November,
Novel Writing and Guilt
As I sit here and wait for inspiration
to hit me as most writers do, I am reminded of the first time that I
participated in the great National November Novel Writing Month event which is
called NaNoWriMo for short. Once again,
I was roped into something new by the man in my life. He suggested that we try
it and I asked if it was a way to get me back to writing, and he said yes. So we were off and running trying to reach
our goal of 50,000 words by the end of the month. The daily goal was to write
1667 words. Easy for some days but often
there was a lot of staring at the keyboard going on, or heading off for a cup
of tea, chocolate or someone else’s good book to read. The staring at the keyboard, the pen and the
notebook continued for the month as we persevered in our new mission.
We were hampered in our daily pursuit
of writing by our working 40 hours a week (a writer friend told me once never
quit your day job) as well as my husband being in a play that year but somehow
we managed to keep on writing. We met
our goal for 50,000 words, met some people we didn’t know, shared more time
with people we did know at the little write in get-together that was organized
by our fabulous group leader who was and still is full of energy and had just
the right amount of craziness to inspire, prod and show others that it could be
done.
We had double the work as neither one
of us had a laptop computer while we participated at the group write in. So
among the tables filled with laptops and frantic writers, we would find a spot
to sit, to join in, to be part of the event of others trying to achieve a similar
goal of writing 50,000 words with our pens and tablets (the paper kind). We would have lunch, tea and write with a
curious hope in our hearts as we watched the ink flow onto our papers until we
could go home and transcribe everything into the computer and onto the flash drive.
Fortunately for us, in the void (our son’s abandoned bedroom)
was an old computer that my husband would enter his work fatefully from the day
of writing out in the world. I worked
on our home computer, entering whatever I had written, adding more to this
scene or plumping out characters that I had in the story. The first year was filled with various
characters on the pages that I would argue with, telling one or another, you
can’t do that or say that to which they would blithely reply, “Oh, yes, I can.”
Then they would go off to do whatever was most interesting to them.
I will admit that my husband was more driven than I
was after all, I was willing to quit even if I had not written all of my words
for day. Sometimes, your body just
refuses to let you do things. My eyes
would grow tired, feeling as if all of the sand in the world was resting on
them, I would stumble on the way to the bathroom to prepare for bed and fall
exhausted into bed. Often this was after
a day at work depending on how busy the clinic had been.
I have an issue with my writing at times. I feel guilty. I feel guilty about not wanting to watch a
movie or television show that my husband is interested in at the time. I want to write, I need to write but still I
feel that glimmer of guilt living on the edge of my mind. I feel the same way
when I am tired and I just can’t stay awake long enough to finish watching some
show that we have started. Why? I think
that it stems from a desire to please, keep others happy and enable someone
else to achieve their goal. Yet, in the
case of my husband, he is always encouraging me to write. You can laugh at the amount of work that he
does to help our house to keep going, with the dish washing, vacuuming, putting
away the laundry that I have started. No
guilt from me on that matter. Do I think
that he is doing too much? I would hope that he would let me know.
On Facebook the other day, I posted a Dear Abby letter
which went something like this:
Dear Abby,
My husband
has let the fire go out. He was washing
dishes at the time.
Should I
forgive him?
One of my friends wrote, “Poor Cinderfella.”
What was I doing at the time? Well, besides being on Facebook, I was
working on this particular blog, trying to read for five minutes and resting my
body and mind from a full day at work. Certainly,
I did not feel guilty at that moment, with my husband slaving in the kitchen,
washing our dishes, heating up left over chicken soup for us to eat. It was no wonder that he forgot about the
fire in our woodstove. I am sure that we
would have not frozen despite the extreme cold spell from the polar vortex that
was affecting most of the US. We have
electric heat, both baseboard and a heat pump, plus we had electricity unlike so many.
My guilt wanders but this year as we
have both bypassed the Novel writing in November, I find that I have a peculiar
lack of guilt around not participating with NaNoWriMo. Perhaps it is because I
have now found myself writing more though I sometimes feel a thread of
resentment towards the blog which drives me to do something each week. It is a
self imposed, of course.
Writing is a gift. But it also is a
curse, a stone hanging on a cord about your neck that continues to drag you out
of bed in the middle of the night to fumble for your glasses, a pen and a notebook
all the while trying to stay warm in the chilly air of your bedroom. For me, it is right up there with a recipe
for improving my roasted vegetables for pizza, or an idea for a Halloween
costume for our son. These gifts of creativity all seem to flow into my mind in
the wee hours of the morning when I should be sleeping. In the end, you either get out of bed, grab
the pen, paper, and your glasses turning on the light while you complain about
how cold it is but not too loudly otherwise, it might drown out the ideas
running into your mind which seemed to have no care for your comfort.
Sometimes because it is November, and
you have stopped caring about NaNoWriMo, you just accept the guilt, roll over
and go to sleep telling yourself, I’ll remember that in the morning. Believe me you are going to be wrong, so kiss
that Novella award goodbye.
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