, for blazing with passion and energy, for being something new?

I did. I know you can.

The most important ingredient in a writer’s cabinet is confidence. That is both utterly true and utterly demoralizing, because the universe is organized such that most writers were not born with an overabundance of self-esteem. But to make those choices, to deploy that mana, you have to believe that you are capable of making the right choices, of creating something fabulous that is worth somebody using up their precious time on planet earth to read. It’s an act of breathtaking arrogance and selfishness and frightening intimacy. I try very hard not to think about how much of myself I have shared with how many thousands of people, how much of their time I have taken, because it would stop me in my tracks. No one can keep up that level of confidence on a daily basis forever, least of all the kind of personalities who end up in the arts. We all falter. We all hate ourselves. We all have days where we think everything we’ve ever done is garbage and we’re beyond worthless. We all worry that we’ll never be able to do it again. We all think we’re imposters, and the world is just about to find out. Yet we find a way to write.

And this, this is the true gift of Nanowrimo, the secret of its success and mine and yours and everyone’s.

You don’t have to be arrogant and intimate and selfish and confident and beautiful and perfect all the time. You don’t have to be a genius from birth to death. 

You just have to do it for thirty days.

Real talk? That’s about how long I can keep it up. The faith that I and my book are worth something, more than something, everything. The faith that I can do this thing. The unshakeable confidence in myself and my abilities. The drive to get this particular story out ahead of all the others. Ignoring that thousands, maybe millions, will read my most secret thoughts and dreams and hopes and terrors. Ignoring that they might hate them. That they might, worst of all fates, not care about them at all and forget them easily. After 30 days, six weeks at the outside, I start to crumble at the edges, and remember that I am literally the worst, that I have done nothing but fuck up all the days of my life, that all my books are nonsense and rubbish, that no one cares about books anymore except the books they themselves are writing, that nothing matters and the universe is mainly screaming entropy with a little advertising sprinkled on top. 

But for thirty days? Yeah, I can believe in myself for thirty days. I can swagger for thirty days. For thirty days, I can be a genius. I can shine. 

You can do anything for thirty days.

I want to end with a quote form someone else, because there’s that sun-shattering confidence! But it’s one of my favorites, and it says everything, and you should be finding your strength in other writers when you can’t find it in yourself, or else what are we all here for? Print this out and put it above your desk this month. Let it be your mission statement. Let it be your guiding star.

So this one goes out to all you literary kids hitting the pages and the pavement this month. It’s an oldie from my man J.D. Salinger, off the B-side of his follow-up album, which for my money beats his debut any day of the week. Rock on, you crazy wordpunks. See you on the flipside. See you with your stars out.

Do you know what I was smiling at? you wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you’ll be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. you won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. you won’t be asked if you were in good or bad from while you were working on it. you won’t even be asked if it was the once piece of writing you would have wanted to be working on if you had known your time was up when it was finished—I think only poor Soren K will be asked that. I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions: Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before you ever sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.