Storyteller's Reflection

So I just finished up a great session working on my NaNoWriMo project and now I'm hopping into this blog entry. One thing I promised myself that I was not going to do was cheat and post my novel progress as a blog entry. Yes, I know that technically I could since it's writing that I'm doing, but one promise I made to myself was that I would do my very best to write consistently, on both of this tasks, and devote myself to each of them separately.

Also, because I'm writing in an extremely fast and excruciatingly loose style, the work that I have is pretty messy. So it would be a little bit embarrassing to post it without at least a cursory proof, and proofreading is the opposite of the NaNoWriMo goal. The entire point of the exercise is to learn how to write fast, loose, and messy; to not allow the inner critic, who always hampers creativity by wondering "is this any good, does this make sense?" That's not to say that self-editing is not important, just that I need to hold off on looking back on what I've done. Because if I start to worry about those things, if the anxiety is allowed to take root in my mind, it will completely kill my momentum and my ability to charge forward in my story, which is what I want at the moment.

Even though I'm not going to be posting my story, however, I would very much like to talk to you about my experiences writing for this project so far.

So, I'm on my second day with this thing (having missed a start on Sunday due to how sick I felt) and I have to say, it feels extremely good to get back to fiction. I can't help but think that some of the mental noise in my head, and a lot of the emotional crap I was feeling was some sort of manifestation in response to the fact that I'm a storyteller at heart, and, well, I hadn't written any stories in a few months.

Having poured myself into this project for the past two days, however, I can say that it doesn't just feel good... it feels right. It feels like there's a hole that's filled once again, it feels like I'm balanced again within my mind, and all of it reminds me of how much fiction writing is part of who I am. I can't replace it with anything else. Even this blog, which I'm proud of, which I look forward to most days now, is just me talking about what's on my mind. A lot of times, it feels like I'm just having a conversation with myself, a conversation that people probably don't really care that much about.

It's different when I'm writing a story. When I'm writing a story, it's not that I'm just talking and rambling on about philosophy or how I feel or what I had for lunch. When I'm writing a story, I'm creating a world.

It's an intoxicating and potent joy, and I'm very glad that I've been given this opportunity to rediscover this aspect of myself that has been dormant for the past few months.

This is just part of who I am, you know? At the end of the day, sure, I might be putting out 500+ words every day, five days a week (usually) but that's not really who I am. That's what I'm doing. It's something that I do, because I was told to do it, and because I want to do it.

The real me, though? The real me writes about gods and demons and fallen angels and dragons and space aliens and grand adventures and epic battles and insane writers and speculative immortality, and everything in between. I write about monsters and elves and blades and treasure, about heroes and villains and the monomyth, the epic destiny, the hero's story, in all of its forms.

I'm a storyteller and that's a word that I apply proudly to myself. It's not a word that describes what I do.

It's a word that describes what I am.