The Fault in our Stars

I'm not a fan of motivational quotes, but I've never thrown any serious shade to one above. It sounds like something a well-meaning forest animal would say to a lost boy, and since I like both forest animals and lost boys, I didn't mind it. I'd assumed it could be attributed to some sort of whimsical children's book author, some neo-A.A. Milne, but it's not like that at all.

We can thank a man named Les Brown for this astronomically dubious little gem. Les Brown appears to speak about being a motivational speaker, and when he's not doing that, he's writing about being a motivational speaker and teaching other people how to be motivational speakers. He says that greatness is within you, and I totes believe it. Now, if Les Brown can write book after book about being a motivational speaker, motivate other would-be motivational speakers and fire platitudes out of a metaphorical tee-shirt cannon for us to swallow up and then regurgitate on pinterest and get paid for it all, why...why that means that you could certainly write a novel! 

Which brings us to the virtual gauntlet that is National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo, as the cool kids call it, is basically a commitment to spend the month of November writing 50,000 words, which is the estimated minimum for the first draft of your novel. In order to complete this goal, you'll need to write roughly 1,677 words per day. I know, this is terrifying, but there are local "write-in" groups where you can go work with other writers in real life, and lots of internet support groups that are committed to cheering each other on. 

I've never done it before, but I'm going to be participating this year, and I'll be reporting from the front lines of caffeine-addled manic creation. I think you should join me, even if you haven't written in years. Making a commitment to write is never a bad thing, and neither are guilt trips from strangers. Besides, it's great way to spend most of Thanksgiving avoiding your relatives.

I'm not promising we'll come out of this with good novels, or even finished ones, but if you shoot for the moon...you might just land on a repetitive, coffee stained, nonsensical star that you can edit later. 

I'll be devoting this week to a series of NaNoWriMo preparation posts, but for now, let's get used to that wretched moon-demon that is the daily word quota. 1,677 words. Let's see if we can do it. Go write 1,677 words now. Not as part of any cohesive story, or with an aim toward quality. It can be a diatribe about how much you hate Mondays and how tired you are. Mine probably will be, but that's okay, because greatness is within us all. Les Brown says so.