Dear friend—
Once upon a time, I was a fiction writer. From the age of 9, I was writing stories.
In high school, I learned about National Novel Writing Month. Every November, writers cheer each other on as they each aim to write 50,000 words in 30 days (1,667 words a day). That’s the original NaNoWriMo challenge, but plenty of writers use the energy to make their own goals. A poem a day; 500 words a day, etc.
I have thrown my hat in the ring a few times, and once I even hit the 50k mark (whatever it was, I have forgotten it, and it has been lost to old laptop hard drives as it deserves.)
In college, I became less interested in writing book-length works. I did a lot of poetry. I majored in fiction, and fiction academia lusts after the short story (fuck a book, am I right?). Some of the stuff I was most proud of in college were actually reporting pieces, after I figured out that nonfiction (reporting, copywriting, research) is more lucrative (ha! relatively) than anything else.
By graduation, I hadn’t written a poem in months and I was short-storied out after writing several for my major. It was #PandemicSeason, and I was journalling a lot. I was writing small, ruminative things that slowly became blog posts, which became these silly little missives I now send to you all.
But after all that, it seems I am now suddenly surrounded by people doing NaNoWriMo challenges this year.
The problem I have with fiction, especially longer pieces, is that it takes a lot of work, more than any other genre. For instance, the structure and flow of a plot doesn’t come naturally to me. Half the time, moving from scene to scene feels like pushing one out while constipated.
Despite the challenges, NaNoWriMo has inspired me to double down on fiction.
Adjacent to this realization, I started chasing a story idea I had a few weeks ago. However, as usual, it’s turning into an exegesis on the same three life experiences that I think about all the time.
I’m resisting the urge to fill the corners of this story with details from my own life. When I catch myself writing something familiar, I’ve started trying to flip it into something unfamiliar, something I actually have to imagine and explore.
For other writers, auto-fiction, or even just intentionally embedding bits of themselves into their stories, is cathartic. Or it’s a way to share something beautiful or life-giving for them. For me, I am usually just navel-gazing.
I’ve said that I am introspective to the point of narcissism. I don’t need any more encouragement to re-live the same stories, again and again. Also, I worry that this kind of introspective writing spills into other parts of my life, because I am so focused on what I think and cultivating my own writing voice (as opposed to, say, the voice of the characters or narrators I create).
It is easy for me to pull my own thoughts, memories, feelings out of my chest. Harder to imagine something else. So this month, my NaNoWriMo challenge is, for the next 30 days, to simply stop writing about myself.
I don’t know what I’ll be doing with this newsletter in the mean time. I’ve considered sending old stories (they wouldn’t be fresh, because I cannot yet imagine Exposing myself by yeeting a half-baked story I yanked from my brain oven just 13 hours before), or maybe book reviews? Not sure yet. I shall see where the wind takes me come Thursday.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I will be spitting on the first person and kicking it to the curb. Mia? I hardly know her.
Thanks for reading, catch you soon <3