Der National November Writing Month ist jedes Jahr eine Attraktion und Motivation für viele Autoren und solche, die es werden wollen. Einen Roman in einem Monat schreiben? Möglich. Einen guten Roman in einem Monat schreiben? Nahezu unmöglich ohne vorherige, langwierige Planung. Dennoch ist es ein unglaublich gutes Gefühl etwas beendet zu haben und es vor sich zu haben. Man hat es geschafft. Hauptsächlich soll natürlich der NaNoWriMo junge Leute dazu animieren zu schreiben, aber das fällt vielen schwer. Nicht, weil sie nicht gerne schreiben, sondern weil schreiben schwer, hart und langwierig ist und man zwischendrin den Mut und das Selbstvertrauen verliert. John Green hat daher einen tollen Pep Talk geschrieben. Der ist zwar ein bischen alt, aber ich finde ihn so unglaublich toll, dass ich es poste.

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

Way down deep in the dark archives of my hard drive, I have a folder called Follies, which contains an impressive collection of abandoned stories: There’s the zombie apocalypse novel about corn genetics, the sequel, the one about the Kuwaiti American bowling prodigy, the desert island novel, and many more. These stories have only one thing in common: They’re all about 25,000 wor

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ds.

Why do I quit halfway in? I get tired. It’s not fun anymore. The story kind of sucks, and it’s hard to sit down every day and spend several hours eating from a giant bowl of suck. And most of all, like the kid who spends hours preparing plastic armies for war, I enjoy setting things up more than I enjoy the battle itself. To finish something is to be disappointed. By definition, abandoned novels are more promising than completed ones.

You have likely reached the moment in this insane endeavor when you need a rock-solid answer to the question of why, precisely, you are trying to write a novel in a month. You have likely realized that your novel is not very good, at least not yet, and that finishing it will be a hell of a lot less fun than starting it was.

So quit. Quit now, or if you’re among the many of us who’ve already quit, stay quit. Look, we are all going to die. The whole species will cease to exist at some point, and there will be no one left to remember that any of us ever did anything: Our creations, all of them, will crumble, and the entire experiment of human consciousness will be filed away, unread, in the Follies folder of the great interstellar hard drive. So why write another word?

Sorry. I reached the halfway point of this pep talk and tumbled, as one does, into inconsolable despair.

Den Rest und die finale Auflösung gibt es hier.