At the start of last November, I had a two-month-old baby and a six-month-old baby. Years before I’d published a novel, and for the years since, I had been revising and revising my second novel, Strip. Sure, I had written some short stories, published some articles, made a couple of films, even. I’d gotten and given up a tenure-track teaching job, and taught elsewhere and privately, too. I’d moved across the country a couple of times since my first novel was published. In other words, I kept busy, which is sometimes the same thing as productive and sometimes not.

But I was not really a writer. “A real writer is someone who really writes,” Marge Piercy says in her rather profound poem “For the Young Who Want To.”

This is not to say that someone else had penned my novels–the published one or the endlessly revised one–or articles or any of that. It was just that, despite knowing better, I had a sort of passionate, on-again, off-again relationship with the kind of Writing that hangs out in clubs with people who call themselves “Inspiration” and “Great Idea” and “Excitement.” They have little gang rumbles with people who call themselves “Doubt” and “Brilliant Editor” and “You Could Do Better.”

Having babies got me really focused. I couldn’t hang out with that kind of writing anymore, had no time for skirmishes or romances or other capital-D Distractions. But did I have time to write?

That’s when NaNoWriMo came along. It sounds goofy, amaturish, like a crutch or a scam or some kind of edifice with nothing behind it, perhaps. But what, you may be asking, is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo, Friends, is National Novel Writing Month. A web site; a sort of a program; a contest in which the number of winners is unlimited. Check it out at http://www.nanowrimo.com . . .

So there I was with the two babies, and after they would fall asleep, around 7 or 8 p.m., I would sit down, half-asleep myself, and type out about 2,000 words. (Officially, you must write 50,000 words between Nov. 1 and midnight on Nov. 30 to “win.” This works out to 1667 words/ day, but I started a day or two late, so I aimed for 2000 words. Also, I knew that I would be cutting so much of what I wrote, that I felt I had to get over 80,000 before I stopped.)

I crossed the 50,000 word line at the end of November, and then I kept on going, at a slightly less hectic pace, but more or less the same, until about Xmas, when I got to about 85,000 words and the end of a draft.

Those are the logistics. Also included are writing buddies, all sort of cafe events and marathons across the country (none of which I participated in because of the aforementioned babies), pep talks sent out by NaNoWriMo from various authors, and forums where you can get advice, solicit plot suggestions, commiserate, or just waste time.

Oh, and there are a number of people who’ve published their NaNoWriMo books (after, one assumes, significant revision), including Curve editor Diane Anderson-Minshall and her partner Jacob Anderson-Minshall, as well as Sara Gruen, whose Water for Elephants was a NaNoWriMo book, as was a previous book of hers. (There’s a list at the web site of other published authors; these were the ones I’d heard of . . .)

But more importantly than all of that, for me, is the personal experience I had of sitting down, night after night, exhausted and uninspired much of the time, leaking breast milk, to pound away at the keyboard. Sometimes I was nearly asleep, leaning close to the screen of my trusty laptop, letting my unconscious take over. My unconscious did all right.

Sure, the book is full of extra information, a lot of “ideas” and digressions, and even an excess of description. But I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to writing fiction. This comes from a certain fear, I think, something M.F.A.-driven that has to do with “purple prose” and a tendency toward embellishment and nostalgia. In other words, I have been developing a style that is in many ways opposite to my own “natural” style–a reaction to the “faults” that others have pointed out to me.

Fitzgerald said something about keeping all the quirks that the critics hated because that was his original style. I can’t find the quote right now, even at Google, but my larger point is that writing a first draft full of my inherent stylistic choices taught me a lot about myself as a writer.

Honestly, while I was doing this–churning out 2000 words every night–I felt confident that I would continue doing this every day for the rest of my life. I felt a kinship to Joyce Carol Oates that I’d never felt before. Because if only half of what I wrote was worthwhile, I could still write several decent novels a year at this rate, and raise up a passel of babies, too.

I forgot that babies stop sleeping so much and start running around and talking, at which point they need to be chased and answered, and it’s just harder to mull over the coming night’s writing while chasing and talking than it is while humming, rocking and nursing. I also forgot that good habits are hard-earned. Which is to say that I have not continued to write 2000 words every day, or even 1000 (though since I began blogging, I’ve written some number every other day or so).

However: November approaches.

Here’s what happens when I put my seat in the seat and type. Characters do things I hadn’t imagined; scenes develop; histories unfold; the people talk to each other and I listen, carefully, sleepily, and take notes. I know more and have more to say in front of a keyboard than I ever do anywhere else. Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” My partner, Angie, talks about writing in that way–to find out what happens. When you write everyday, no matter what, you get as close as possible to being a reader of your own work, with the attendant pleasures, surprises and identifications readers get to experience.

I heard an interview with Joyce Carol Oates once on the radio (with either Terri Gross or Michael Krazny, can’t remember), in which she talked about how she goes jogging every day, and while she jogs, she tells herself stories, so that when she goes to the keyboard, all she has to do is write from recall. Let us not forget that she lives in New Jersey, a place of winter, of snow. So this takes some dedication to the running, not to mention the writing.

