Hello NaNoWriMo fans. You may not know who I am, given my horrible habit of not blogging about Little Village’s NaNoWriMo experience this month (this would be my first). Here’s a salute to our other authors who’ve been carrying my weight.
That said, phew, we’ve been giving it hell, but it seems NaNoWriMo can dish out as much as it can take (I find that portraying NaNoWriMo as some sort of plotting antagonist helps me cope with our shortcomings). We’ve been struggling to keep our word count up to quota, and to add to our humiliation, there’s five of us. I’m sure we’ll be hearing plenty about this in other blog posts and elsewhere, so I’d like to talk about the bright side of this experience. That’s right, I’m keeping it positive.
Jumping into this project gave me a bit of a scare, first of all. I struggle to recall the last time I wrote fiction. In fact, I struggle to recall anything I’ve ever written that could be considered fiction, apart from a few failed endeavors when I was a child. A decade of essay writing and journalistic reporting in high school and college seemed to have taken up any time I might have otherwise devoted to creative writing. What’s alarming is that this had never even crossed my mind.
The transition from a non-fiction and relatively objective mindset to one of fiction could be described as shocking. The idea of writing dialog that wasn’t, in fact, a quotation of something a real-live person had already said was a foreign one, to say the least. It’s a concept that hasn’t crossed my mind in years. Endless lectures about objectivity, proper sourcing and style guides had, apparently, eroded that spot in my brain where creative fiction ideas resonate.
That’s not to say non-fiction writing doesn’t allow for plenty of creativity. Fiction simply allows for a completely different form of creativity to manifest, and I feel sheepish for not fully realizing this until now.
The freedom of expression allowed in fiction allowed me to think more openly along other axes, such as the axis of time. The idea that a chance meeting at a bar between two characters can consist of a three line reference or a thirty page chapter was a surprisingly liberating concept. Time is able to expand or compress at whatever rate the author chooses, a freedom I’ve never taken the opportunity to explore. Once again, I’d become far-too accustomed to a world where time is a rigid, static concept.
If these creative writing epiphanies seem rather obvious, I would agree. Consider me incredibly late to the party.
