NaNoWriMo is no small feat. I’m not whining, but aside from sucking up every extra word in my creative piggy bank, it has jostled a few old but distinctly unsettling feelings from the “so you want to be a writer” shelf on the left side of my brain.
As one of my good friends is always quick to remind me, writing is largely a labor of love. And just like love, it is sometimes quite easy to want to kick it in the groin, throw it against the wall and be done with it for all eternity. However, also like love, there is, concurrently, the constant feeling that with a little more work, it will be better than ever. With a little more work, this little story will find its own voice and speak out on its own. So I have found myself in a perpetual cycle of throwing my measly ten thousand and counting words of novel-in-training against the proverbial wall and shortly thereafter, picking it back up, turning it over in my hands and trying, with the same old twenty six letters, trying again.
Another feeling which I had not, until recently, really been able to put my finger on was this ‘life of the story’ as I have started to call it in rants to poor and unsuspecting friends. When one reads Shakespeare, Austen, Rowling, Lewis, Card, Tolkein–all of them, the story immediately comes to life from the first few words. The reader consents to the fiction (if this were one of my fantasy term papers, I’d be quoting McDowell) and it is a story. I have struggled, from the age of six, with somehow imbuing my written words with this same feeling that the story is alive. And it’s not just the greats. No, it’s the lemons too; somehow they get away with sounding like a story, at least at the outset. Does all a story need is for it to have a real dust jacket and cover art, a nice place to live? Is that all it takes to convince those hundreds of words that if they all work together they will indeed be a story?
While on particularly dark and grimy days I sometimes wish this was true, I am most often very glad it is not. I am still trying to find this spark, this voice, this life that I hear in the words someone else has written and published in my own. If I hear that spark, they stop being just my words, and become a real, live story.
I’m still working on that.
Every once in awhile there are traces when I come back and read something I have put aside for weeks or even months. If I don’t recognize myself too easily in the words, I see a glimmer of a story standing on its own legs. Once I find one that stands from opening word to ‘the end’ I’ll send it in post haste.
So even as I sit here stewing over how difficult it will be to turn what I have written into a passable tale, there is the other part of me that gets excited every time I open the file and start to reread, knowing that with a little more work, it might one day be something good.
I love reading your writing.