Sunday, November 4, 2012

Peptalk Prime

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

A few days ago, you hadn't started writing your novel yet. Unless of course you're cheating, which I leave as a possibility because, really, I don't know you well enough to trust you.

It could have been about anything. Sure, you had been intricately planning to write about Dr. Who marrying that girl from Twilight for the last 8 months, plotting how every last little bit of whatever-the-minutia-of-these-pre-existing-franchises-you're-ripping-off-are will interact with each other, but until you start writing, you could change to some other horrible idea.

But now you've started writing; you've committed to something. You've written a few thousand words, and now the whateverth Doctor is trying to get with the grumpy chick's dad. And now it's time for you to make the best of it. You can abandon it as a failure and switch to a book paralleling Pokemon competition to professional women's tennis in a steampunk universe, or you can tough it out.

Because remember: you've chosen a path. You can poison those awful characters, you can have them die in a helicopter crash caused by werewolf Christmas or some other ridiculous idea you think is super keen. But if you hadn't started, you wouldn't have had that horrible thing to kludge your way through.

You've made your bed. Now it's time to lay in it.