Farewell NaNoWriMo, though I hardly knew ye. I wrote some 7,356 words in the first week and didn’t touch it again for the rest of the month. And not because ‘real life’ came between me and my lofty writing ambitions. This is an excuse a lot of people will cite and I imagine for most of them that is quite true. For me NaNoWriMo set off some horrible internal battle. It was horrendous.

I can write this.
(Sure you can.)
No, really. Just 2000 words a day. It’ll be fine.
(Then what happened on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday?)
It doesn’t have to be ‘good.’ It just has to ‘be.’
(Then why aren’t you ‘doing’ it?)
Maybe I can’t do this.
(Of course you can’t do this! You were a fool to think you could.)
But random annoying happy 14 year olds are doing this and ‘winning…’
(Ahem. Yes…)
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I’m not sure I like writing. Infact I think I might hate it. Maybe I’m not cut out for this? Maybe I don’t have the right to refer to myself as a ‘writer’ or even an ‘artist.’ Hmmm.

NaNoWriMo was only the tip of a much larger iceberg. I’m not creating anything. For the most part I don’t want to. I’ve come to hate and resent the world. There’s no joy to be had here. It’s all about “harm minimisation.” I read Julia Cameron’s books (The Artist’s Way, Walking In This World) and think, “Wow! This woman gets it.” I find her words soothing and comforting. Unfortunately at times I am so comforted in those moments that I relax and don’t do anything any more. I don’t do the exercises, I don’t do the art, I don’t do ‘the work.’ I don’t even show up. But one of the things she talks about is having a self to express, about being somebody. Cultivating experiences. Filling the artistic well so you have things to draw upon when you address the page, stage or canvas.

I think I need to do that more. Actually get out and do things, experience some sort of life, develop a self worth expressing. I see myself too much from other people’s vantage points. I need to say what I want more. I need to be more honest with people. I need to dream more and do more. But I hate dreaming. Dreaming is the first stop towards disappointment. But what is life without dreaming? It’s pretty sucky. Perhaps more sucky than this dreaming and failing. I certainly don’t feel like I have much to lose. So, wonderful. Let’s keep the expectations low. That will help. Probably.

I am traveling interstate over New Years Eve. There’s this other world waiting for me somewhere else. I don’t know what exactly. Infact I’m quite wary of it. My inner control freak is alive and well, and wants to endure experiences it can manage carefully. And actually it’s quite foolish because there is so much outside of my control. Sometimes you’ve just got to go along for the ride. But I’ve never done that. I micromanage my environment as an adult because I had to micromanage it as a kid. I feel foolish when I take chances and things don’t work out. I feel foolish when I tell someone how much I care about them and their response is unenthusiastic. I tell myself each and everytime that the chance was worth taking and that the action was noble, but I don’t really ‘feel’ it. That’s the theory of it, but the reality of it is much closer to “Well I’m never doing that again.”

I guess all I’m trying to say is that I don’t know very much… and that’s okay, hopefully.

Kate Bush’s Costellation Of The Heart:

Well we think you’d better wake up capt’n
There’s something happen’n up ahead
We’ve never seen anything like it
We’ve never seen anything like it before

I want a full report
That’s it
What do you mean, that’s it?
That’s all you get
You’d better do something ’bout it
What am I supposed to do about it?
We don’t know, but you can’t run away from it
Maybe you’d better face it
I can’t do that
C’mon face it!
I can’t do that
C’mon, c’mon face it
What am I gonna do?
It is gonna hurt, it is gonna hurt me bad?

I don’t know why I thought this [NaNoWriMo] project would be a good thing to do. Someone said that the project sounded fascinating but not the working title. And the thing about the title – Heartbroken And Grieving – is that it is fairly indicative of the content. This is depressing as fuck, and I say that as the idiot writing the damn thing. I’m not sure why anyone would want to read such a thing. (Except, perhaps, that they want something slightly more upbeat after finishing Anne Frank’s Diary.) The worst part is that I know that now I have started it I won’t be able to stop until I’m finished. It will linger and haunt me until I finish the damn thing. The only way to exorcise it will be to get it out onto the page. I don’t think I’ll have 50,000 words by the end of NaNoWriMo and that hardly seems to matter now.

I’m doing NaNoWriMo. Or perhaps NaNoWriMo is doing me. Either way, I’m working on this story. Okay, here’s a confession for you – my NaNoWriMo novel is not a novel. It’s a memoir. It’s the same memoir I have been thinking about writing for a year or so now. I thought the current heady atmosphere of communal writing might be the time to stop thinking about it and start writing it.

I have a lot of real world materials to draw on from that time of my life; at times I do more transcribing than ‘writing.’ Transcribing is actually quite time consuming, so it isn’t unusual for a long session of transcribing to take twice as long as ‘straight from my head’ memory writing. There is also a tendency to get lost in ‘memory lane’ going down this path. ‘Memory lane’, actually, is a curious place. There were things I had forgotten entirely. There are others that are etched into my brain. At times I was replaying video over and over to make sure I had got the transcription correct. At other times I just replayed things because they made me laugh. I even had a moment where I felt genuinely loved. Part of the reason I had been resisting this project so hard was that I knew it would hurt (emotionally) to revisit some old territory. I sort of forgot about some of the good times that preceeded the bad.

I am trying to keep my expectations low. Last year I was really overwhelmed by the prospect of writing such a large thing as 50,000 words. Especially in a month. Last year I wrote two lots of a thousand words (on completely unrelated things) and gave up. Walked away. I joke that I got into the fetal position on the floor, but it wasn’t too far removed from that actually. The oddball truth, as far as I can tell, is that for me the biggest issue here isn’t managing my time or writing or the wordcount, so much as managing my anxiety. This week I’ve had good writing days and genuinely horrible ones. And although I do have a spreadsheet to measure my progress I am trying to treat every day as a new day and a new opportunity. When someone said something which I’m sure was meant to be encouragement but which instead filled me with doubt, I didn’t write that day. The next day I tried to be philosophical, I thought to myself, ‘The good news is that you can’t get any worse; you can’t write less than zero. Whatever happens today will be a relative success.’

And actually on that day that I didn’t write, I played music. I recorded a song. A song that actually forms part of the overall project. And the next day I wrote about that song. So in a way it’s all headed in the same general direction. So I think what I’m trying to say is that I have faith in my final destination, even on days when the actual application of the process is a little shaky. I’m sure I will finish this. Whether I finish this in November only time will tell. But I’m not going to beat myself up about that either.

I’ll be writing much more extensively about NaNoWriMo over at JohnLacey.com. You can also follow my progress on the NaNoWriMo site.