In Hank Parker’s words:
I had been focusing on writing non-fiction and hadn’t planned to write a novel—I was finding that the real-life stuff was compelling enough. I’d been working on an account of an underwater treasure-hunting expedition I had co-led, a project with amazing characters; quests and conflicts; struggles and outcomes that rivaled those of any fiction plot.
Then, essentially on a dare, I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). It was a chance to put into words a story about the hypothetical outbreak of a gruesome and deadly tick-borne virus in the heavily populated northeastern United States. The plot had been percolating in my mind for years as I worked as a researcher, professor, writer, and federal government advisor on bio- and agro-terrorism, and pondered what might happen if such an epidemic occurred. And I’m passionate about turning non-scientists on to the mysteries of science, and helping to demystify those mysteries. But writing fiction? Well, I’d never tried that before.
So in the anonymous environment of NaNoWriMo, I pledged to meet the contest’s challenge—to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I didn’t have to show the results to anyone else—the only thing that mattered was the word count. So I could forget the internal editor and just let words flow. And flow they did, bound only by the limits of my imagination. Thirty days later I’d tallied 56,000 words, had become immersed in the plot and characters, and didn’t want to stop.