November 1, 2006
Wednesday

Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
              — Bruce Mau, b. 1959
                  Canadian graphic designer, from An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

And so I do. Alert readers will have noticed the badges on the sidebar. One announces that I am a NaBloPoMo participant, the other a NaNoWriMo participant.

“NaNoWriMo” stands for “National Novel Writing Month.” It began in 1999 with some friends who, as founder Chris Baty says, “wanted to write novels for the same dumb reasons twentysomethings start bands. Because we wanted to make noise. Because we didn’t have anything better to do.” They had fun, banging out 50,000 words of fiction with the goal of quantity over quality. The next year Baty took the idea to the Internet and attracted the participation of 140 wannabe novelists. And, like most things that start with somebody’s brainchild posted to an electronic discussion list, it grew, the numbers of participants building exponentially to 59,000 last year.

I hopped on board in 2004. The idea of going for quantity rather than quality didn’t appeal to me. I am an artist, after all. I write shapely fiction. (That, of course, is a fiction in itself — that my fiction is shapely and that I actually write it. I still employ the “think system” most of the time.) I decided to write one monologue a day, letting whatever random character that walked onto the stage of my imagination speak for a while.

I didn’t get very far. I wrote three or four character sketches, and then just stopped, turning my energy to getting ready for the holidays. Last year I signed up again, and once again abadoned the effort, unable to let myself just write without going back to fix plot holes, determine what first class postage was the years my character was in high school, or revise to eliminate clichés and verbal tics.

“NaBloPoMo” stands for “National Blog Posting Month.” It is the project of Eden Kennedy of Fussy. She proposed it as an alternative to NaNoWriMo for people who lack the “imagination, stamina, and self-destructive impulses required to write a novel that quickly.” Updating your blog every day for a month seems easy. Many of us are veterans of Holidailies, the December write-fest that, like NaNoWriMo, started as somebody’s personal motivation to write more often and attracted a following.

As with many such projects, I learned about it from a post to a discussion list, and decided to join up. Eden reported on Saturday that she still had 400 sites to add to the hundreds whose links she had already compiled. Mine is in the queue, and I don’t expect that she’ll really be able to complete the list anytime soon. But I consider myself a participant, and with this post, I’ve begun.

To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)