NaNoWriMo or Finding Your Process

For too long I've tried to write like my favorite writers.  Wendell Berry in the woods with pencil and paper.  Hemingway in the early morning hours and with a typewriter.  I've always written my first draft in pen and paper, and maybe that's why there have never been any second drafts.  It is an astoundingly tedious process to read my handwriting while transcribing the words to a digital copy.  I started a story about a patient and their family from the ICU in pen, then typed what I had written and then printed it without saving.  Now I am retyping the story and saving it.  The idea being I would get three shots at the first draft by necessity.  Revision built in.

I thought that might be my process for a while.  But goddamn was that hard. 

So, I jumped on the National Novel Writing Month bandwagon.  And I have really enjoyed the process.  Typing the first draft is much easier and much less time consuming, though decidedly not as cool.  And the attractive website to update word counts is an encouragement.  And a solid, but doable goal of 1600 words a day to work towards makes me feel like I've accomplished something every day.

Here I am at seven days of writing.  Every day I have put at least 1600 words, from my head, into the world.  I'm not enthralled with the output (yet), but the process has been good.  And I think that's the goal of NaNoWriMo (god I hate that); to just write.  It's demonstrated to me that I do in fact have the chops to sit and just write. 

And that's a good feeling.

Again, With Feeling This Time

This blog was started while I was on a mission trip in Burkina Faso, in West Africa the summer following my freshman year of college.  I started it with the intent of updating family while I was abroad.  Based on my family's first questions when I stepped off the airplane in Indianapolis all those years ago, the blog was a miserable failure; early in that summer I had cut my foot on a shard of glass.  My foot had healed and I had forgotten all about it until my youngest sister asked, fearing the worst, how my foot was.  Out of Africa

Following my return form Africa there were years of silence as I continued ignoring its presence.  Come my senior of college I had discovered a new desire for literary expression.  Four years at a christian university, and interactions with people from many different backgrounds had finally educated the religion right out of me.  The steady, slow, but not insidious dissolution of what had become my substance found voice, for a time on this blog.  God Is Love, There Is No God and We Are His Prophets

After college I had a sojourn in France teaching English.  That time was spent steeping in my, then, new understanding of life.  I wrote a few times while there, but experiences were my bread and butter and there was little time for reflection. Public Transit

Following France I returned to my home town.  I lived with my grandmother and tended bar.  I had traveled back there to be with her.  Attempts at freelance translation and efforts to gain employ as an interpreter were frustrated.  Had I kept on that tack I might have eventually arrived; but as is evident from this blog, I don't have a lot of patience for the long game.  While home I felt lost, and confused.  I met the director of the local college's nursing school.  She said I had 'good bedside manor', and 'would you like to be a nurse'? 

Then I started nursing school.  I wrote a few articles based on what I was learning and took a strangely deep dive into various iterations of the Shakespeare play 'Much Ado About Nothing'.  Driven, Oh, That I Had Been Write Down an Ass

That last post was nearly five years ago. 

In the interim I have found, and lost, love twice.  I moved to Denver, Colorado and missed my grandmother's funeral.  I have moved from the Emergency Department where I was mean, hateful, stressed, and convinced that everyone will screw you if you let them and I am now in the ICU where I am less stressed, mean, and hateful, and have learned that people just have bad days sometimes.  And some will still say 'fuck you' in the same breath that they are asking for a turkey sandwich.  I have taken up rock climbing, sailing, and the #vanlife. 

 I still possess a desire for literary expression.  And I have a significantly more vast lived experience than before.  Maybe this time it'll take? Check back in to see for yourself.