Camp NaNoWriMo starts in April. A month long excuse to pour out words onto the page in an adrenaline fuelled rush? A chance to banish the inner editor and the little demon who sits on your shoulders whispering judgement on what you’re writing? Count me in! It’s time to gear up with other writers to commit to writing your book.

I love every minute of it.

This will be my eleventh Camp NaNo. I’m aiming for 75k this time, or a finished novel. Either is good.  Not that I’m ready for Camp at all. My outline is half finished. My ending is sketchy in the extreme. And the only reason I know anything about the world or characters is because this is a sequel to a book I’ve already written. But that’s half the fun really, diving into the challenge half prepared and chasing after the story at top speed.

Beside, I’m a pantser at heart. I love the thrill of discovering the story as it’s unfolding on the page. I love my little, messy, plot hole filled first drafts with their millions of typos and nonsensical twists and turns. I’m learning to like outlines and knowing where I’m going, but give me a sniff of that open, uncharted road and there’s no telling where the story will take me.

Come Saturday, I’ll be cracking open a new document, probably staring blankly at the page for a good half hour as I attempt to figure out where to begin (why is it always so difficult to start a new novel?), and finally getting a start on a new tale of adventure. That’s where I’ll be. Will you be Camping too? No? No idea what Camp NaNoWriMo even is? (Don’t worry, I have a whole post on that right HERE). Are you ready to tackle April’s challenge together?

I think most writers have a dream of having long, uninterrupted stretches of time in which to write. Time when people aren’t disturbing them, time not squeezed in around study, work, and other commitments. I know I often wish for more time for my writing. Even though I can literally arrange my day any way I like, writing still has to compete with my work for my YouTubechannel, my family, emails, blogging, looking after the house, cooking, sleeping, and a host of other life things.

But something I’ve learnt is, you don’t need unlimited time to write.

I started writing seriously when I was 14. It was amazing. I had whole days in which to sit and write. And I did. I spent hours typing away on a slow desktop computer with a bad habit of overheating at bad moments. People just left me to my own devices. I did my first NaNoWriMo in 2011, won it and loved it. I had all the time in the world to write in.

And then I started university, and all those free hours disappeared.

To be fair, I absolutely loved my course. I studied writing and publishing, learned to write poetry (badly), creative non-fiction (even more badly), and learned about editors and publishing. But at the same time, there were no long stretches of just staring at the screen, letting the inspiration come to me when and if it wanted to. If I couldn’t get the words out at once, the opportunity was gone and it was back to lectures, writing essays, researching, stressing over deadlines. The long mornings of writing turned into twenty minutes before I started studying, half an hour of coffee, and whatever time I could force my tired brain to work in after everything else was done at night.

And yet, I was more productive than ever.

In 2010-2011, before I started at university, I wrote maybe 3 novels at best. In 2012 I wrote 6, plus editing at least 3 drafts. That NaNoWriMo was also my most productive, clocking in over 300,000 words. Even though I was so much busier in the rest of my life, somehow I was also writing more, finishing more books, writing so much more with so much less time. Because it’s not really about how many hours you have. It’s what you do with them.

Having more limited time meant I had to make the most of what free moments I had. I had to get those words down as fast as I could. I had to be disciplined. I had to scrape together time wherever I could, because if I didn’t, I wasn’t going to get anything written at all that day. And I never even considered quitting, which meant that that time was going to come from somewhere.

I’ve kept a lot of those habits actually. I write, sitting in the car while waiting to pick people up from music lessons. I brainstorm while driving to get my sister from work. I write notes while cooking dinner. I write while on my coffee break. I’ve even had times where I’ve gotten up an hour earlier to write because that was the only time available.

You don’t need all the time in the world to write. You don’t need hours and hours to be brilliant in. You can be amazing in the cracks of time between other things. In fact, you can be more brilliant than ever. Never, ever write off the power of a free five minutes. Trust me, those five minutes are the most important. Write when you can. You’d be surprised at how much you can actually get done.

