Ever since I posted about my plan to join Camp NaNo again this year to re-write the story I worked on during NaNoWriMo 2012, I’ve been second-guessing myself. Constantly. Brutally. I’m so tempted to here just now write “I’m not sure if I’ll go through with it after all” and thus step into the same old trap of letting my second-guessing and selfdeprecation stop me from even starting something. I really dislike that about myself.
I was sure I had to do the re-write in German, because I thought it should come more naturally to me and to be easier to write it in German. I am German after all and it’s my first language. But when I tried to write some stuff from this new perspective and tried to do it in German it just didn’t work out. It felt alien to me, which is so weird to say, because it shouldn’t be. But it felt more natural to have this story play out in English in my mind and to write it down in English.
That was the moment the second-guessing started and I was asking myself, if I was crazy and telling myself that I’m in over my head and that I will utterly fail. Again. I know that these kind of thoughts are the main reason I don’t do things I want to do or should be doing. I’ve got that much from “The Procrastination Equation”, a self-help-book which I still haven’t really read or worked through. Yes, and I totally see the irony in this.
With Camp NaNo (or any other writing endeavour) I really have to learn letting go of my own expectations and to stop thinking about the outcome. To stop thinking: “What if you can’t do it? What if your English is not good enough? What if people will think you’re crazy for doing it in a foreign language? What if no one will ever like it or even read it?” I’m not really writing it for anyone to read (yet) anyway, so why do I even worry about it? It’s stupid and pointless and it’s paralysing and I really hope I can shake it all off when 1 July comes around. I really, really want to and I guess, I just have to soldier through one day at a time. Or “Bird by Bird” as Anne Lamott wrote in a book of the same title about writing and other stuff.. Another book that’s still on my “To read” shelf. Maybe I should read that until the start of Camp Nano?
Anyway, I really have to stop overthinking every little thing about CampNaNo and just go head and dive right in.