“Writing about wanting to write still wasn’t writing. It was more like giving the universe a wish list.”
NaNoWriMo will be over in two days, and this is still where I’m at. This is where I’ve been at for longer now than I’d like to admit.
I’m not writing. I’m wanting to write, and then not putting in the work.
There was no way in hell I was going to win NaNoWriMo that way. There’s no way in hell I’m going to become a published author this way.
I work in journalism now, so to be fair, I do spend a significant portion of my time writing. Everybody said that I should count those words toward the 50,000 goal, but I tried, and it felt like too much effort to go back and add up the word counts of all those individual articles. And anyway, to me, it felt like it would’ve been cheating, because the goal of NaNoWriMo, for me, wasn’t to write 50,000 words of news and feature articles. It was to write 50,000 of a young adult novel. Which I did not do.
I can’t possibly do it in the next two days, either. Not when today is Thanksgiving, and I have to go back to work tomorrow. And honestly, if I’m going to spend time writing, I should probably focus on my enterprise article, which is more than two weeks overdue now.
On this day of giving thanks, I should be thankful my editor hasn’t said anything about it.
I was also going to publish this story in Quotes To Write By, because that’s exactly what the quote at the top is. But that was my plan over a month ago, and it feels more relevant now, so I’m not going to put it in a box.
It’s not going to help me write if I put myself in a box.
(Then again, it was pretty effective for Guinevere Beck in You.)
Is writing about wanting to write still writing, or not? I guess that depends, because in a sense, it is still writing. But if I’m writing about wanting to write my fiction manuscript, then I’m not actually writing my fiction manuscript, and it will never become anything more than a fictional manuscript.
It’s time to stop writing about wanting to write, and start writing.
