So, Is It Fun?

When I was in the office teaching last week, I kind of let it slip to my students that I was writing a historical romance novel. Since I normally try to keep my writing life and my professional life as discrete as possible, I was a bit irritated with myself for spilling the beans, but for some reason, I just had to tell. And it was a very small class, populated primarily with people I've worked with for years and only one client. Somehow, that just loosened my lips.

It's only after you share your aspirations as a writer with people who are not writers that you begin to understand how thoroughly alien the entire process is to the vast majority of people. Despite the fact that 81% of people feel they could write a book, only 27% of them would write fiction (you gotta scroll down that page a way to find this statistic). Clearly, while most people fancy themselves writers on some level, they don't have imaginary people carrying on imaginary lives inside their heads.

This difference between myself (and my fellow authors, both published and unpublished--see new links at right, by the way!) and the rest of humanity was made more apparent to me than it had ever been before when one of my students asked me, on a break, "So, is it fun?" Her tone clearly indicated she could not begin to fathom how it could possibly be fun to sit at a computer and spew words onto the page about people who never existed.

Worse, though, I couldn't really answer an unqualified "Yes." Because it isn't always fun. Sure, it can be. But sometimes, it's downright painful. And I have definitely reached the painful part of my manuscript. The part where everything comes slowly and with great difficulty, even though I have great clarity as to what scenes have yet to be written in order to reach The End.

So I told her the truth. I said it wasn't so much "fun" as a compulsion. Something I have to do. What I didn't say was that I'm not feeling particularly compelled to finish the book I've been writing for the past eight months. Because I'm not. Instead fighting the urge to ditch it and start the new book (or books), whose characters are becoming increasingly loud and insistent about their need to get out of my head and onto the page.

I know I have to be strong. I have a history of starting books I never finish. It's a history I don't want to repeat. If I don't finish Living In Sin, it'll be proof positive that I can't finish a book. And if I can't finish a book, I certainly can't get published and I'm just wasting my time. So I'm digging in my heels and ignoring those people in my head so I can finish. Even though I did register for NaNoWriMo, which starts November 1.

For those who don't know, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words of a new work within one month's time. I don't know if I'd manage that, even if I started on November 1, but since I've promised myself I won't start the new book until I finish the first one, I may not be starting until later in the month. But I thought committing myself to NaNoWriMo while simultaneously vowing to finish Living In Sin first would give me the kick in the pants I need.

And I think maybe it did. I've written 8,000 words since signing up. And actually, it was even fun!