In any case, for that month, I was more of a writer than I’d ever been, despite the above mentioned published novel, the unpublished novel, the M.F.A., and the teaching. Which is to say: I was writing. And when you are writing you don’t much care if you are a writer, just as when you are making love, you don’t much care if you are a lover. You’re just doing it, and it’s great.

So I invite you to join me over at the NaNoWriMo site. Become my “buddy,” so we can encourage each other along. I know you are busy and perhaps frightened and maybe you have a dissertation due or a job that drains you or babies to tend, but really, is that any excuse not to write a novel in November?

[Note: Fifteen percent of the 100,000 people who participated in NaNoWriMo last year completed their 50k words. Check out the course I am offering to see you through before, during and after: http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses. Thanks.]

This is a blog about the craft of writing, so it was bound to get meta one of these days. Writing about writing in a relatively new genre–the blog–and a genre that’s brand new for me, both as a writer and, more or less, as a reader, would sooner or later require some reflection on the form itself. So, it’s sooner. It’s tonight.

I’ve read blogs by friends. Well, I had a first friend who blogged. She was the first of my friends to blog, that is, and also, she was probably my first friend. We met when I was 2.5. But anyway, she started writing a blog when she was traveling around the world, and so I would read it to keep up with her, and I kept reading it, even when she got back. I thought she wrote well and had interesting ideas about . . . whatever crossed her path. And that was the blog I read, until we stopped being friends.

That story would probably be more engaging than my thoughts about blogs, but one of the lines one has to walk in writing a blog is, how much should be confessed? What should be left out altogether, what referenced obliquely, what detailed? I’m afraid this is going to be referenced obliquely for now. I haven’t looked–maybe my friend wrote about our falling out. I sort of doubt it, though.

Recently, some acquaintances have fallen on hard times: their son is in the hospital with heart problems. I don’t know them well enough to know what’s going on any other way, so I read their blog. It makes me cry very often–something I didn’t used to do much, but which, since giving birth, I am now prone to doing. Their blog is moving and inspiring. We are bringing them lasagna on Thursday. Actually, we are hoping to make loads of lasagna for a variety of people with new babies.

I read Ericka Lutz’s blog on Red Room while she was trying to win a contest by getting the most hits. It was fun to read, but I also enjoyed having a sense of purpose and a feeling I was part of a team rooting for Ericka.

I met a woman at Totland who has a baby a few months older than Leo and I read a lot of the archives of her blog, some of which has to do with her struggles with infertility. I cried at one of those entries, too.

The thing is, I do not have a job where I go somewhere, sit at a desk, and try to look busy. In fact, at this very moment–8:48 p.m. on a Tuesday–I am avoiding the important writing that I must do. I have a commitment to do a certain number of pages a day, and then to email a writer friend about my accomplishments. There is an affirmation, even, that I type to her each time. I’m behind on that right now. There just is no such thing as a moment when I have nothing to do. And the truth is, I still have to read books. What I mean is, I survive and thrive by lying around in bed reading books, and in order to do this and raise two toddlers, I have given up sleep and the house is a mess and also, I do not read a lot of blogs.

But now I have been poking around the internet, checking out the blogging terrain. Finding the punk mommy who died of cancer, and the asexual person on the autistic spectrum, and the guy reading through the Booker Prize long list before the short list is announced. And I realize something that I tell my clients all the time, whether they write memoir, novels, or something else: I want scene. I want to be dropped into a world.

And, folks, I have a world. Last year, I wanted to find a topic so that I could write one of those books about The Year I Did ______. Beth Lisick wrote one about self-help adventures, called Helping Me Help Myself, which is a great title. Someone named Julia worked her way through Julia Child’s very thick cookbook, and someone else lived according to Biblical rules for a year (The Year of Living Biblically). I heard on the radio about a woman trying to live as Oprah would advise–trying to do everything suggested on the show and in the magazine. (From the interview with her, I gathered that this project is factious, though she wouldn’t criticize Ms. O directly–because what if her blog gets made into a book . . .)

So I cast about for my own activity that I could do for a year and write about. Everyone kept saying to me, “Elizabeth, you have two babies four months apart in age. Write about that.” But, due to the fact that I was raising two babies four months apart in age, I did not. (However, I did write an article for Curve magazine about being pregnant at the same time.) Meanwhile, I’d moved into the house I inherited from my father, filled with nearly everything he’d kept through the years, and thought perhaps I could do something on the subject of Going Home Again.

The trouble with personal writing is that life is already so painfully personal. I read to escape my life, and I write because what else can a reader do for a living if she doesn’t want to tear other writers apart? So I don’t really want to write about my life. But–and here’s the rub–I suspect the blog requires it. The best blogs, like novels, purport to take you where life cannot: into the insides of someone not yourself.