A Case for Arrogance

Last month marked the the fifth anniversary of me knowing about National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” as the cool kids call it, and my second failed attempt at it. Every few days I received updates from the official NaNoWriMo website, subject line reading “Your NaNo Updates.” The truth of the matter was they weren't my updates. They weren’t about anything I was writing or anything my two NaNoWriMo buddies were working on. Most of it was “Pep Talk” from famous writers that, while probably helpful, never got my attention.

I don’t mean to say that I’m above it. While half of my brain harbors that arrogance that all writers have--otherwise they wouldn’t be writing--the other half asks myself what the hell I think I’m doing. Unfortunately, for the last few years now, that second voice has been most vocal.

There was a dry spell of writing for me after the end of my last semester of undergrad. I had the upper-level fiction class left to take and I was forced to take it with a professor who was notorious for harsh criticism in both literature and writing classes. I was never clear on his credentials for teaching a creative writing class. All I could read on him was his anti-genre elitism and vaguely sexist attitude. That class ended with me getting a B--my only B of all of my creative writing courses--and losing confidence in my writing. Maybe he was right: maybe I was a hack (my words, not his). I’ll never know why I got a B in the class and why some others got As, but I’m not about to ask him. At least some of my arrogance still sits in me.

It took a class in grad school taught by (Warning: NAME DROP) Roxane Gay to rekindle that spirit in me. Her criticism was blunt but not hurtful. For a time, I felt like I could ride that bicycle of writing all over again. I did for that semester and it felt good. But then the rest of grad school happened and ate up what time I could spend to think about writing. and then finally the thesis came which became composition priority Number One.

So here I am now, long after the hustle and bustle of graduate school, master’s degree in hand and I find I’m not writing anything except this blog. NaNoWriMo looked as good an opportunity as any to get back to it. I had all sorts of fiction ideas swimming through my head. A few days before NaNoWriMo started I even got to work on one of them. Did I fire off too soon?

As November progressed, I saw updates from old classmates on Facebook updating us with their progress in NaNoWriMo. They put up a better fight than I ever did. One had been sick and took a break from it. I wish I had that excuse.

NaNoWriMo is a lovely idea, truly. It gets those who aren’t writing otherwise to start thinking about it and doing it. If it gets people just thinking about it that aren’t otherwise, I’d say NaNoWriMo fulfilled some portion of its purpose. But then I think of the temporal boundaries of the month. Never have they claimed that they only want folks writing in the month of November. But there is a finality about November 30. Did you get those 50,000 words written? No? Well, you tried. Halfway through the month I realized I hadn’t written a single word for it yet and decided, “Screw it,” because what’s the point of trying to reach 50,000 words when I didn’t have 25,000 halfway through.

It’s a terrible attitude. Truly god awful. It’s especially ridiculous to pin it on an organization which has no goal other than getting folks to write. But this is the attitude you get when you need an audience, when you go from thinking you’re hot shit to knowing you’re just shit. I feel like Samson with a crewcut.

Without some sort of support network, I’ve found that writing, both during and outside of NaNoWriMo, is difficult. There are those who write for themselves, but I’m not one of them. I’ve always thrived in the workshop setting. Being an interstate immigrant to Arkansas, I’ve lost that ability to physically gather folks to a writing workshop. There is the prospect of a virtual one via Facebook with some grad schoolmates. Maybe they can stoke the fire of my arrogance.