The Waaaaiiting Is the Hardest Part

Here we are: October 31.  For many of you, it's Halloween.  For a large number of us around the world, however, it isn't Halloween: it's NaNoWriMo Eve.

That's right.  Tomorrow starts our thirty-day noveling adventure: natural highs from the perfect turn of phrase, doldrums of despair that our plots will ever go anywhere, and deep funks of miserableness when our beloved character turns out to be utterly unimportant to the story.  Sore wrists, computer malfunctions, lost sleep, long talks with the boss about our job performance (during which we wonder how many words we could have been typing, or if we can somehow work this into our novels) -- it's all part of National Novel Writing Month.

Yes, NaNoWriMo does take it out of you, there's no doubt about that.  Some of my worst creative memories have come during the past four Novembers.  Of course, so have some of my best.  What I find amazing every year, however, is how eagerly I anticipate getting up on November 1 (or, on those years where it's kind enough to land on a weekend, staying up until 12:01am) and starting my story.  The beginning always seems to go so well, and much of that has to do with anticipation, or more correctly, anticipatory energy.

Everything in the universe is energy.  Even matter, which to us seems nice and solid, is simply coalesced energy appearing to our limited understanding to be solid.  If everything is energy, then it stands to reason that our hopes are energy, our thoughts are energy, our dreams are energy -- and even our anticipation is energy.

The cool thing about energy is how easily and willingly it changes forms.  Place a ball on top of a hill, it has potential energy; give it a slight nudge, that potential energy becomes kinetic energy as it hurtles down toward the unsuspecting town below.  So it is with our anticipatory energy (which is nothing more than a sort of emotional potential energy): give it a little nudge -- such as, say, the commencement of a month-long noveling adventure -- and off it goes, spilling word after word after word (and, hopefully, after word) onto the screen.

The hardest part is containing that energy.  Think of a spring (and here I'm thinking of the industrial sort of spring, not a wimpy Slinky sort of thing) -- compress it to a tight coil, and it becomes harder and harder to keep it in that form.  The spring is exerting pressure, wanting to uncoil, eating away at our strength bit by bit as we hold it between our hands (which should be working on our plot outlines, and not holding springs for theoretical demonstrations, but that's another matter).  The energy in its pent-up form -- the coiled spring -- is not it's natural state: being relaxed and all sprung out is.  The longer we try to contain that potential energy, the harder it becomes.

The same is true of our ideas for NaNoWriMo.  I've had my two ideas rolling about in my head for the past few weeks, and they're sick and tired of not getting written.  They're ready to jump out on the page, breathing life into the characters, color into the setting, and vitality into the plot.  The longer I hold them in my head, the harder it becomes to keep them contained.

But here's the best part about that energy -- the longer I keep it contained, the more it builds.  The more the energy builds, the farther it will take me when I finally release it.  If I've done my job right, all this anticipatory energy ought to get me through my first 10,000 or 15,000 words, and at that point, if I'm lucky, momentum takes over and carries me through the next several thousand words.  (More on momentum in a few weeks.)

This is true of any creative endeavor: anticipating the act of creation, playing with ideas in your head for hours or days or weeks, builds a sort of energy that, once released, carries the creation through its turbulent and fragile first steps.  If you've let the creative energy build enough, it will carry your precious creation past the dangerous beginning -- that stage where it's all too easy to write it off as a waste of time, not good enough, stupid, etc. -- and on to a place where it's not complete, but it's safe from being killed before it has a chance to take flight.

If you are doing NaNoWriMo, then I hope your energy has been building these past days and weeks, and that you're ready to unleash it in a few short hours from now (except for you people in Australia, who by now have been writing for hours, darn you).  If you're not doing NaNoWriMo (and it's not too late to sign up), then look for your own creative project and start thinking about it.  You don't need to take any greater step than to think of what that creation might be, and what you might do with it.  Just the thinking will begin to build anticipatory energy, and before long, you, too, may be unable to contain it.

For the next several weeks, the posts here on The Creative will all focus on writing, due, naturally, to my participation in NaNoWriMo.  I hope they'll be insightful and helpful to all of you creatives, but I also hope they'll be motivational to those of you who are also taking part in NaNoWriMo.  More than anything, though, I hope they'll be coherent; lack of sleep has a way of doing things to your brain....