Writing is a strange occupation. The moment we need to write, our brains instantly push us to go and do something else: post on Twitter, wash the dishes, walk the dog, create an elaborate five tiered tiramisu cake. Any, as long as it isn’t writing. And yet, the feeling of having written is one of the best. Often, we write just for the feeling of having written afterwards. But writing itself, that’s a terribly hard thing. Motivation doesn’t come easily, inspiration strikes rarely, and even the act of forcing yourself to sit down and push out a couple of words can be agony.

Sometimes I wonder why I do it.

Writing isn’t sitting in front of a desk for eight hours and pouring out ink from your soul. It isn’t days of slipping out of bed to catch the muse, armed with a latte and a fresh bagel. It’s not sitting in the sunshine with a mug of tea, brewing the perfect plot twist and soaking in the inspiration. And it’s very rarely writing through your meals because you’re so inspired that you can’t possibly stop until you’ve got all the words down.

Writing is hard. It’s messy. It’s days of forcing yourself to the desk when you don’t feel like it. It’s snatching moments between other things to crunch out a few words. It’s weeks of emptiness, where the words aren’t coming, dark nights of doubting your own abilities, staring at your book and seeing the flaws and hating yourself because no matter how hard you try, it doesn’t match up to what you want it to be.

So why do we keep putting ourselves through this? Why keep forcing yourself to eke out another few words when all you want to do is burn the whole thing and take up beekeeping? Why hasn’t this strange beast that is the life of a writer scared us to our senses yet? What is it about writing that keeps us coming back every day, asking for more punishment, bloodied and bruised still from our last round in the ring?

Because we can’t not.

We were born with stories in our souls. There are words inside us that need to come out. It doesn’t matter whether anyone will read them or not. It doesn’t even matter if we ever read them again. But we can’t do anything but show up to write them down. When we step away from writing, it’s only a matter of time before we have to come back, have to write down the words and empty the stories out of our minds. I read this great quote today which sums us up perfectly.

Writing is hard. It’s messy. It hurts sometimes. It’s riddled with self-doubt. But it’s amazing. Because writing isn’t about the difficulties. It’s about what you make, what you do. The hardships are just steps on the road. Think of how good you feel after you’ve written. Imagine what it’s like to finish something. Remember those times when the writing did come smoothly. Envision a piece of writing you were proud of. We might be teachers, artists, doctors, anything. But we are also writers. It doesn’t matter how hard the writing is. We show up anyway. Because this is what we do. How could we do anything else?

Reaching the end of a draft is such a rush. After being lost deep in edits for weeks, in this case edits of my fantasy novel The Crystal Tree, coming out the other side is an amazing feeling. Racing to hit a deadline that flashed past, lost in the rush of creating order out of chaos, struggling to find just the right words to convey the actions, emotions, and beauty of the moment. And then reaching the end and the final words, sitting with fingers poised over the keys as I wrestled with the all-important last paragraph. Hitting ‘Save’ for the last time and knowing the draft is finished.

There’s no feeling like it.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of being finished with a draft, whether it’s the first or the ninth. Somewhere between exhilaration and exhaustion if I had to try. And each time has its own moment of pride, something in particular to be proud of having done. This time for me, it’s knowing that I’ve finished a ninth draft. I’ve stuck with a book for five years. I’ve finally pulled it into a good enough shape that I can send it out to some amazing people for beta reading, to help me find the story again in the maze of words that is all I can see now.

It makes me wonder what it would be like to finish it for good.

What will it be like to close a document and know that the story is done, after all the years of rewriting, reimagining, editing, re-editing, are over? To know that my book, my creation, is ready to go into the hands of readers? That maybe it might end up sitting on someone’s bookshelf (certainly on mine) with other published works? What is that feeing going to be like to know that the thousands of hours I’ve poured into learning my craft, practicing it, perfecting my words, have finally resulted in a finished product?

I can’t imagine it. But I think it will be amazing.