Nanowrimo 2014

So National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) is almost upon us. The question is, will I do this year or not?

I ask because I attempted it last year but fell off the band wagon pretty quickly - other things came up and I simply was not really committed to what I was writing.  This year is a little different already.

So the question is, am I going to do it?

The one year I successfully completed it - 2012 - I went in with a definitive idea in mind that sustained me through the struggle of generating 1567 words a day (it is not as hard as you think, but it is an endurance race).  This year, I find myself 2 days before I would start writing without the foggiest idea in the world what I would write about.

But I am wondering if this, too, is not a different aspect for writing.

The reality is that I have ideas rattling around in my head - lots of them, actually.  Most of them I simply self censor because they're not "good enough" or actually ready for prime time.

But what if I simply took one out and started watching where it went.

It is not that I will write The Great American Novel - I get that.  But it is interesting to wonder what I could write if I just let the story start telling itself.  Because the remarkable thing I have found about writing is that if I will simply start writing, the characters will begin to fill the story in themselves, sometimes so much so that I scarcely recognize the work as something I typed.

So maybe this year the question is not so much "Will I do Nanowrimo?" as much as it is "Where will Nanwrimo lead?"