November Novel

It may be July as I write this, but that’s just all the more reason to wonder why I can’t seem to crack the secret writing formula that four times pushed me to write a complete novel in one month.

For something like twenty years there was an online challenge called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month (poorly named because it was really a borderless event, little ole me here in Canada participating). A bunch of scandals^[1] left the organization which was behind the event-proper now but a footnote creative history. Yet those of us millions who participated while it was still in good standing are left with memories… and in my own case, a small stack of unedited, mediocre novel manuscripts.

Controversy aside, something about the urgency of a deadline broke the procrastination hold that I all-too-often find myself tethered by and… well, simply, productivity resulted.

 It is a fallacy of a sort, this whole writer’s block thing.

When pushed by something as simple as a pretend, arbitrary deadline, I found that I was suddenly able to crank out thousands of words of coherent fiction every day for an entire month. 

Secret writing formula? Or another lie I tell myself when I sit at the keyboard that needs to be pushed aside so that the productive side of creativity can happen?