If you’ve ever read this blog before, you’ve probably seen some mention or other to National Novel Writing Month, the writing “competition” that asks you to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I put the word competition in quotes because this isn’t a contest with a fabulous cash prize and it’s not some kind of writing fight club (though if it was that last one, I probably wouldn’t be able to talk about it anyway, but it’s not). Sure, there are tens of thousands of other writers out there doing the same thing all month, but the only one you’re in competition with for NaNoWriMo is yourself.

On one hand, this is good, because you know yourself pretty well and you know how quickly you fold under pressure, so you should be easy to beat in any kind of competition. Especially one that doesn’t involve running or throwing. But on the other hand, it’s bad, because you know yourself pretty well and you know how quickly you fold under pressure, so you should be easy to beat in any kind of competition. Maybe looking at this as a you v. you battle royale isn’t the best way to go about it. You’ll have yourself psyched out before you even write a word, and if you can’t write your first word, you’re never gonna make it to word 50,000.

It might be best to just drop the word competition completely. It’s not a competition. It’s a task. A difficult one, because those 50,000 words won’t write themselves (believe me, I’ve tried to make that happen and it never does), but not an impossible one. Hell, I’ve done it 3 times already. Got 2 actual books out of it, and 1 that had more than enough words but never quite made it to the end of the story. None of this work was any good, and I’d probably have to shoot anyone who tried to read any of it, but at the end of each month I at least felt like I’d accomplished something with my writing, and that feeling doesn’t happen too often anymore.

All of that said, as November 2010 approached, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try again. Even if I didn’t remember how tough it was to do this last year while holding down a full-time job, I could read about it in the blog archives. Plus, I just tried something very similar with Script Frenzy this past April (another one where I wrote the pages but didn’t finish the story) so maybe another marathon of writing wasn’t what I needed. And if that wasn’t enough, I could recall the 2 times when I didn’t reach the goal. Didn’t come anywhere close, in fact. Those times I got my ass kicked by the month of November more thoroughly than the Cleveland Browns do every year, and it wasn’t a feeling I was in any hurry to recapture. I figured I’d just not think about it and see what would happen on November 1. I’d either write 2,000 words that day or I wouldn’t, and however that went down would dictate the next 30 days. A simple solution, I thought.

Then I realized that even if I hadn’t consciously decided what I was going to do, somewhere in the back of my brain I’d already made a decision. You see, about a month or so ago I stopped reading fiction. I didn’t stop reading. I still read magazines, and the biography I’ve got as an iBook on my iPad, and I still dragged books along on my daily commute, but they were all nonfiction. And the only time I eliminate fiction from the equation entirely is when I’m doing a big writing project. I used to think I did this because I didn’t want to accidentally swipe from whatever I was currently reading while writing. And maybe this was true on some level. But over the years I had to finally admit that the real reason I didn’t like to read fiction while writing it was because reading stories that were better than mine (which is basically all of them) just knocks the legs out from under me and makes it nearly impossible for me to finish what I’ve started.

(Sidebar: You may recall the post I made over the summer about Catch-22. I still haven’t started rereading that book for both reasons outlined above. I hold the book in so much regard that it would intimidate me enough to make me quit writing by November 5 or so. Plus, there aren’t too many parts of that book I don’t want to steal, so reading it while writing would probably be a horrible idea. It probably won’t be until early next year that I get to crack it open again.)

Long story short (as if), it appears that I’ll be trying to write a novel in November. Even though the little part of my brain that has made this decision may also be the one in charge of Jack Daniels consumption, road trip menus and career planning and therefore never has my best interests at heart, I’m gonna put it in charge and see what happens. And of course, this blog will document the whole ugly process in more detail than last time, because I don’t want to be the only one suffering. In other words, if you hated last November, after another 2 weeks it might be best if you don’t check back again until December 1. No idea which part of my brain will be posting to the blog on that day, but maybe it’ll be able to write a decent joke.

I mean, the law of averages says that’ll happen eventually, right? Why not December 1?

T “writing fool” green