Achievement and Ambition

Last year I competed in and completed Nanowrimo, a writing contest where the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in only 30 days. It's one of those things that seems like a huge task as a whole, but when broken down into day-by-day doesn't seem so bad; 1,666 words a day doesn't seem like as much as 50,000 in total. Even still I didn't expect to finish. I'd competed twice before, once abandoning my novel at around 20k and the other time at 15k.

To this day I am not sure what it was about last year that enabled me to get all the way through to the end and finish. I'm sure it's due in large part to the fact that my psychiatrist and I were working on dealing with things one at a time. So taking it day by day, looking at those 1,666 word groups instead of the whole, meant that I worked my way through the thirty days (not without numerous hitches) and came out the other side with a novel.

Except I didn't - I got to my 50,000 words and realised, to my surprise, that the plot swimming vaguely around in my head was not even half complete.

Bollocks, said I, and proceeded to ignore the novel for the best part of six months. Eventually at that point I managed to go through and do a rewrite, and was astonished to find that I didn't actually think it was quite the epic pile of shit I remembered. I rewrote and edited and came up with the crazy idea that perhaps there weren't just a few more words in that story - but there were another 50,000.

So November rolled around and I said hey, you know what. Let's see if I can't get this finished. Several friends of mine were also taking part, so spurred on by their companionship, the lingering pride of ever finishing last year at all and a perfectionist's need to get the story told, I started writing. The first couple of weeks went alright; when I missed days, I caught up reasonably quickly. I won't say it was easy. Often I'd sit down and find myself totally unable to write anything purely because I was gripped so terribly by the concept that no matter what I wrote, it would be utter tosh.

Then I got so sick the other weekend that I gave myself the flu. I missed five straight days - just under 10,000 words worth - of writing. I fell utterly behind, managing only about 500 words in those days. I came very close to giving up. I was looking at the graph thinking I am meant to be at 35,000 words and I've written just over 20k. I can't pick myself up from there, surely?

But, largely out of not having anything better to do - and the secret fact that, if I can get through all of the things that annoy me like my fear of failure and the fact that typing for too long gives me this funny feeling in my fingers that makes me want to shake and punch things, I rather enjoy writing - I continued. And then I realised that I was catching up, bit by bit, writing 2,500 words a day instead of 1,666. Then I realised, two days ago, that I was at 45,000 - I was nearly there.

Then yesterday I wrote up to my 47,000 target...realised that I was right near the end of the story, and I pushed on. And I finished. Properly finished, this time - a whole novel, a whole story, 103k words.

What this reminded me of and what I wanted to say, other than to celebrate, is the following:

Depressed people can have ambitions too.

We play life on a higher difficulty setting and have less mana to cast spells with. It's like running the same race as everyone else, but carrying a huge rucksack with you. Our ambitions might not strike as high (or they might aim too high, and that's half the issue), and the things that fill us with the glory of achievement might seem trivial to some people.

But I don't think any achievement, even if it's just getting out of bed - or leaving the house for the first time in a week and a half like I did this morning - is trivial or petty. And even if I can't say that I'm proud* of myself, I can at least say that I did something and there is proof and evidence and even my fucked up psyche cannot deny what I have done and achieved.

So that's what my novel means to me. Victory. Victory through massive adversity.

* Regarding the P-word: this word when spoken to me by anyone makes me instantaneously burst into tears. Following this post I have now discovered that such reactions also apply if I write it about myself.