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.