I’m not the kind of girl who is likely to mistake the golden crust of an apple pie for the whole pie – I know there is gooey, cinnamony goodness below. And even though I know that the hard, glittering layer of ice glazed over fresh powdery snow after an ice storm covers something soft and light, I sometimes hesitate to disturb it with my Bugabootoos. It’s so beautiful and intact, before the dogs come along and pee on it, before the kids tear it up for snowball fights. I don’t mistake the perfect surface of anything for the whole thing – but still, I have to be persuaded to go below. And it’s not because I’m scared of what I’ll find there. And it’s not because what’s there isn’t also very tempting.
The truth is that it takes work to access the good stuff. It’s tedious. It’s annoying. It’s not always the kind of work that yields something valuable right away. You can be compelled to write, and then write a bunch of crap. You can sit down intending to write one thing, and then wonder why something entirely different is coming from your fingertips. Often, I write, get frustrated, leave my desk, come back again. I must have done that at least seven times yesterday morning. If it wasn’t for NaNoWriMo, I would have given up to organize the spices in my cupboard. Finally, the eighth time, I broke into the deep nourishment and exploration, untethered. That feeling is the reason why I write. That feeling is incredibly nutritious for the soul. It’s so profoundly spiritual; who “I” am completely dissolves away and it’s just this awesome flow.
When it comes to anything which needs to be done deeply and done right, it’s tempting to skate over it, or give it a “lick and a promise”, as my Mom would say. If we want it to be worth our efforts, we need to grab the fork, take off the mittens, and dig in. I think this is one thing NaNo is after – with the focus on quantity, we dig and dig and dig, and we aren’t allowed to give up. Eventually, if only out of sheer persistence, we actually write something we like. And hopefully it’s something we need to write, and ideally it’s something others need to read.
I think in some ways this ties into the “triggering subject” Alice LaPlante writes about in The Making of a Story. The thing that prompts us to initially sit to write is often not the thing we really want to write. Otherwise, writing would be merely an act of transcription. Rather, LaPlante says that writing is ‘a process of discovery’.
