NaNoWhyNot

I wrote my first draft of Copper in 2012 and now it’s 2022. I’ve let my other roles, mainly teaching and motherhood, eat into all my writing time, stifle my dreams.

One of my friends (online friends, from the brief but brilliant days of the li.st app) recently asked to read one of my novels. And it made me sad because I have none to mail him—I’m not proud of any of them. 7 novels, 3 screenplays, and none at a share-able or publishable stage?! Why am I so bad at revising, at buckling down to get the damn things done?

I know I could do it. My best Copper draft, when I got brave and submitted it, got a few requests for the full manuscript (but I think they were more vanity-press agents than I’d first realized) and made it to semifinals in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. But my writing skills weren’t at their strongest, and I got shy and pulled it, because I know Copper could be so much more.

Well, it happens to be November 1st. My social media and emails are alive with NaNoWriMo encouragement and word counts. And I miss my NaNoWriMo days, I really do. So…

I’m going to jump in. I know these characters. Last summer I worked feverishly on fixing the outline so I could pin down the true, sensible, properly-paced plot that Copper deserves (and promptly got waylaid with all the other summer demands that took away time to actually WRITE that draft)–but still, I have the outline. I can jump in and feel like a “pantser” even though my “plotter” skeleton lurks beneath.

I think I’m going to lose a lot of sleep in committing to this–but I lose a lot of sleep grading essays, planning lessons, snuggling toddlers through their nightmares, etc., and I finally bought a Keurig to keep in my classroom. So I’ll live on extra coffee this month–there are worse things. So I grade my essay stacks more slowly–my third period is driving me insane, I shouldn’t be rushing to get their half-assed work back to them when half aren’t going to read any of my comments anyway.

I feel differently this time… I opened up my most recent of the 84 drafts of Copper floating around my laptop and: it’s good. I see the growth in my writing in very tangible ways. The 2012 draft (that I let my best friends read) was bare bones because I wasn’t really visualizing the story in my head. I was writing it, blocking it through like a choreographer, not thinking of it as art but thinking of it as something thrilling to rush through. In the whatever-year of the draft I skimmed today, past-me was writing as an art form. All these years teaching students about active voice, engaging descriptions, complex syntax, more interesting yet fitting synonyms, etc. have taught me, too.

I wrote 1700 words today. I also salvaged 5,000 words from the last draft, because I’ve reworked that intro SO. MANY. TIMES that I refuse to make any new changes to it, for my own sanity. That gives me a few buffer days if things pile up, but I kept it in a separate tab of my Scrivener chapters, which I can toggle off if necessary (so that the goal is still to write 50,000 new words this month).

And I’m blogging about it here, even though I kind of fell off the face of the WordPressEarth as a blogger, for another level of accountability.

Here’s to getting the stories that won’t leave our hearts down onto the page, out into the world. Good luck, fellow writers.