Dedication's What You Need

Lots of brownie points go to anyone who can remember where today’s title comes from.

It’s true though – if you want to be the best and if you want to beat the rest, dedication’s what you need. This summer’s Olympics and Paralympics reinforced that lesson. Those men and women have spent many long years in single-minded devotion to their goal. Credit to all of them, however well or otherwise they did.

There’s an initiative that comes around this time every year. Some go for Movember – the growing of a moustache throughout the month of November to raise funds and awareness for male cancer charities. If anyone that you know is participating in this event then I’d urge you to support him in their worthwhile cause. It’ll make you feel much better when you’re laughing at his feeble attempts at face fur.

I’m not doing the Movember thing though. Whenever I’ve tried to cultivate a moustache it comes up patchy and multi-coloured. It’s like I have a mangy tortoiseshell cat’s tail on my upper lip. Not attractive. Instead I’m taking part in the lesser known and lesser-pronounceable NaNoWriMo; National Novel Writing Month.

The idea is that it encourages those of us who lack commitment to a single project or might be easily distracted from our writing to sit down and just get the damned thing written. The goal is to produce at least a first draft of a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. That’s about 1,700 words a day, every day. To give you an idea of how much that is, this blog is 576 words long. I can knock these stream-of-consciousness things out quite easily but when it comes to prose with convincing human characters and a satisfying plotline, well they can sometimes be like pulling teeth. My interest starts to wane and I wander off to a web browser in search of obscure research or try do a bit more work on my family tree. Or shoot some virtual zombies. Anything to avoid the intimidating blank page.

I’m usually happy to produce a thousand quality words in a day though; that’s a decent enough amount. But I love a challenge. As they used to say in an office where I once worked, stretch objectives help you to grow. If it stretches me and I think I can have a go at it, even if it’s a little daunting, then just bring it on!

That’s why NaNoWriMo seems to be working for me. I know that I can write 2,000 words in a day, I’ve done it before when the muse has been whispering in my ear and my fingers have been moving in a tippiddy-tap blur over the keyboard. But to keep that up over a month? Well, there’s the challenge. We’ll see.

I’ve had ideas about an adventure thriller set in a theme park for some time now and have made a few aborted stabs at it, but NaNoWriMo seems to be the vehicle I need to kickstart this project. After seven days I have eighteen hundred words in my file, and I’m regularly backing it up just in case. You never know. It would be a shame to lose them because I’m actually quite pleased with not only the quantity but the quality of the words on screen.

Even if some of them are ‘this section needs rewriting’ or ‘expand this bit!’

© Shaun Finnie 2012