NaNoWriMo: Third Times a Charm

There is no logical explanation for what I am about to write.

It doesn't make any sense especially when there are so many things against me, time being the biggest thing of all.

I don't have much of it to spare. School. Work. General living. Those three things suck up most of it. Well, sleep does too but I digress.

Regardless, I am once again going to try my hand at NaNoWriMo. I've had an unquenchable desire to start writing again. Ideas that are begging to be put onto paper, to have a life of their own. But none of them (I am sad to say) are novel worthy. They are short snippets of what might be or could have been. None of them have a full shelf life of more than a few passing glances, but that's the basis of this years project.

Each time I've sat down before for this project, I've had grand delusions of a full-fledged "novel", trying to squeeze pages out of a story that just wasn't there. In the overall view of things, I'm not a "novelist". My words belong in short stories and essays (I suppose this is why I have a blog or three) and that is how I plan to attack this years project. Small stores, snippets into the lives of those characters who live inside my head. Who are all connected yet separate.

My initial thought would be a story a day. A small glimpse into my favorite part of writing, the characters. But even that seems to limiting. Some will have more to say. Some less. So I'm going to keep it fluid and if needed constantly changing. Because for me, the only way I can write is if it feels honest, uncontrived and without any sense of direction.

The Write Stuff

It doesn't happen as often as I'd like, but there are days when it feels like the pen in my hand has a mind of its own and the ideas just come out of no where.

This is how the last few days have gone. And it has been glorious!

But the best part about it, none of it has been for the blog.

I've had essentially the same story running through my head for the last few years, trying to work out how to put it down on paper. It's your standard romantic comedy with what I would like to say has a little more comedy than romance (just like my real life!). There are no earth shattering revelations or life changing "ah ha!" moments.

I have at least a half dozen variations of it in notebooks and scraps of paper around the house, but until this version it never felt right. I finally feel like the I have the characters and story where they need to be. I'm fully aware that when it is done, it will be tucked away on my shelves and unlikely to be read by anyone else.

But sometimes, writing just for the sake of writing is worth it.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

---Henry Ward Beecher

I seem to have been bitten by the writing bug.

Not that I'm complaining, I've just gotten used to it not being there.

The written word has been my best friend since I could write my name.

I have notebooks upon notebooks filled with half finished stories, scenes without a home and character profiles that never quite found their way out in the world. I have boxes of journals that I've filled over time with my hopes, dreams, nightmares, fears and love letters.

I wrote my first short story when I was 8. First poem at 10 and failed a fourth grade writing assignment because I didn't "understand the concept of a tall tale". The next day I decided I wanted to be a writer.

There is something about putting pen to paper (an actual pen to an actual piece of paper) that makes me feel better. It frees something inside of me that doesn't have another way out. It makes me feel things in a way I don't otherwise know how to deal with. Sounds terribly pretentious, I know, but for me, writing fiction is far more liberating that writing in my journal or a poem or even here. It's the lure of living vicariously through imaginary lands and the lives of fictional people that makes it easier to deal with day to day things. And that makes me sound like I need to seek some professional help.

For the last week or so, that same familiar itch to create worlds of my own has struck again. Although,  most of those "new worlds" seem to mirror my own life. Which is both good and bad. It's been good because it's giving me a chance to say things I'm not sure I would otherwise have the courage to say. But it's bad because it's giving me a chance to say things I'm not sure I would otherwise have the courage to say. But I've been thoroughly enjoying the freedom of doing just that.

So tonight after work, not that I needed a new one, went out and bought myself a new composition notebook to get the scraps of paper I've been writing on organized and to get some of these ideas down on paper to start putting in story form.

I sometimes have to wonder what I am going to do with all these scraps of paper and notebooks, but for now, I'm just going to enjoy getting the stuff out of my head and seeing what I can create (even if no one else ever reads it).

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