Lisa Geichman Prosek

During the last six months, I’ve been feeling more overwhelmed and unnerved by the blank page than usual. When I have written, I’ve spent much more time thinking about how the work fails than how it succeeds. I’ve found it far easier to totally avoid writing than to do it, even though writing stands as the one thing that makes me feel truly fulfilled, productive, happy.

When my asthma kicks up, tries to suffocate me, and reduces my life to the drudgery of simply trying to breathe through one day at a time, one puff of my inhaler at a time, my doctor prescribes a round of steroids. It doesn’t cure the problem, but the treatment helps to ease the symptoms so I can look ahead and feel like I’m improving until the asthma-causing inflammation burns itself out. Usually, just a few days’ worth of medication gets me going, and I forget the sometimes-excruciating feeling of not being able to breathe.

So, taking a lesson from that, I’ve decided that I need a round of steroids to jumpstart my writing. As no bottleful of prednisone will help with this, I’ve decided to sign up for NaNoWriMo for the first time.

My mission, as it is for others, will be to write a novel of at least 50,000 words. But, maybe unlike others, I don’t want these words to be polished. I want them to be raw, ending in work not finely chiseled.

I usually concentrate on writing memoir and screenplays, not fiction. And, the way I look at it, writing a quick, unpolished novel–new terrain–will provide the opportunity to succeed by granting me room to write material that’s quite imperfect. By writing without strings, without wires, without need of any safeguards, I’ll be learning, having fun, and producing writing that blasts through my creative asphyxiation.

What’s more, I intend to write this novel during my normal waking hours, not while hiding from the Self-Righteous Censors in the wee hours of the morning when I’m so bleary eyed and muddle headed that I can’t hold more than one thought in my mind at once. I’ll write out in the open, with light shining on my page, because I know there’s no possibility of failure as long as I put my fingers on the keyboard and let the characters tell their story.

The idea for the novel came to me last year, and it’s been sitting in a file. It’s not an outline–just a mini-page of random notes, literary wishes instead of ideas. For months, every time I’ve looked at that file on my computer, I’ve thought about NaNoWriMo. Should I? Should I not? Should I spare myself the chance of failure?

But, today I signed up, and the plan’s a go. And today I begin to remember the joy of writing.