Well, I’m about one-third of the way through my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) goal of 50,000 written words by the end of November. I’m out in the middle of the lake hoping to reach the half-way point soon, and the far shore is in sight.

I can’t speak for everyone who’s determined to finally write their first/second/fifth novel this month, but so far for me it’s been incredibly rewarding.

Writing stories was my first love when I was growing up, but in my first year of high-school I fell in love with Biology and decided that’s what I wanted to study in university. I came by that honestly – my dad would have done the same if he’d had the opportunity, but when he was a young man in Europe he was expected to help out on the family farm. It was a waste of a great mind, and he supported me fully in pursuing the same dream. Although he’d already passed away by the time my hubby and I were able to go to Africa, I felt like maybe he was watching happily as our safari vehicle took us through so many fascinating landscapes filled with wonderful wild animal encounters.

All through adulthood I continued to want to write a little bit, jotting the beginnings of many different novels. Life got in the way, though, and I never finished any of them. A few years ago, however, I started homing in on an idea I’d had for a long time. I began doing a lot of background research and outlining some plot points.

Research and plot-tinkering are great ways to put off actually putting fingers to keyboard, though. I shared the same fear as many starting writers: can I write well enough to bring this story to life, or will I be wasting my time?

The great thing about this month of marathon writing is that it frees you to just write what’s in your head without worrying yet about getting it just right, and 30 days is not a very big chunk of time out of your life to give it a shot.

I had all the chapters worked out beforehand – the sequence of events that will take my (one-day) readers from the Inciting Event (the event that changes everything for the protagonist) to the (hopefully) thrilling Climax. And in my case, I also hope the first book will be enthralling enough to make my readers want to continue on the rest of the journey through books two and three.

What’s especially interesting about this process is that I started out worrying about how I was going turn my bare skeleton into a seaworthy craft, and then take myself on the actual journey with my heroine. What I’ve been finding is that the ship is in many ways building and sailing itself. When I sit down to write, the ideas are all falling into place. I guess that’s a good sign, and time will tell.

But more than that, the words are – mostly – coming out the way I want to express them. I’m not spilling out a confused mess just to get my word-count in, I’m writing paragraphs and scenes that I’m quite pleased with.

That’s not to say that I may not want or need to do a lot of editing and perhaps some rewriting before I let some beta readers have a look at it, and then some more tweaking based on their feedback. But I see the far shore, and there’s a landing site. And the journey to get there is a revelation.

So for all of you who have a pet project you’ve always wanted to try, just start doing it. You may find, as I am finding, that it’s like a snowball rolling down a hill that keeps gathering more and more snow and momentum as it goes until it becomes a fully-realized snow-person. It’s never too late to start one, and even if it doesn’t become an award-winning snow-person, in the end you can have the satisfaction of saying that you finally did it!