I think I finally get the point of this Nanowrimo thing. It's like taking your car out on the highway and "opening up the throttle to see what she can do." It's not about reaching any particular destination. It's about doing something for the pure joy of the thing itself. Sure, in this case there is an arbitrary goal of writing 50,000 words in a month. The number is about motivation. It's there to make you desperate enough to waste words. Without the word count and the deadline, we would write slowly and carefully, stopping at every crossroad and looking both ways before proceeding. We think we have to squeeze every drop we can out of every word, as if words were a precious natural resource. Nanowrimo represents a return to the glory days of writing, when words cost just pennies a gallon. We all wrote with giant, inefficient machines and thought the well of words would never run dry. Heck, we even wrote without wearing our seatbelts.

Having said that, I think I must have a clogged fuel injector (to carry the metaphor perhaps a bit too far). I've decided to keep writing, but I'm not going to worry too much if I don't reach the word goal this year. With everything I've got going on this year, as long as I don't give up I'll be a "winner." Besides, I mainly just need my words to get around town and take the kids to soccer practice.

Labels: Nanowrimo