So it’s September. Which means it’s almost October. which means (you guessed it) November is fast approaching. And November is NaNoWriMo. Which means that this year – like every year before it – I’m going to spend the next couple of months lamenting the fact that I’m not a writer.

By a writer, I don’t neccessarily mean published or publishable (although that would be awesome). Nor do I mean that I would want to do it fulltime. I just mean having the ability to put words on paper so that it tells a story in a way that someone else can appreciate it.

I aspire to write, don’t get me wrong. I even, occasionally, attempt to write. And then I go back and read what I attempted to write… and it sucks, y’all. I mean, it is really cringeworthy. REALLY. Not being modest, here. All of my stories devolve into plotless meandering nothings, populated by ridiculous characters that have think and act like middle schoolers, whatever their age is supposed to be. And that makes me sad.

And so my fear of being bad at writing keeps me from writing – writing, in my mind, is a hobby that isn’t much fun if you’re not good at it… unlike, say, RockBand, which is arguably more fun if you are not good at it (as long as you turn on No Fail).

But then I think about some of the books I’ve read – truely horrible works that somehow managed to get published, juvenile one-dimensional characters and all. And I think… surely, my writing isn’t that bad, is it? Couldn’t I write a story that would be good enough, at least, for me to allow someone else to look at it? Or maybe just good enough for me to go back and look at, without wanting to destroy it?

So this year. I will write. And I probably won’t finish. But I will not let my fear of being bad at it stop me from trying, this time. At the end, I probably still won’t consider myself a “writer”… but who knows. Maybe I’ll learn something in the process.