NaNoWriMo For a Friend

 In 2012, I blogged this about an annual event called NaNoWriMo:

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The name glides from the keyboard smooth as silk.  NaNoWriMo. 

One month, 50,000. words, fiction.  Write till you drop.  Generate record profits for the coffee industry. Hopefully, get something out of a month of sheer terror that can be refined into a novel.  People have written novels and gotten them published. 

Writers hanging around writers, both in cyberspace and (in various cities) physically, urging each other on, sounded great. Sounded scary. So why did I keep thinking about it? Like a throbbing tooth that you just must nudge with your tongue, NaNoWriMo worked its way into my mind. 

At first I said to myself, I'm not going to do it.  Actually it isn't the 50,000 words in 30 days thing that terrifies me.  It's the fiction thing.  I don't do fiction.  Well, I haven't done fiction since, oh, I was a 12 year old writing the timeless novel "Birdmen of Zuma" about canary men with super powers, living in - where else? - the Canary Islands.  Timeless as in "You've Never Seen it At Your Local Bookstore and You Should Thank Me Daily For That." (I even have a timeless friend and blog reader [now decreased, sadly] who remembers me pounding out that novel, day after day, after school, on her mother's typewriter.)

I thank those writers who gave me encouragement, with a special shout out to the author Jo Michaels, after I blogged about possibly doing NaNoWriMo.  I pondered and made excuses in my head.  Excuses, I do very well.  Fiction, I don't do well at all.  I even looked at the rules and it said FICTION. You know, character development and plot. I prefer to tell stories about what is or what was, in "real life".

I decided to lurk around the public parts of the NaNoWriMo website. And when I started to dig into the forums, an amazing thing happened.  I was back in the book What Color is Your Parachute, in the cocktail party exercise I blogged about last week. [10 years ago now!]

This exercise involves imagining you are in a cocktail party, where people have gathered in the corners.  Historians in one corner. Mathematicians in another.  Artists in another. Mechanics in another, and so forth.  You can hang out in any corner you want, regardless of if you have the skills or the experience, and listen to the conversations. The corner you end up wanting to be in gives you clues as to what your chosen career should involve.

While in those forums, I found my corner. I'm a writer, after all.

How can I resist forums with names like "NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul"? "The Plot Bunny Day Care Center"? and "What Your English Teacher Lied About"? These people are my kind of crazy....

Novels have power to change the world.  As someone who started out college out majoring in history, I should know that. "

I did NaNoWriMo several times.  I completed it all those times except for the last time (2016).  In 2016 I couldn't find the heart in me to go on.  I was writing a dystopian novel (one of my preferred reading genres) and lost my heart for it along the way.

I don't intend to do NaNoWriMo this year, either.  I feel like I don't have much to say. No novel bursting out of me to write.

So why am I writing this post?  Because a Facebook friend and fellow blogger is planning to do NaNoWriMo for the first time. This woman has a lot (and I do mean a lot) going on in her life.  One of these things is supporting the library in Boundary County, Idaho, where she lives.  I blogged about that library situation some months ago. 

A number of townspeople sat on the library lawn and read books that others have, or are threatening, to ban. She was one of them.  She loves to read. 

My Facebook friend reads a lot.  She writes a blog.  She works full time in a difficult job that is so badly needed.  I want to encourage her into success with NaNoWriMo.  Writing is a hard thing.  But maybe she will write that novel.

That novel that may change the world.

Have you ever done NaNoWriMo?  If so, could you leave some words of encouragement in the comments for my Facebook friend?