Writers Series One: In Perspective

I’m an author of many books. I do what I love and love what I do and get to do it for a living. Ten years ago, I would have never imagined that I would be paying my bills with my imagination. Now, granted some months are more fruitful than others. Some months it’s bountiful and others dying lemons. But you take the good with the bad. That’s a blog for another day. Today, I write about perspective.

Not perspective as in storytelling, but rather perspective in writing. Nanowrimo has come to a close, the month is up. If you don’t know what that is, it is a yearly challenge to write a novel in 30 days. Or 50k words. I have done this challenge every year since 2004 and hit the mark every year. My best was nine days and my worst time was three minutes to midnight. In my defense, that was a hard year all the way around. I had just gone through a brutal divorce, was raising my infant grandson, working at a nursing home while living in a slanted four room crappy apartment. Writing is/was my escape, and that year was tough to escape anything.

But I finished Nanowrimo and that was the year that taught me that Nanowrimo is my writer’s reset. Some view it as so much of a challenge that they fail to enjoy how charged the creative process can be. When in fact, it gets your writing. It doesn’t matter if you finish, as long as you write. As writers we get into these ‘slumps’, not writer’s block, but rather the drive to write escapes us from daily dribble, to holidays, good times and bad. We pause a day and it turns into a week.

Nanowrimo, at least for me, resets me. It focuses me on one story, one thing and that is the book I am writing. It keeps me so focused, I don’t check my books and ranks on Amazon. I don’t get caught up in what other authors are doing on FB that annoy me (Another blog in the series). It puts everything back in perspective when it comes to writing.

It reminds me that writing is what I do. And I am much more productive when I focus on that.