Welp, it’s over, and has been for a while now. December and the year 2011 are both about to end and NaNoWriMo has become a distant memory for another 10 months or so. I’m sure you’ve recouped by now, right? I hope you have a sequel or something already mulling around in your head. You’ve had a month off to think about it and once the new year starts, well, we all know how time flies. November will be here before you know it! Better start crackin’! Do you have any characters in mind? How’s your plot coming, huh? HUH?

Seriously, though, I hope that whether you reached the ultimate goal of 50,000 words or not, you still feel accomplished, because you should. Even if you merely started and couldn’t get past 500 words, you should still feel fulfilled, because what you did with those 500 words is start. Many writers gave themselves the benefit of the doubt by setting a personal goal of reaching 20,000 words in a month, or 10,000 words, which is still 20,000 and 10,000 more than the person who didn’t sign up at all. You did it, you took the chance, and even now, you have a base to work with. You have a beginning or a middle or an end to water and flourish in the garden of your imagination. Those 500 words you mustered up could be the very seed you needed to push yourself to a completed novel. Because in the end, that’s the most important thing of all: trying and starting.

At the beginning of the month, I came across a year-old article that irked me to no end and I feel what was said in it took the recently departed Christopher Hitchens’ quote a little too far when he said, “Everyone has a book in them, it’s just for most people that’s exactly where it should stay.” Now that I’m a month older and wiser, I know now the article was only written to generate traffic for the writer’s site, purely done for self-promotion by going against the grain and stirring the pot. The article essentially bashed on Nano for encouraging people who had never tried their hand at, or didn’t know how, to write a novel. The writer pressed them not to even attempt it because of ignoring the simple warning of EDITING. Many times, calling the work birthed from Nano as nothing but “crap” and claiming the whole exercise was a waste of time.

This is a crime. No one should ever tell anyone else whether they can do something or not. If they try and didn’t enjoy it, or openly know they don’t have what it takes to make it, that is a different story. But if the month of November is the trigger, the single catalyst that sets in motion something that someone has wanted to do for years, maybe even decades, why on earth should they be stopped? Because another agent doesn’t want to wade through their growing mound of slush? Last time I checked, that’s their job, so that’s an invalid argument to me. That’s equal to a writer not writing because the words won’t come, or the story they have in their hearts is too big. To a lesser degree, as far as creative comparisons go, that’s a 19th century gold digger coming to the mountain with his pick axe and deciding not to dig because the mountain looks too intimidating. The real issue lies in writers doing their jobs and agents doing theirs.

Yes, I’ll be the first to say that it’s very, very premature to write a novel and then just slap a stamp on it and ship it to New York, just as it’s completely irrational to upload it online to self-publish without the proper editing and revision. As much as you want your words to be read and considered, take the proper steps first, writers, but don’t get dejected. Don’t get downtrodden. Don’t give up. Don’t think you can’t try.

And please, please have fun with it.

The most fun you can have in Nanowrimo is when you discover the most surprising things that come out of your head when under pressure and in competition mode. I did, and it’s the most exhilarating part of the experience. This past year, I engaged and pushed myself to write a story I’ve had drifting through my imagination for over a decade, but not knowing how to execute it. I knew it would be grandiose and bizarre and strange and a complete roller coaster ride to write, but I didn’t expect it to come as easily as it did or be as fun in the process. This isn’t me flaunting my writing abilities, by any means. Believe me, there were many times in November I didn’t think I was going to make it, struggling with time, direction and ideas. In fact, for a whole week, I barely wrote anything at all because I was coming up with zilch.

So, when you’re able to push yourself and bring your imagination to it’s limits and write even when nothing is coming, you should be very proud of that. Writing isn’t easy. Good writing is even harder. No one is expecting you to write your most renown work in a month, but at the end of November, after the long weekend off and the Black Friday sales are gone and the turkey leftovers have a only a few days left in the fridge, you should have a skeleton of an idea. After that, it’s just adding the guts, muscles and skin.

What’s so great about Nanowrimo is that it’s a free pass to throw grammatical caution to the wind. Keeping in mind that no one is expecting perfection in that 30 day period allows you to feel completely free and unhinged on the page. Some of the characters and scenarios I came up with this time around are so far out in left field that I never dreamed I would have come up with them. Given, I haven’t looked at the document since November 30th, so while it may have sounded good at the time, it will more than likely need copious amounts of red ink and corrections.

Still, I have a new base to jump off of that I built myself, as do so many others around the world. Letting go and being completely crazy on the page is looked down upon in multitudes of conferences, classes, books and by teachers galore for the rest of year, so why not, for that one single month, let yourself be free to do what you want with a story? In the end, isn’t that what we are - creators who want to flex our imaginative muscle?

Besides, why else would December March be called NanoEDmo if it wasn’t the national month of editing?