It’s 12.36 am, October 9th, 2010. On my mind this morning are the following: the vlog, my dissertation, the album I’m putting out next year, the punk gig I’m going to on Thursday, the possibility of affording those Teenage Fanclub tickets I want, the fact that I’ve had Watchmen sitting on my desk for three weeks and still haven’t watched it, therefore negating the point of having a LoveFilm subscription…
Oh yeah, and the fact I really don’t know how to write. Whatsoever.
Being that it’s the middle of October, the tubes are abuzz with talk of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month to the uninitiated). As we all plan our plot twists with great delicacy, refine our characters with anal retentive detail, and prepare for 30 days of alienating our friends and missing out on spending full days in the pub (is that just me?), I really wonder why the hell we put ourselves through such torment. The target word count at the end of next month is 50,000 words. 5 times longer than my dissertation, which decides the outcome of the last 4 years of my life. Requiring ten times more planning than anything I’ve ever done, for very little in the way of a quantifiable outcome.
Well, perhaps it would require more planning in normal circumstances. But that’s where it all falls down, for me at least. Planning for a writing project is not my forte. I have most of the next 6 months planned out for business stuff, and the next two months are booked up as far as my personal and academic lives are concerned, but writing has always been a more fluid thing for me, something I’m always altering at the last minute for the most minuscule of reasons. Even now, I’ve written about 300 words in a matter of minutes, purely stream of consciousness. Academic me would spend half an hour on one sentence, analysing it’s semiotic potential. Business me would just stick to bullet points: as long as I know the details, they don’t need to be concrete. And I have tried to plan what I write before, so I had a more concrete idea of how things will work out in the end. I even tried scripting my vlogs. I just hate it.
And yet, here I am, about to embark on a writing project which will inevitably crush what’s left of my creative energies for the rest of the year. My intellectual masochism knows no bounds, apparently.
There’s something to be said about improvising in art. Jimmy Webb talked about happy accidents, how certain things just sound good for their own sake. That element of spontaneity is one of the things I love about my job, to be honest. NaNoWriMo may change that. Who knows…
This is the first part of something that, much like most of my recorded works, I thought of when doing something monumentally more important. There may be more in the future.
