Confessions

The month has done. It is finished. At least, that particular batch of 50,000 words is finished.

However, I must admit I bent the rules a bit.

See, Chris Baty, the guy who came up with this idea in the first place, is pretty insistent in his book No Plot? No Problem! and on the website that you come into the month with no prior writing (other than outlines and such). Half-finished manuscripts are verboten. To wit:

Do I have to start my novel from scratch on November 1?
Yes.

This sounds like a dumb, arbitrary rule, we know. But bringing a half-finished manuscript into NaNoWriMo all but guarantees a miserable month. You'll simply care about the characters and story too much to write with the gleeful, anything-goes approach that makes NaNoWriMo such a creative rush. Give yourself the gift of a clean slate, and you'll tap into realms of imagination and intuition that are out-of-reach when working on pre-existing manuscripts.

But I am a naughty monkey, and I abandoned this rule after the first day.

I had built a beautiful, grotesque, wonderful vision in my mind of the novel I would write but had purposefully not set anything down about it before the first day. That morning in the Ontario airport, I wrote about two pages of the strangest blather that had ever been carved in electrons via the medium of my fingers on the keyboard. It was weird, wild stuff. At the time, I was almost disgusted by how bizarre it was and began to despair.

Then came Bootcamp NW in Oregon with Skaggs, and a good deal of my time in prayer there was seeking after God, asking, "Do you want me to write? For Your sake, why? And if so, what?" I vowed to hold on like Jacob until I got something like an answer.

And I think I did. I'm pretty sure God tapped me on the shoulder and said, casually, "You're not done with the first one yet."

So this month has actually been comprised of me adding additional material to the Leaf story I began in March. I do not have two 50,000 word novels; I have one 100,000 word novel.

I've still felt kind of guilty, though, so I'm confessing here and now. Forgive me, Chris Baty! I still had a grand time, filled in a lot of gaps in the first draft, came up with a few more scenes that made me choke while I wrote them, and am more confident about the story than I ever was after the first time out. I'm still far from a finished product, and I don't know what will happen with this great, unwieldy, it-all-has-to-be-printed-out-cut-apart-and-reordered-again thing, but it's got some purpose, and that is a happiness.

And I've got some other stuff to write now, too.

So this was fun, but (Lord willing), it's only the beginning.

ps—Having gone back and read that chaotic madness of the first day, it turns out to be not as bad as I had thought. Really, there's some interesting stuff in there. So perhaps one day it may rise again...