Write Now, Because Tomorrow Ain't Promised Today

If you died tonight, would you be happy how your life turned out?

Should you feel, like 50 Cent, that all your ducks are in order to pass peacefully into the afterlife, then I commend you. But honestly, I don’t think that’s a sentiment you should be harboring right now. Even if you are the most precocious of bros, you’ve still got a lot of living to do.

Everyone’s got a checklist of things they want to do before they expire. Go bungee jumping. Take a deuce on a Japanese toilet. Fire heavy artillery into the ocean. But soon after graduation, people start to have a very deterministic view of how their lives will unfold, and they begin to realize that this “life checklist” cannot stay on the back burner forever. “I’ll work here for three years, then move to the New York office. Probably get married, have some kids, join a softball league and die. I really don’t think I’ll have time to complete the World’s Biggest Crossword Puzzle!”

Maybe that’s a bit drastic. But if you’ve got a passion project that you’ve been putting off for a while, why not get jumpstart? For one thing, it will help you avoid a mid-life crisis later in life (though I’m actually sort of looking forward to my mid-life crisis). Furthermore, these early years out of college are perfect time to do it because you presumably don’t have that much responsibility (especially if you’re unemployed).

So, what’s first on the docket? How about writing a novel? Rumor has it everyone’s got one in them (in which case a colonoscopy may be in order!?). Plus, today marks the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoMo, where the idea is to write a 175-page novel (50,000 words) between today and midnight on November 30. NaNoMo is in its ninth year, and a host of past participants have had their flash-in-the-pan narratives published professionally.

Sign up now and get it cracking! I have started mine. Here are the opening lines:

Despite being debilitated by paranoia and unofficially diagnosed with clinical depression, Mary wasn’t completely humorless. She understood the irony—the insanity—of living in Manhattan given that the only thing she feared more than death was living people.

See you at the Pullitzers, noobs!

PS I hope everyone enjoyed Halloween and didn’t end up like this chaunce.