Happy Holidays
What is the best phrase to use this season?
Happy Holidays seems to be something of a controversial phrase to some people, but it really shouldn’t be.
Did you know that between mid-November and late January, 14 different holidays are celebrated? And in December alone, there are 11 this year (St Nicholas Day, Hanukkah, Immaculate Conception, Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Posadas Navidenas, Solstice, Christmas, Zarathosht Diso, Feast of the Holy Family, Holy Innocents Day, and Watch Night).
That’s a lot of holidays. And that’s why saying ‘Happy Holidays’ isn’t a ‘war on Christmas’ or overly politically correct. It’s just a reflection that not everything should be seen through a Western and/or Christian lens.
″‘Happy Holidays’ allows everybody to be included… When you’re walking past somebody, you don’t know what their religious beliefs are or whether they have them. If they have religious beliefs and you can’t tell what they are, say ‘Happy holidays’.”
-Whoopi Goldberg
So, Happy Holidays to you all!
What I have been up to recently
I wrote last month about participating in NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - the annual challenge to get 50,000 words of a novel down by writing daily throughout November.
I knew going into NaNoWriMo that I would not succeed in writing 50,000 words. And I was okay with that. You may ask, why do it if I was already setting myself up for failure? Well, I didn’t really see not achieving 50,000 words as a failure.
I had an idea for my novel in my head, and I had downloaded the brilliant Scrivener writing programme and started plotting out my novel and doing the research. But I am someone who likes to make sure that I have all my ducks lined up before committing to something. (This is just another way of saying I’m a perfectionist.) I knew that there was a risk that I could sit tinkering around with the plot and doing oh-so-much research but fail to get down to the main business: actually writing the novel.
NaNoWriMo gave me the push that I needed, the kick in the pants that I didn’t want to admit that I was looking for. It meant that on 1 November I had to sit down at the computer and start writing, and to start writing with the acceptance that I might be doing bad writing but that that was okay.
What happened during the month was that I made massive changes to the structure of my story, and that meant that as I was writing, I was also going back and tweaking some parts. The point of NaNoWriMo is just to write and not to go back and edit what you’ve written. However, can you imagine what it’s like saying that an editor isn’t allowed to edit? Yes, well…
And herein lies the rub: if you are making structural changes to your story, you need to do a certain amount of tweaking and revising just to keep control of the story. Otherwise you are going to end up with a confusing mess at the end of the month.
And on the upside, it’s really helped me work on the structure in a very short, intensified period of time. And I have continued to do that - so much so that the hero has undergone four name changes since I started, I have eliminated one whole character who I realised I didn’t need, I’m contemplating erasing a second, and I have decided that I might not kill off one of the central characters after all. And that’s just among the characters. I’ve also made sweeping changes to the story line along the way. And I am still loving it.
What have I learned from NaNoWriMo:
That your first draft is just that: a draft
That it’s fine to do some bad writing in order to just get the story down on the page; you’ll have the time later to go back and revise and improve
That the internet is full of the most amazing resources - everything from war diaries for particular regiments that served during WW2 to a site that helps you name piglets. I am also incredibly grateful for people who write PhD dissertations on seemingly obscure topics that prove to fantastic sources of information
That character description is one of my weaknesses, but I’m working on getting what is in my head down onto the page
That writing a novel is time-consuming, exhausting, a torment, and, finally, terrific fun.
But by far the most important of these for me to learn have been those first two: about drafts and bad writing.
"There's no such thing as writer's block...What it really is is misnamed 'I have a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing.' And the way through is to do your bad writing. You don't have to ship it to the world, but you have to do the bad writing. And bad writing, over time, if you do enough of it, can't persist. Good writing will slip through."
–Seth Godin, in conversation with Tim Ferriss
As well as all this novel writing, I’ve been doing some writing of a different type: an article on Swedish interiors and architecture that should hopefully be published soon.
And Jill and I have been recording episodes of The Swede-ish podcast. You can find all the episodes here, including our most recent, in which we discuss exactly what it is that we want to leave behind in 2020.
With that, I’ll wish you all Happy Holidays, and I’ll see you again in 2021.
Kat