PerNoFiMo

Yeah, I just wrote down PerNoFiMo, not NaNoWriMo. Because while I'm not officially participating in NaNo, I'm trying to embrace the spirit of it.

Last year I tried it, and I failed. I think part of it was that I decided a week before to do it, I didn't have an outline together, and this idea wasn't one that I could just spit out. I needed time to research and plan. So when it came time to write I hit a lot of brick walls and around 20,000 words I realized I would be using none of what I'd written. Plus, I spent a day driving home to California for Thanksgiving and a day driving back up to school. And once at home, I didn't want to write. I wanted to spend time with my friends, family, and cat.

Seriously, how could I write when I hadn't seen my kitty in 3 months?

I wasn't planning on doing NaNo this year. But then, a little idea I had began sprouting. And this one doesn't really need an outline or research, just a general idea and then I could run with it wherever I wanted. So tempting not to try again, except for a few things...

TESTS! STUDY! WORK! ESSAYS! CHORES! LIFE! MORE TESTS! MORE WORK! 

I'm sure you all know how it goes.

And, to top it all off, I'm still on a W.I.P right now that took a back seat when I came back to school.

I wanted to get in the spirit of NaNo though, and so what I decided was to have my own PerNoFiMo, or Personal Novel Finishing Month. This is going to be the month, guys. By November 30, I will have finished the first draft of my W.I.P. I'm currently at 45,000 words and hope to be anywhere between 65,000 and 75,000 by the time I finish. Anywhere between 20k-30k more to go.

Not quite (at all) 50,000 words, but it'll be a great accomplishment nonetheless.

Fixed vs. Growth

For the upcoming fall, I'm going to be a peer mentor for the freshman coming into BYU. I've been doing training for the past few weeks where they give all the peer mentors articles to read and sometimes a video to watch. Last week we had to read an excerpt from Dr. Carol S. Dweck's book Mind.

In this excerpt she talks about success and how our mindset about it can determine how far we go in life. Dr. Dweck says that there are two kinds of mindsets: fixed and growth. In a fixed mindset, one believes that the first results are the final ones. If you're smart, you're smart, and if not, nothing will change that. They will often stay at a level they're comfortable with, play it safe. Rather than go into a class with more rigorous curriculum, they'll stay where they know that they'll succeed. They don't want to look stupid in front of others. The other mindset is the growth mindset. These people believe that everyone has the capability to grow and become better. They strive for what's difficult in order to become excellent at what they do. They don't see a failure as their set path in life. They look for the solution to make them better. As a result, they grow.

This really made me consider what kind of mindset I have. Dr. Dweck says that most people have a mix of mindsets, and I believe that I do. But now that I'm aware of this, I want to adapt a mindset of growth. Because, we all know it, writing is a tough business to get into. I haven't heard of one person who wrote a book in one draft, sent a query letter to their top agent of choice, and was signed on the next day as a client, then in eighteen months became a NYT bestselling author. More often authors talk about that first book that couldn't get an agent, and the dozens of agents that rejected their work, and the book that got published, but was never made into a blockbuster movie.

I want a growth mindset. I want to be able to look at all of these challenges in the eye and stare them down. I want to be able to hone my craft, take on the rejections, and get better from them. I feel like I'm just barely putting my foot on this path, but at least now I know how I want to walk down it.