Letters to November 13.11.14

Dear November,

I wasn't going to do any writing at all today, of any description.  I got home from seeing my family, put on my computer and resigned myself to watching some TED talks, drinking some tea and eventually crawling into bed without having done anything with my evening other than that…

I chose to watch an innocent enough looking TED Talk… This one:

And, Oh fool me!  It mentioned NaNoWriMo. 

I'm struggling with my piece because I don’t know where to go with it.  I don’t really like to discuss my works in progress, but for you, November, I'm going to make an exception.  It’s semi-biographical.  A lot of the particulars are relevant to the last year of my life.  Writing all of that was incredibly cathartic and has got me more than 15,000 words into the piece.  It makes it my longest ever work in progress to date.  That in itself is a massive achievement. 

But now the story has hit the point at which it needs to have very little to do with reality.  It’s where I talk about something that frightens and scares me.  But I need it to unnerve the reader too.  I need it to build through the story, hitting a crescendo where they’re terrified to put the story down not knowing what happened…

Basically, November, I want this piece to be scary shit… I want to be Stephen King.  Don't worry, I know I'm no where near becoming Stephen King!!

The thing is… I don’t know how.  My hope for tonight is that I will pick up a rhythm and flow with it and the rest will “write itself” as I start talking about what scares me…

The bigger thing is… I'm scared to write it.  Not because I think I'm going to scare myself.  Because I'm faced with my fear of failure.  What I've realised tonight… in the last 10 minutes in fact… is that if I don’t write it, I'm failing.  By the end of this month, technology and fingers willing, I will have my first working manuscript by the end of the month.  And that terrifies me.  It’s already on its 28^th page and I'm dreading what I'm going to find when I got through and revise it. 

Unfortunately, whilst I enjoy our chats, it’s time for me to sign off.  If I don’t write something today, I'm going to feel guiltier that I already do.

Speak to you more tomorrow.