The same happens to our art. If we don’t wait patiently to let it bloom, the end result feels incomplete, unpolished, lacking. Perhaps sadder still, people who rush into things have already lost them, even when what they are rushing into is something beautiful, like love.

This is why the Bhuddist idea of “sitting with” whatever it is that we feel, even when it’s uncomfortable, truly resonates with me. Because it’s only through sitting through the discomfort, the fear, the anger, and all the other negative feelings that paralyze our bodies and cloud our thoughts that we can reach the essence of things. And, in that essence, we are then able to find the creative, the beautiful aspects of whatever it is we are sitting with. But it takes time, patience and courage to be able to do that.

Through my writing, I hope to be able to give my readers just that: the patience to sit through negative feelings and confusion until our thoughts become clearer, and the courage to look at ourselves and our world deeply, even when the thoughts we unearth terrify us.

As for what you say about conversational vs. fancy writing, I think you are absolutely right – fancy writing is almost always bad writing. If the whole point of the writer were simply to use altisonant words that no one knows the meaning of (like the word “altisonant”) he or she would be a terrible writer. But elaborate writing is not fancy… it has a texture, like Arundhati Roy’s. And it’s beautiful – not because it’s fancy but because it serves a purpose, it is a living being of its own; the writing itself is the story. But, of course, Arundhati Roy is a slow writer…and it took her a long time to finish and polish her book.

This ties in with the second comment I wanted to make – the fact that your readers like best the stories you edited least. I think a possible reason for that is that you may be re-writing things the wrong way (I know I tend to do it a lot!) It’s very easy to take the rawness out of your writing while editing it, and that sort of takes the life out of it, too. The key to being a great writer (and the reason why there aren’t many, although there are many people who write) is that they can rewrite something 1,000 times, and still keep the rawness and energy of the first draft intact. It’s not an easy thing to do, and I don’t pretend to know how to do it well, but it’s something that I wish NaNo and blogs would give more weight to. For instance, in my opinion, NaNo writers could greatly benefit from a National Novel Rewriting Month. The aim of that month would not be quantity, but quality, and writers would simply be encouraged to rewrite the first chapter of the NaNo novel so that it flows, and it is easy and effortless to read, but still has life in it. If they did something like that, I would applaud NaNo. I think they need something like that. Writers need something like that.

The reason I wrote this piece is not that NaNo is the Devil, but that it encourages this belief of our modern, ultra-fast-paced society, that we need to get everything quickly and that it’s better to get something that’s okay than nothing. It almost doesn’t matter how good the final product is – what matters is that we can check it off our to-do-list.

“Written a book…check!”, “Married…check!” …”Earned graduate degree…check!” By doing that, we miss out on all the wonders of life. The beauty that is inherent in the struggle of writing that second draft (which seems worse than the first) then writing a third draft (which might be even worse) and, finally, going for a walk, setting the novel aside for a couple months, then writing a fourth draft..which ends up being “The One.” We never know when writing is going to become an effortless effort for us… but we need to keep writing and rewriting, until both us and our readers will forget that we are writing, that the words that come out of us are just “a bunch of words.”