NaNoWriMo starts in less than a month. Less than three weeks! On October 1st, the folks at the site took everything down, archived all old forums, and then started out clean and fresh. Always a good thing. Now that the site is all clean and shiny and new, I’ve been over there dipping my toes into several forums, just to see what is going on.
And I find…lots and lots of very young people. Maybe it’s because I’m pushing 50 now that I look at all those repeated posts about “how am I going to write and still get my homework done” and “my parents won’t leave me alone to write” and “I get no privacy to write” and just think they are all whining little babies.
But they are, almost literally, babies. This is new to them. When I was their age, I was writing in spiral notebooks with pencils or sometimes pens. My parents didn’t care one way or the other, we were a family that had plenty of activities, had dinner together every night, but after that, after dishes were done, our time was our own. I could be found sprawled on my bed with a notebook, scribbling away. In the summer, I might be doing it outside, laying on a blanket under the shade of our big maple tree. I still had chores to do, and homework, of course, and I had a part-time job. So I suppose I wasn’t writing all that much, and Nano is a whole universe different than the scribbles in a notebook I did.
That isn’t to say that I think they can’t do Nano. On the contrary. This is one of the only times in their life they will not be burdened with full-time work, or responsibility for anyone but themselves. They haven’t yet had to juggle work with child rearing and home maintenance and laundry and meal preparation and bill paying and grass cutting and all those other things that adults have to do. Now is the time when they should be getting those creative juices trained to flow; later when other things must encroach on their lives, they will need that experience, that desire, to keep them going.
I know, even for me, it was very hard to write in those years when I had small children and a stressful marriage and plenty of real-life things that kept my creativity locked away. Now that I’m older, and my kids are older (although I still have a grade schooler and a teen at home), I do have more freedom to write. They can care for themselves enough that I don’t have to be watching their every move, and they can help with household chores. This makes a huge difference in my free time, and is equally good for them, I know. They are learning independence and self-reliance, and mommy is getting some good writing in.
But still, if I knew then what I know now, I would tell all these young’uns who are worrying about how they are going to do it to stop whining and just do it. There will never be another time in their lives when they will have this freedom, as limited as it seems. And they will be building good work habits and learning how to fit everything into busy lives so that they don’t lose their ability and desire to write.
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