The Panic Jar and the fading away folk
There is less than a week of November left now, and that means National Novel Writing Month is three quarters over. The Panic Jar has proved a popular item, although people seem much keener to put stuff into it, than take stuff out. We did use it a couple of times last week, and the inspirations were:
- have one of your characters meet an old friend to whom they were once close, maybe this helps set your character on his or her path or maybe it addes to their angst.
- have your characters play a silly game using dirty words
- pick up the nearest book to page 69, count down 17 lines and incorporate this sentence into your novel.
It’s not the people who fill the jar, nor even those who take from it, who don’t complete NaNo. It’s the quiet ones who suffer their writer’s block or inner editor attacks alone, who fight their writing demons in private – and lose.
Writing a good book can’t be done in a month, unless you’re Charles Dickens, but writing your first draft of a good book can be a month long task, and doing it in concert with a supportive band of like-minded people can make a pleasure out of the long haul that is novelism.
I do hope some of my quiet novelists will make it through, but I know that my loud, engaged, flirty, bombastic, funny, crude, whimsical, giggly, publicly despairing and openly bewildered ones will, because the rest of us will make them! What they do with their novel then is up to them, the main thing is, they’ll have achieved something most people only dream about.
They will have written a novel.
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