november | 2011
Savoring the Story By Leigh K Thomas
“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.” --Jean-Luc Godard
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his November, I signed up for the absurd challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days in celebration of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. At the beginning, I told myself I wasn't going to focus on the word count; just the story. I had an outline and a solid start, and the experiment would be to see where one month of disciplined focus and writing would take me. By the end of the first week, I was pleased to find my characters developing and my plot forming into something I was actually excited about. The daily rhythms of constantly nursing this one
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novel and always dreaming of this newly created world, allowed me to become so familiar with my story I could crawl inside it like a secret fort. But when my methodical, slowbut steady pace started to fall behind the target word count, I became distracted by my less-thanpar measurement, despite my early promises to myself. I was beginning to feel the pressure, and had to call into question what victory really meant for me here. So what if I didn’t get to 50,000? Hadn’t I already achieved something just by plunging in?
I didn’t realize the paralells then, but a similar thread unfolded in the real-life story of our family’s church plant deciding to come to an end. What happens when the finish line you end up crossing is not the same one you set out in search of ? When I re-read the story of our church, I can point out so many memorable lines, significant chapters, and an absolutely phenonemenal cast of characters. The first time I came to our church at the yacht club in 2008, I was just a friend of Joel’s, and I came back the following week as his girlfriend. In fact, I remember