Let’s say you’ve done everything right. You’ve bound and gagged your internal editor and locked him in his office, freeing you and your muse to write the worst dreck imaginable. You’ve mapped out and jealously guarded your writing time for each day. You have a buddy to shame you into sticking to it, and you’ve limbered up your mind enough to follow the characters where they lead, rather than forcing them into an outline they didn’t sign off on. That’s it, right? Guaranteed winner!
Maybe not. 80% of people that start NaNo each year don’t make it, and from what I’ve seen among my own local writer’s community, the folks that didn’t win didn’t even break 15,000. Why did those writers remain mired in a lowly four-digit word count for the entire month?
Because they didn’t want it.
Threats and bribes aside, they just didn’t want it. Oh, they all have excuses, but as is so often the case, the excuses are just empty air. Josh has a two year old daughter to take care of, a high-maintenance wife, a day job as the entire IT department at his company and, yes, a life involving hanging out with friends and family on a regular basis, and he beat me. I’m supposed to be the professional novelist in my writer’s group, the only one to have completely three novels even before this year’s NaNo. I live alone, can write anytime, anywhere thanks to my Windows Mobile smartphone and Stoaway Sierra Bluetooth keyboard and have no wife or kid to take up my time.
And Josh, with all those distractions, beat me.
And he beat me for one simple reason. He wanted it more. This is his first novel, and he’s hungry.
As for the losers, they had homework, dayjobs, kids to tend and an assortment of other time sinks, but nothing that Josh didn’t have to deal with as well. He wanted it, they didn’t. He won, they didn’t. It’s as simple as that.
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair— the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.” –Stephen King, On Writing
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