National Novel Writing Month 2011 #1

I started on my NaNoWriMo project Tuesday morning (or Monday night, or whatever) at literally the stroke of midnight; but then, of course, I felt way too much pressure to get down something that was just right, and perfect, and so I wound up sitting there for like twenty minutes before anything came out. And then what came out wasn’t anything to write home about. I started to wonder about the wisdom of starting to write when I was only going to give myself about an hour to get 1700 words. (I expected to start on it Monday night after midnight, and then do more on it Tuesday afternoon, and maybe Tuesday night after work; but I wanted to start on it as soon as possible, because Tuesday is usually the toughest day of the week for me to get any writing done.)

Slowly but surely, though, the words began to take shape, and then they began to flow; and about one hour later, I had just over 1000 words. I thought most of them were pretty good, but what I liked best was the way the tone of those words struck me. I won’t say that I’m trying to write like Tom Perrotta, but I have a great appreciation for the darkly comic tone that he brings to his work. He often begins with seemingly tragic characters, and yet seems to wind up in a place where there’s a little bit of hope—not a riding-off-into-the-sunset kind of disingenuously cloying hope, but the kind of honest hope that makes you think you can wish for it to happen with at least a reasonable expectation that it might. I’m not precisely trying to write like that, but I do hope to tap into the same kinds of themes—whatever it is about middle America that makes people of certain means who get there wish that they had just kept going.

By the time I finished work Tuesday afternoon, I had over 2000 words, which is a very healthy start; and I managed to get a few more down at work, and by the time I knocked off for the night, with my first full day of writing complete, I was at almost 3000 words, which is a very good start—especially considering that I got that many words during the part of the week that is generally not all that conducive to getting a lot of writing done.