IWSG August 2020

I haven’t been a very good member of the Insecure Writers Support Group (which blogs the first Wednesday of every month except the thirteenth one, in which case obviously it does so on the thirteenth day), but as I’m planning on entering the latest anthology contest (with about a month left to write something) at the suggestion of Smilin’ Alex Cavanaugh, I figured I ought to dust off the ol’ “support” part of the IWSG and participate again.

(Here I remind readers that I’ve been unable to leave comments on blogs since the pandemic started. I don’t know why my phone doesn’t want to let me, and even when I checked in with my notebook recently I couldn’t. Don’t know what that’s all about.)

Anyway, the group likes to lead discussion with a question, and this month’s is:

Have you ever written something that became a form (a poem, short story, novel) or genre that you hadn’t intended on? Or do you choose that in advance (and stick to it)?

The second novel I tackled writing turned out very differently than I expected. The first one, written under the auspices of NaNoWriMo, was something I had switched to on the day I started writing it. The idea of NaNoWriMo is that all the work, and all 50,000 words of it, is done in November (that’s the “mo” or “month” at the end the funny title). I think some people plot out in advance but still do the writing itself during the month. In 2004 I tackled NaNo for the first time, and for the next two years continued the story (each with a new timeframe and other considerations, but technically I cheated the second two times by having something preexisting). On November 1 I thought I was going to be writing one thing, but switched to a different idea just as I sat down to write (or earlier in the day; I can remember some thoughts as they were occurring that month, but not all of them!).

When I sat down to tackle the second book, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to write...but I had done next to none outlining. It was very vague. So as I began writing, my necessary improvisations changed the book substantially. It was no longer anything like what I had imagined. I mean, there were the elements, but the end result...basically helped me learn what it might look like for me to write a wholly original story of my own. To that point the bulk of my fictional output was Star Trek fan fiction (but even that was always fairly recognizably unusual), and then of course what I produced over the course of those three NaNos, but even then I had been borrowing from a familiar playbook.

The results, to my mind, were very interesting. Other people did not necessarily agree. But the experience has continued to inform my literary career. What can I say? It’s important to know what’s important to you as a writer. If you only write what anyone could write, it’s not really critical for you to have written it, unless you’re a writer who’s okay with that, and many are, but I am not. So this was a crucial learning experience for me, and directly informed the novel I wrote next, which was considerably more focused for it.

And then I had a better idea how to do this sort of thing. And am gearing up to do it all over again.