30. Write Your Life

30. Write Your Life

Or, An Open Letter To The People Who Kept Me Going.

Today, Wednesday 30^th November, I finished my NaNoWriMo cycle of stories.

Thank God. Now I might be able to get my academic life / my sleeping pattern back on track. Maybe. But it's not likely.

It's been an interesting journey, and I hope you all got something out of it. I know I did, between long Skype conversations and endless MSN chats and the millions of TV episodes that kept me awake.

I now know that I can discipline myself to write – well, unless I'm in Brussels, which happened in the last couple of years as well – and do it, if not well, at least decently.

I've learnt that it's damn difficult to try and find a different style to write in every day, especially if you're hanging onto your wordcount by the skin of your teeth and are writing story seventeen on day twenty. Which ends up being about seven thousand words longer than you expected it to.

ENTER THE EMOTICON! O_o

I'm sort of strangely proud of myself. I managed it. I wrote more than 87 pages in OpenOffice, more than fifty thousand words! I wrote a story for every day of the month. Maybe next year I'll try for an actual coherent novel.

Though probably not.

Would people be interested in more short stories next year? Leave a comment!

Feedback is amazing.

I have, once again, realised how fantastic feedback is. I live for it, I crave it, I log into my blog every day to check if anyone has left a comment.

If you like a story, please do comment. I read them all.

I didn't think I would be able to actually do this whole story-a-day thing because I have dropped out of NaNo in previous years. I think it was the fact that they were individual short stories that kept me going – I'm much better at short and sweet than at long, cohesive, consistent and continuous.

But the thing that really got me through all thirty stories?

You. The person reading.

Knowing that someone was looking forward to the next story is the thing that kicked my arse on the days when I was behind with my writing. And the feedback only helped.

So thank you, to all of you. But especially you, reading this right now.

What's interesting, though, is that I did exactly what this prompt is telling me to.

I wrote my life.

If you look at each character hard enough, inside them somewhere is someone I know (Spec and Sam are clearly Simon and myself when they interact).

There are daughters and sisters, friends, interpreters and Harry Potter. That's what I know.

There are dark moments that came out of nowhere and there are funny moments that had to be thought through for a lot longer than they should have been, but that is what writing is about.

Getting everything off your chest.

The best works are the ones that involve some sort of real element in them.

And I don't mean fantasy novels are bad – look at me, I mean, really – I just mean that in every good book the author has incorporated real aspects of human life. A nervous habit. A particular sentence. A way of speaking. And I tried to include that into my stories.

I tried to make my characters human, despite the fictional aura that surrounds them.

Watch me write, I use big words that mean nothing but look pretty.

Sorry, I'm just a little tired.

NaNoWriMo is over for this year, and that makes me slightly sad, despite the happiness inherent in winning and writing (oh.my.god.fiftyK.wow!).

Some of the stories were fanfiction, most of those were planned that way, and the reason for that is that not having to invent your own characters makes writing invariably so much easier, because they're characters you know really well (even if I seem to have a tendency towards drunk Weasleys). Most of the time, that is – I don't recommend writing characters that are slightly difficult (Sherlock) in a fandom you're not used to (Sherlock, BBC) doing things that you haven't written about before (solving crimes/porn – just sayin'). I'm just glad it worked!

The prompts were a mix of words thrown together and sentences, some of those inspired by people, some of them spoken by friends and written down, some of them made up when compiling the list.

From one to thirty, I am now done.

Every prompt invoked a particular image to mind, and every image was examined before being thrown aside to reveal something else, something that, hopefully, people weren't expecting from the title.

Now I'm just rambling.

I hope you enjoyed my NaNoWriMo as much as I did. I'll post more stories over Christmas – if you're not on Facebook and want to be kept updated, leave a comment and I will make sure you're kept informed.

Have a good one!

Love,

Ale*