If there's one thing Nanowrimo is teaching me, (www.nanowrimo.org) is that there is a vast difference between the creative process "spawned on a whim" for as long or as little as you like, than to make a commitment to an entire book of no less than 50,000 words before 11-30.

A friend of mine (ironically, the one with whom I on occasion share very spiky and frustrating moments but who is also in a great position to understand this process perfectly) commented that he didn't know how I did it and worked, and everything else that goes as part of a normal day.

To which I replied something like this: "I don't either, but it just happens, and I feel compelled to MAKE it happen." That is the truth, however simple it sounds.

It is the same feeling as knowing you are thirsty. There is no question as to what you need to do to remedy it. You drink. Period.

Despite feeling so tired, I almost find the tiredness is what opens me to the story. I am compelled. I have to write.

"Cacoethes scribendi", as my dA tagline once read.

It is a funny time in the process, and it's amusing to me how the Nanowrimo writers of any experience have been able to predict certain patterns in the writers' experience as the month progresses. Most amusingly, these last few days are often marked by a feeling of abject terror:

"OH MY GOD EVERYTHING I WROTE ...IS SHITE. UTTER RUBBISH! IT READS LIKE A BAD STAR TREK EPISODE!!"

/panic panic panic

Now that's not entirely true, I don't actually think the book is bad. But I do start to engage the story more intimately now, and I'm looking back on the first chapters and cringing, and questioning if "that" relates so well to "this" after all, if everything I had started to write really is where I'm going to end up going, if any of it is worth a damn.

I'm not the best writer in the world, but I've had enough feedback to know it's worth trying. I'm also my worst critic and my worst enemy, prone to spend two hours proofreading instead of writing, when the whole POINT of Nanowrimo is to GET THE BOOK DONE, not find a hundred synonyms for "labyrinthine" that you actually like as MUCH as "labyrinthine".

(Isn't that a fabulous word? I love words that sound just like what they are. Labrynthine. Superb!)

They attempt to assure us: "No first draft is ever good. The point is to finish."

And I have learned something...........that they're right!

From this process I've learned that writing a novel is best done with some sense of discipline, for in even getting a thousand words down a day, (I average more like 1600, trying to stay close to target), you maintain an intimacy and contact with the story you are creating. The characters, like real people, are at the forefront of your mind if they are close to you. And in writing a little each day, you keep that alive.

Even if you feel it's rubbish, it's the continuity, the stream-of-consciousness thinking that flourishes more readily when you just...stick with it.

It's funny, as I once felt for sure that such structure would not only not help a creative mindset, but actually hamper it.

In some respects, I still think it's true. I think you can "force" a painting, and ruin it. In your desire to perfect something, you might in fact pull the energy and vitality from it....like overworked dough on a pastry, literally "loved to death" until what was nuanced and balanced becomes hard, unyielding and clinical.

The difference, I suppose, is that reading a book is ultimately a different experience than viewing a painting, or even the taste of a perfect choux. The impact of viewing a painting, or the flavour of something, happens most strongly in that first moment of sensory impact, and then afterwards, mellows perhaps into reflection of the experience.

A book runs the opposite way, and at a much slower pace. You are invited to open it, to attend it.

You gradually come to understand the events and characters, and then, with each page, are agreeing anew to accompany the story on it's journey from start to end.

Only at the final pages, once you've closed it, and put it aside, are you truly able to digest what you have experienced, able to fully see the creation as it was intended to be viewed.

Perhaps that is why, as I try to create my own story, I have to resist that urge to perfect it. It is premature. It is changing the recipe before it has been baked - rejecting the incomplete canvas before it has been filled.

It's been an interesting experience.