[This is not the speech I gave at McGill Library in Burnaby last night. This was my attempt, the day before, to put my thoughts in order. My thoughts, as I spoke them, were distinctly less ordered, which is rather a pity]

It’s NaNoWriMo time, so here’s a shout-out to the intrepid writers attempting it this year. Bravo! You are boldly taking that first step on the proverbial journey of a thousand miles.

There are as many different reasons to write as there are writers writing. Personally, I write because I want to make art, and art is one of the finest, most humane things we can do. It’s also one of the most intimidating, and it comes with a lot of baggage. We’ve all been told that we didn’t have enough “talent,” or been mocked for being sincere or enthusiastic in public, or been asked – sometimes nicely, sometimes not so nicely – to stop singing. The world tells us all no, over and over. The easiest thing is to listen and obey – to give it up – and most of us do.

To quote Carla Speed McNeill: anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Art is abundantly worth doing, whether you have expert skills or not. I’m in two choirs. For years I danced. Am I fabulously talented at either? Nope. But once I figured out that I couldn’t die of looking silly, there was no stopping me.

My favourite thing about NaNoWriMo is that they’re convincing people that it’s ok to try. I applaud them for that. We all have something to say and we are worthy to say it; art is not and should not be exclusively the domain of “experts.” In my dreams, art is a verb, something we all do for the love of it, and for our own sakes.

I’m kind of an artistic anarchist, to be honest, and I’ll tell you a secret: in art, there are no rules.

Now this is something of a paradox, because in fact art has lots of rules. You learned a bunch at school — how many syllables in a haiku and feet in each line of a sonnet; rules of spelling and grammar; musical keys; colour theory; dance steps. Viewed from a certain angle, art is nothing but rules, and this is not a bad thing. If I decided to sing in whatever key I wanted, I’d be kicked out of choir; if I eschewed spelling and grammar, no one but me could read my novel (and I’d be faking it, trust me). We need art to have rules so we can understand it.

What I really mean is “art has no rules that can’t be broken.” We get to choose what rules we’ll follow, understanding that there may be consequences to these choices (like getting kicked out of choir). If any rule is hindering instead of helping, we are absolutely free to let it go. Every rule is voluntary, and has to pull its weight.

I mention this because NaNoWriMo is a month of intensive rule-following. The letter of the law is straightforward: write 1667 words per day for 30 days and end up with a novel-length chunk of text. But what’s the spirit of the law? Why do this at all? I can’t get on board with arbitrary rules unless I understand what they’re for.

The spirit of the law, to my mind, is twofold: one, if everyone’s doing this at the same time — keeping track of word-counts together, having writing parties, egging each other on — then there’s a nice camaraderie there that one doesn’t often get in writing. Misery really does love company, and I think that goes double for writers.

Two: writing quickly, without editing can keep the mean shame-Grendels in your head at bay. They are nothing but the echoes of the world telling you no, telling you you suck too much to do this. Nothing stops writing in its tracks so effectively. We all have them, and we all have to find ways to shut them up. NaNo offers one specific way: work so fast and furiously that you don’t have time to listen to the haters in your head. It’s a clever strategy, and it works for lots of people.

However: if you find these rules don’t work for you, you are not a failure.

This is something I feel really needs to be said, among all the cheer-leading and pep-talking. Not everybody works this way — and that’s good, right? We’re all different; it’s going to be reflected not just in our art but in our processes. If you find you can’t NaNo, it doesn’t mean you’re not a writer.

True confession: I’ve never finished NaNoWriMo. The first time I tried it, I’d already written a novel, so I knew at some level that I could do it. And yet, I couldn’t NaNo: the pace was doable, on a per-day basis, but I require down-time. I couldn’t write that many days in a row without a break. The well ran dry. The pressure of it weighed down on my heart, and I felt like I’d been chained to my keyboard. I was having a miserable time.

I got really depressed. It felt like everyone could do this but me! If I hadn’t already had a novel under my belt, I’d have thought I was no writer at all.

It’s hard when “the rules” are passed down from on high, with testimonials from Published Writers. It’s hard to go against the voice of Authoritah when you’re just starting out and trying to do things right. But let me raise a second, parallel voice, a descant over the main melody — because I’m an Authoritah too, friends — reminding you that all rules are voluntary. None of them are set in stone.

If the strictures of NaNoWriMo help you, huzzah! I’m glad you found something that works. If they don’t, give ’em the finger and kick ’em to the curb. Do not make NaNoWriMo a stick to beat yourself with. I’ve tried it; it hurts.

Now go out there and art!

This time from Ursula K. Le Guin, an interview at Interview.

If it’s tl;dr here’s my favourite quote:

There’s always room for another story. There’s always room for another tune, right? Nobody can write too many tunes. So if you have stories to tell and can tell them competently, then somebody will want to hear it if you tell it well at all. To believe that there is somebody who wants to hear that story is the kind of confidence a writer has to have when they’re in the period of learning their craft and not selling stuff and not really knowing what they’re doing. It’s like being adolescent for years and years after your adolescence.

