A different type of writing

When I was much younger I thought that my future was a lot closer than it was. I feel like this happens to a lot of children; they have a plan of what they want to do (my little cousin wanted to be a "cooker in the morning and a mommy in the day" for a long time) and then get to about our age and look back and can laugh about their career choices from when they were four or five. For me, that occupation was being a fiction writer. I was constantly coming up with little stories and trying to write them down with my terrible little-kid handwriting (which, truth be told, hasn't gotten much better since) and read them to my family. My mother would often chuckle and tell me I did a good job and my father would give me constructive criticism. Most of us probably know how well constructive criticism goes over with small children. He would say that I needed to have "less dialogue" and tell more about what the characters were doing. I would try and fail. I got to a mixture of angry and disappointed and decided I didn't want to be a writer anymore.

I still kept thinking of little stories though. Little by little I started coming out of my shell and would start writing again. In fifth grade I went to a competition with a story I had written and illustrated (a very big deal for me at the time) with a story about a family who lived inside a volcano. I ended up going and winning second place for the age group, I don't quite remember what it was. This should have influenced me to keep writing stories, but honestly it didn't. I put the whole writing thing aside while music started becoming the main focus in my life.

Last year, I first heard about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which, if you don't know, is a challenge that has you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I read about it in mid-October and decided I would give it a shot. The first day came along and I began writing. My initial idea was to have a group of students sitting in a class that were all going through a rough time at home, school, with friends, etc. and, in the end, they all were coming to the same moment of "zen," or clarity, and all thinking, even maybe for just a second, that everything would turn out in their favor later on, it's purpose to show how the human mind can subconsciously work. I started work on the first of November, completing about 2,500 words just that day. The next three or four days were progressively less productive and by about a week in I had given up. I still wanted to continue thinking about this idea which I felt was a different kind of writing than a strange family who lived in a volcano, escaping an eruption just in the nick of time.

November starts pretty soon. I'm already signed up for NaNoWriMo and I already have this idea which has been fermenting in my brain for a year. My goal this time around is to get to at least 30,000 words before I think about quitting. I'm feeling a lot more comfortable with writing fiction and I'm glad that I have at least the will power to try and finish this year.