A Good Traveler

My brother was telling me about the idea of zen mind and beginner’s mind a while back. It’s kind of that awesome place where you are just starting something and you’re totally focused on the exploration and the process and not the outcome. It seems that the place of ‘no expectation’ is a magical landscape where a lot of cool things can take place. The moment of zen so many of us seek is actually that same place we inhabit when we first pick up a camera, or a paintbrush, or hop on our motorcycle. It’s that innocence and curiosity of seeing something or being somewhere for the first time. It’s the place that exists before we construct all these mental blocks to make the experience hard for us.

I think of that now, because today (November 2) I’m starting NaNoWriMo, something I’ve heard about for years but that was always off my radar until after Thanksgiving. This year, however, I’m up to the challenge. From November 1 through November 30, the goal is to write a novel of 50,000 words. That’s approximately 175 pages.

I wrote my first story when I was 6 years old. I decided then that I would be a writer when I grew up. I’ve been writing ever since. I have a diary from every year of my life since Second Grade (age 7). I’ve been writing poetry since I was 12. The only thing I ever thought I was fit to do, and the only thing I ever wanted to do, was write. It was easy. My childhood fantasies of adulthood involved me writing in an old wooden house. And then I grew older and it became pretentious and heavy and complicated and hard. And more than a few people snapped at me in a ‘you’ll shoot your eye out’ tone that I had better find a practical career and give up the idea of writing for a living. With time I realized they were partially right – I had to earn a living and didn’t see it happening with the Word. And I didn’t know how I could do it in the ‘real world’, without benefit of a rich husband or a trust fund, or being comfortable with cold and hunger. And the middle path, of working a day job and writing at night, is really freaking hard. But it’s the only real option most of us have. I’ve been blocked and ambivalent for many years. And in part, maybe that’s why the life I wanted and the life I have are so very disparate. And why I often feel like I am sleep-walking in someone else’s very strange and unfulfilling shoes. The secret of all secrets, the one that I have rarely spoken out loud, is that I want to write more than anything in the world, I have to write out of compulsion, I can’t think properly until my mind is on paper, and I won’t feel my life is worth living unless I’m doing it every day. From a young age, I thought writing would be the best route towards justice. In a world where there are no karmic avengers and the voiceless and downtrodden and underdogs often stay that way, with a sweep of my pen, I could make the world right. My Dad used to talk about the triumph of the human spirit, and I thought, I want to write about that too.

For me, NaNoWriMo is a way to loosen the stranglehold of cynicism that grips me whenever I sit down to write. And it’s about having fun and engaging in work and discipline. I’m not going to take it too seriously. But I’m going to take it seriously enough that I intend to have 50,000 words completed by November 30. I’ll be updating you on my progress here. You can view my progress with the nifty widgets on the right side of my page. You can also go directly to my NaNo profile.

The welcome email from the folks at NaNoWriMo says this: Do not edit as you go. Editing is for December. Think of November as an experiment in pure output. Even if it’s hard at first, leave ugly prose and poorly written passages on the page to be cleaned up later. Your inner editor will be very grumpy about this, but your inner editor is a nitpicky jerk who foolishly believes that it is possible to write a brilliant first draft if you write it slowly enough. It isn’t. Every book you’ve ever loved started out as a beautifully flawed first draft. In November, embrace imperfection and see where it takes you.

That’s ungodly hard, but I think I can suspend the reality of the critic for one little month and see what happens. But isn’t that what this blog is about, Travelers? About embracing imperfection and seeing where it takes me? Hell yeah it is. And it’s good Buddhist practice, really. I still don’t know if this undertaking requires giving in to monkey mind or doing away with it, or both. But I don’t care. More than anything, I want this, my first NaNoWriMo, to be fun and juicy and unbridled.

Please pop by and be part of my cheerleading team!