{"id":13596,"date":"2014-11-19T12:37:31","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T18:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/?p=13596"},"modified":"2015-01-26T16:45:35","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T22:45:35","slug":"art-is-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/2014\/11\/19\/art-is-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"Art is Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been putting this article off for days.\u00a0 Not because I don\u2019t like writing, not because I don\u2019t want to do it, not even because I don\u2019t have an idea.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t been writing this article because I am all written out.\u00a0 My fingers ache at the very idea of typing an extra sentence.\u00a0 My brain flatly refuses to come up with any more words for anything<\/em>.\u00a0 My nerve begins to fail me when I so much as contemplate opening a new Word document.\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n

I am doing NaNoWriMo.<\/p>\n

For those of you who don\u2019t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month (so it\u2019s not really an acronym, see?\u00a0 I\u2019m not forcing more acronyms on you).\u00a0 You’ve probably received\u00a0a few e-mails from Ms. Townsend about it, advertising a \u201cfun, challenging experience\u201d that drags every last piece of creativity out of you.\u00a0 It is that, and so much more.\u00a0 NaNoWriMo takes place during November and the goal is to write a certain number of words (your own personal word goal) by the end of the month.\u00a0 Most people choose either 30,000 words (that\u2019s a thousand, or about 3.5 double-spaced pages, a day) or, if they\u2019re really ambitious, the program’s traditional 50,000 word goal.<\/p>\n

This number is both everything and nothing.\u00a0 It is everything in that this is the<\/em> goal, the<\/em> number that you are reaching toward throughout the entirety of the month.\u00a0 It is nothing in that nothing happens if you don\u2019t reach it (unless you\u2019ve cleverly made promises about consequences to others in the event that you don\u2019t finish). The entire point of the activity is just to write, and to make sure that you know you can fit writing into your life.\u00a0 There is a website where other people in the school can see the progress you\u2019ve logged.\u00a0 It gets rather competitive.\u00a0 You begin to hate perfectly nice people around you because they just \u201caccidentally\u201d logged 5,000 hours over a busy weekend.<\/p>\n

NaNoWriMo, already quite intense, is even more so at IMSA.\u00a0 Nearly everything is, after all.\u00a0 Already beset with problem sets and papers, how is even the most dedicated IMSA student supposed to squeeze in an extra thousand or so words a day?\u00a0 That\u2019s, like, a short paper!\u00a0 The answer is, simply, that I cannot tell you.\u00a0 It is for every student to decide, to figure out how exactly they are going to make space in their life for something like this.\u00a0 I find that I have more time when I\u2019m doing it because I tend to write instead of straight-up procrastinating.\u00a0 I mean, it\u2019s still better than math homework.\u00a0 In all seriousness, though, I think that\u2019s one of the many beauties of this strange endeavor that thirty or forty of us have embarked on this month.\u00a0 We each have to find our own way to create the time, to fashion out of our busy schedules that balance and time management that is so emphasized to us in Nav.\u00a0 We get to figure out what isn\u2019t necessary to our lives (sometimes this turns out to be NaNoWriMo itself, which is disappointing but perhaps predictable) and what really is.<\/p>\n

NaNoWriMo is fascinating and wonderful and horrible.\u00a0 You boil inside your own head for lack of the next plot point.\u00a0 You wake up at 6:30 in the morning because you\u2019ve glimpsed a beautiful, brilliant plot bunny (magical idea that just hops by, basically) and have to write it down.\u00a0 You write until 11:58 so you can put your updated word count online and hop over your friends at the last second. A character in a book I read long ago (Feeling Sorry for Celia<\/em> by Jaclyn Moriarty- read it) once said something along the lines of, \u201cI hate running 5ks, but stopping running after a 5k?\u00a0 The most beautiful feeling on earth.\u201d\u00a0 I don\u2019t run, so I have no idea how accurate that is.\u00a0 But something about it feels right in terms of writing.\u00a0 Only when you spend a month sprinting through poor plot points and clich\u00e9d characters will you feel the heavenly relief of not<\/em> writing.\u00a0 And then, of course…it\u2019s time to revise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been putting this article off for days.\u00a0 Not because I don\u2019t like writing, not because I don\u2019t want to do it, not even…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":162,"featured_media":13626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1019,12],"tags":[2074],"coauthors":[2340],"class_list":["post-13596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-imsanews","category-opinions","tag-nanowrimo"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/162"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13596"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13645,"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13596\/revisions\/13645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13596"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}