Day 11 of NaNoWriMo, and for the first time this month, I'm on track. This involved two marathon writing sessions over the last few days, and (predictably) towards the end of these exhausting stints, my writing was more confident, accessible, and more promising.
Each November around the mid-way point of this challenge my brain likes to say, 'See, this is what it's like to actually be a writer, words showing up.' And I despair at the previous eleven months of myself where I ran away and hid from the page. November is about waking up, reigniting, recognising that this is what it takes.
I started this blog to track my process, to see what I would try and fail at, what would work and wouldn't work within the myriad of approaches I've been taught and told about by others. Turns out my process is erratic, and boy is it drawn out. My process is getting wildly excited about a method one day, only to yawn at it the next. It's furious periods of writing followed by rolling haystacks.
Yesterday, deep in the fug of the world I'm creating I realised something else - that something I often consider a flaw in myself contributes wonderfully to my writing. That is my tendency to look ahead in a very detailed anxious way in day to day life. I tell myself often negative and extreme stories and struggle to pull myself back from the fiction. Such as:
Tomorrow I have to confront Jane on this problem. I bet Jane will take it badly. I bet Jane will blame me. And then John will overhear and get involved. I hate when John gets involved, that's just like him. God, I'm annoyed at John and Jane.
And then I genuinely have to spend some time unpicking that, reminding myself that it hasn't actually happened, and there's no one to be mad at.
Maybe everyone does this.
Anyway, it's funny that this trait is so present when I'm writing. I'm in my head with the characters and the room like a stage director, thinking, what if the worst thing then happened, what if he doesn't forgive his brother, what would that feel like, or what if the brother was angry? In other words, I'm able to forward plan, or imagine many outcomes and follow the emotion of them.
So, a pain in real life, a triumph for my fiction.
What else am I doing in this NaNo bubble? Reading, a lot. Mostly thrillers about missing girls, only truly relaxing into the books once I've established that they're not too similar to mine. I'm trying to learn, pick holes, find ideas. I'm also reading 'We need to talk about grief,' by Annie Broadbent. My novel requires that I go dark, so I'm going. I just have to remember to come up for air every now and again, my eyes full of water, and step away. I found grim subjects easier to sit with then I was younger, but they get to me more these days and I have to accept that.
Otherwise, you know, you might end up going a bit odd and bursting into tears at your writing retreat after reading the line, 'She liked fruit tea.'
Happy NaNo'ing!