And now I’m back to work!

Read this: “Writing Begins with Forgiveness” by Daniel José Older. It’s wise and well-said.

It’s kind of a relief to know I’m not the only one who thinks this way. This has long been my complaint about NaNoWriMo, that a word-counting race to the finish too often ends in shame for those of us whose brains don’t work that way. There is never just one way to do things, friends. As I’ve said in this space before: if writers write, then I reckon I’m a thinker, and writing is just a by-product of that.

Of course, I have also suspected I’m really a dancer, or a musician, or I would be if my talents matched up with my inclinations. I think there probably are some writers who compulsively write all the time, because they love the act of writing so much. Me, I’ve got to take time to turn over the mulch in my mind, to delve and cogitate and be present in the world.

Do it your own way. That’s not an indulgence; it’s a necessity. That’s how you find your voice, and how you make it art.

First this article about MRAs being furious about the feminist agenda of the new Mad Max movie. TW for proposed abuse of girls and wives at the end (the post gives warning too, and there’s plenty to read before that part). The tl;dr version: the presence of bad-assed women turns the whole movie into feminist propaganda.

If only.

This particular brouhaha, however, reminds me of another article I read some time ago about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Cold War. It’s a bit meandering (and has an agenda of its own), but I’m intrigued by the knee-jerk tendency to equate a writer’s visible philosophies, beliefs, or worldview with propaganda. The writer was supposed to become as invisible as possible, and I’m wondering to what extent do we still hold this ideal? Does the contempt for genre fiction — especially spec fic, which really is a literature of ideas — grow from this same root stock?

Thirdly, and then I must get back to work: a frustrated writer friend was complaining yesterday about a review of one of her books, where the reviewer essentially called her irresponsible for depicting two characters having unsafe sex. Apparently you shouldn’t write about sex in a book for teens unless you’re depicting best practices. Otherwise what kind of message are you sending? So… it’s bad to have an agenda if you’re making art for adults, but it’s irresponsible not to have an agenda when writing for teens? Am I understanding everything correctly?

If I just leave this here without further comment, can you still discern my agenda?

So I’m at the stage of writing where my mind is being blown all the time. I don’t know if this is part of most people’s process or if it’s just me. I don’t recall reading about it anywhere, and I don’t think I’ve written about it before, but it always happens. Even with Shadow Scale, though the going was slow, I arrived eventually at this state, where ideas come gushing out of the ground and everything feels connected and meaningful and pertinent.

It’s not my writing that’s amazing me, just so we’re clear. The writing is going fine, but I can tell I’m going to have to re-order a bunch of stuff in ways that aren’t clear to me yet. I actively set that worry aside and try to have faith that it will come. It always does; it always has. My brain is smarter than I am.

No, the mind-blowing comes at me from everywhere else. I walk down the street with my mind open and trawling like a fishnet, snatching remarkable and unexpected fish out of the air. Or else I’m a snowball rolling downhill, picking up glittering and relevant detritus along the way. Or I’m a barometer for ideas, water rising in the storm glass, jittering like a beating heart.

None of those analogies quite capture it. Everything I read, everything I hear and see, everything enters and forms part of the answer, whispers of what my next book is really about. I feel like it’s raining answers, jewel-bright and glorious.

Random book on aging your husband recommends? Relevant. Song you encounter by chance? Vitally important. Conversation with a friend over lunch? Crucial (ye gods, what if it had never happened?)

It an exhilaration very like dancing. The wildest part is that it’s thinking that gets me there. Thinking should not feel like this — how can it feel like anything at all? Maybe I mean intuition. Maybe I’m just a hammer suddenly noticing all the nails.

Either way, this is my favourite place to be, consumed with ideas. Aflame with them.

The wheel will turn, and I’ll be back to banging my head against the table soon enough. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy dancing to the peculiar music of my thoughts.

I’m sick today, but well enough to write. In fact, I particularly wanted to write to see whether being sick helps keep my occasional ceaseless perfectionism in check. Indeed, it does, although maybe a bit too much. The end result was an exploratory exercise, wherein I write in a slow circle around a subject and learn a lot about it as a result. These aren’t usually suited for inclusion in the book, but they give me a good view of what I might write that would be. It’s like a spyglass fashioned of words; I can see where I need to go, off in the distance.

Anyway, by nice coincidence, today Ellen Kushner’s Twitter feed had a link to a blog post by Terri Windling: When Every Day is Judgment Day. She intersperses her own and others’ thoughts on perfectionism with pictures of a lovely dog. That’s win-win, as far as I’m concerned. And don’t neglect to listen to the song at the end, which is worth the price of admission all on its own.