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NaNoWriMo as a purge; metawriting

Day 8 of NaNoWriMo, and I’m just barely on schedule. I have many days of writing planned out, and I’m looking forward to the upcoming fixed points in the plot that I already think I know will happen. But I can’t be sure – I thought I knew what I would write yesterday, and then another character emerged and monopolized the narrative.

This is the third year seriously trying to do it. My first year I completed the requisite 50,000 words – but it was awful. I’m not being humble – it was genuinely awful, but it had a quality in its own way, because it served to purge the awful words that were inside me. Cliches, tropes, and otherwise predictable subsets of words.

You want to flush the dirt and awfulness from any channel before you can engage in a deep clean.

Last year NaNoWriMo was interrupted by a flailing of work, I had come to Boston for some time and there was a big push towards that deadline. I bootstrapped the story, and then would sit to pen it every now and then, when I felt the mood. It wasn’t often – I got in about 18 days of writing over the course of the past year, from November 1st, 2011 until October 31st, 2012. The first year when I started writing, the characters and the scenes would write themselves as I went about my day. I would fall asleep dreaming their dreams, I would wake up and know how my characters awoke. Their lives interwove with mine, and when I sat to write, it felt like I was doing little creating, and more simply transcribing that which had already happened. Taking it down like a scribe, a journalist, a historian. It didn’t feel like there was any originality of my own composition, just in the style with which I recorded the composition.

This year, that feeling is back. Characters are expressing their own agency that isn’t revealed to me until I type out the letters. The locales that serve as the stage are alive whether or not I am thinking of them. They run of their own accord with or without me, and when they are in my thoughts, it is as naught more than a clockwork that unfolds to reveal itself to me. I’m allowed to peep into their world and write down what I see. That feeling of peeping into an alternate world transcends deja vu; it’s endemic to my daily quotidian life.

A Good Day

Some days are like today, when I toss and turn all night, I barely wake up on time, the internet in the cafe works but is just noticeably slow, the development environment decides to be uncooperative, it’s just slightly warmer than could be comfortable, MySQL decides that it should be fussy, and anything that can go wrong – slightly wrong – does.

But then I remember that days like today are actually good days. They keep me honest. They help me appreciate small victories. I realize that every other day is actually a great day. Days like today remind me that it’s good to be working with good people on good things.

End the day with good company and any day ends well – even today.