Essay by Greg London

Greg London was a classmate of mine in Viable Paradise X, and a very smart man. This essay is under a Creative Commons Attribution license:

Author: Greg London
Title: “The Zen of Nanowrimo”

Writing is a weird skill.

It is, at least at the moment, a skill that is far
more Zen like in nature than, oh, say, engineering.
The reason there are so many damn writing books
is because it isn’t a skill that can be boiled down
like a complete set of instructions on how to fold
a paper airplane.

On top of all the weird, almost alien skills you must
develop as a writer, such as “Point Of View”, plot,
characterization, and world, you must also, at several
stages of your education in writing, overcome an even
more powerful issue:

Yourself.

Fear of rejection, fear of judgement, fear of failure,
fear of starting but never finishing, fear of finishing
and never publishing, fear of publishing but never
publishing again, fear, fear, fear, fear of criticism
from previous fans of your work.

No instruction on writing can really get very far if
it does not address in some way the writer’s fear.

The thing is that fear is handled differently by different
people. This is probably one of the reasons that there
are a whole section in the bookstore about how to write,
because on some level each one addresses fear in a different
way.

Another thing is that the same person might handle fear
differently at different times, so they may end up buying
and reading a book that did nothing for there fear, but
then may end up reading that same book again years later
and smack their forehead with a big “Aha!”.

I haven’t done nanowrimo myself, but what I’ve read from
it and heard about it, it is first and foremost a tool
for dealing with lots of fear. The end result of coming out
the other end of nanowrimo is, if nothing else, the notion
that you CAN actually write a novel. It will be a rough draft
novel, but the approach of DEMANDING that you write 50k words
in 30 days is a tool for dealing with the fears that stop
writers.

Coming out on the other side of nanowrimo, you may be
extremely surprised of what you really are capable of
as far as writing rates and cranking something out.

Now, the tools and approaches needed to address
point of view, plot, character, world, and other issues,
those remain. But I view nanowrimo as providing people
with the fear equivalent of skydiving for writers.

If you can overcome that fear, you’ve gone a long way
to put a lot of that fear permanently behind you.

But writing, to me at least, is like Zen.
You do the zen koans, you meditate, you do exercises,
and then one day, you’re washing your bowl, exactly
like you’ve done a million times before, and suddenly,
BLAM!
You finally grok satori. You finally “grok” writing.

And there are many koans for the writing monks.
Nanowrimo is one of them.
That everyone doesn’t get enlightenment after doing
nanowrimo is missing the ineffability of zen koans
and writing.

(end rant)