NaNoWriMo Series, Part 2

Why write a book in thirty days?  I mean, isn't it a waste of time?  Writing 50,000 words on paper or a word processor doesn't make you a novelist, or even a meaningful storyteller.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that it's a good excuse to write a lot of junk.

But you have to start somewhere.  That is, I think, what the National Novel Writing Month event is about.  Getting people started.  Telling them it's okay to dive in and not worry (yet) about the end result, to let go of their expectations.  

Because if they don't, they'll never start.  They'll be crippled by the magnitude of the huge task before them.  And then they'll never accomplish anything.

Some quotes, to keep you afloat during this second half of the marathon.

From Stephen King:

Writing a book is like finding a brilliantly colored string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string breaks and leaves you with nothing. But sometimes--if you are lucky, if you are brave, if you persevere--it brings you to a treasure. And the treasure is never the money you get for the book; the treasure is the book.

And from Ray Bradbury:

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or flower you planted, you're there.  

"It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something form the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and the real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there for a lifetime.

And because I forgot to share it when it was published, an interview with me at Red Poppy Review.

Read the other interviews, too, to get some insight from inspirational poets.  Some of them dabble in fairy tales and speculative fiction as well.

As for NaNoWriMo, f you're in this with me, hang in there!