Writing Away

So yesterday I challenged myself: Write Every Day. This is me doing it. ;)

I came up with a plot for a new book a month or so ago. I was really inspired by the movie, Inception. It's really amazing. My plot really has nothing to do with the plot of Inception, but more to do with using the actress Ellen Page as a muse. My main character is based on her and some of the characters she has played. I actually can see this story in my head, which makes me think that, instead of using it as my NaNoWriMo plot in November, I may stick it on the shelf until Script Frenzy in April, and turn it into a screenplay.

This, unfortunately, means that I need to come up with a new plot for NaNo. This is the hardest part of writing for me. I remember, back in high school and in my early college years, I would just write. I would sit down and put a pen to paper and write and write. I hardly ever crossed anything out, I was quite against revision for a while, and I never worried about coming up with a plot or metaphor or form for my poetry or stories. Even before then, I wrote tons of stories as a child, and I never seemed to have a problem coming up with a plot line, or characters, or anything. Then I took all these Creative Writing classes in college where you actually have to write in certain forms and read your work to the class and give and receive constructive criticism. My writing got better, but it slowed down. I no longer wrote several poems a day. I was lucky if I even wrote at all on any given day. I would want to write, but I'd sit down with paper and a pen or at my computer and look at a blank page. I felt the need to come up with some type of form, plot, metaphor, whatever before I could even begin to write the thing. I could no longer simply write.

It's still this way to this day. This is why this challenge will be so great for me. I've always considered myself a writer but when I have nothing to show for it, when I do no work for such a long time, I feel like I'm lying to myself and to the world. Now that I'm challenging myself to write every day, hopefully I will be able to return to that sense of freedom in writing. I need to realize that, as long as I'm writing every day, doing what I love to do, it doesn't matter if it's perfect. In fact, it's not going to be perfect. It's going to be horrible, lovely, confusing, amateurish, witty, repugnant, awesome and crazy. But it won't be perfect. But it will be me, and I'll feel more like me than I've felt in years.

Oh, and I started Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. So far, so good!