NaNoWriMo Day 31
It was over twenty years ago. A March night in Madrid, beautiful and crisp and dry, early enough in the year to still need a jacket. I’m walking down a street that Hemingway might once have walked or, more likely, stumbled drunk down. A young woman, much shorter than me, is alongside me and two other guys from our spring break group trail behind me.
Our group of fifteen had gotten smaller as the day went on. There were no guides, no agendas, and it was years before the smartphone era, so it was exploring at its purest: just a paper map and some good shoes.
I was the only one in the group who was actually majoring in Spanish, and by that point, it was my second trip to Spain and I was fluent. I even occasionally dreamed in Spanish then. I was also in my mid-twenties, so walking around a city for 14-15 hours was still something I looked forward to.
As those hours went on, the group got smaller and smaller. Some people branched off to see something else, others went back to the hotel, others stopped for dinner or drinks. So it was down to the last four of us: two guys who barely spoke any Spanish and the girl, who spoke absolutely zero. She was very bright and was along on the trip because she loved traveling anywhere, but her language was German because, well, learning a language isn’t something you need to justify to someone else, just like writing a novel isn’t something you need anyone’s approval for.
She was intelligent, curious, cute, and even played the violin better than I did (we had the same teacher, so we were at the same recitals). As we walked back to the hotel in the cool spring night air after another marathon walking expedition, she put her head against my shoulder, leaning her weary head against me for support.
Our week in Spain had been, as always, amazing, but it was winding down. This was a pleasant way for it to wrap up and I thought, in the classic words of Kurt Vonnegut, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” That lasted several seconds, right until she broke the silence.
“You’re weird,” she said. And not in a humorous way. Not with an implied “in a good way” or “but I like that about you.” Just a flat, “You’re weird.”
All I said was, “I hope so.” I left off the, “Because have you seen what passes for normal these days?” to see if maybe her flatness came from the lack of energy we both shared after a long but exciting week. She simply took her head off my shoulder and we finished our trek back to the hotel.
In one sentence she had changed my entire view of her. She went from someone intriguing to someone so forgettable I can’t remember her name. I don’t remember her, but I do remember her words.
Tomorrow, you set off to write 50,000 words. You’ll have a chance to have someone remember your words. A chance to change how they see the world—in a good way, I hope. Maybe it will be a sentence, maybe a page. Perhaps it won’t be a word but a feeling, a character, or a place you bring to life throughout November.
Because you’re weird, and that’s a good thing. You’re weird in the same way that people look at a marathon and think running over 26 miles is a weird worth doing… and then they do that weird thing. Your marathon starts tomorrow with word one, page one.
You’re weird in the way that a weightlifter will look at a 500-pound bar lying on the ground all by itself, not bothering anyone, and say, “That needs lifted.” Why? Why move it at all? It’s doing a perfectly good job keeping the floor from falling into the sky right where it is. Disturbing it would just be weird.
You’re weird in the way someone looks at something that doesn’t exist and makes it exist through sheer force of will. There’s a magic in that. No one else on the planet has thought that thought you have, and if that’s not weird, what is?
So tomorrow go find your weird. Dig it up, dig it out, build it day by day. You’ve got a month. What were you doing a month ago? That’s so much time and so little.
Do you know something that was so weird that people—some of them highly cultured and respected, including one of the greatest writers in French history—thought it should be destroyed immediately? This weird old thing, which is now so famous you don’t even need to see all of it to know immediately what it is:
Tomorrow’s November 1st. Build something beautiful or weird or wonderful; it doesn’t matter. Just build something that’s yours in the way only you can and have fun doing it. I’ll be having fun all month, so look up “nighthawk808” on NaNoWriMo’s website and join me if you like.
Have fun storming the castle!
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