And What I’m Going to Do With It
This August, I accidentally wrote a novel in three weeks.
It was a bit annoying, actually; I had plenty of books I should be reading but instead I found myself reaching for a computer. What I thought was going to be a simple short story, 10 to 15,000 words at most, ended up taking on a life of its own. Each character was much deeper and more complex than I thought they had been. It was a rewarding experience, and it reminded me that sometimes my creative writing works out best when I acknowledge that even I don’t have all the answers when it comes to my stories and characters, and even I can sometimes be surprised.
I say ‘accidentally’ because I didn’t intend to write 100,000 words when I first came up with the story idea. Sometimes when I write a story I come in with a very clear idea of what the story will be about and how long (roughly) the story will need to be to incorporate everything. I’ve written enough by now to know what kind of story will be 4,000 words, what kind will be 10,000, what kind will be 30,000, and what kind will be much longer. But occasionally, I underestimate and the story runs away with itself, filling page after page until I don’t know where it’s leading me anymore and all I can do is follow it and see where it goes. Those are my favorite kinds of stories because they write themselves and I get to experience it the way a reader might, not knowing what is coming next, or in some cases knowing the ending but having no idea how I’ll get there.
When I’m working on a longer piece I usually write at night, when I can clear my schedule and sit on my bed and write for as long as I need to. I try to write at least a thousand words a night, but when the story is writing itself sometimes it’s all I can do to keep up. The words pile up – 8,000 a night, 10,000 a night, sometimes even 15,000 a night. Unlike some stories where I have to struggle to find an opening, or where it takes a while for the words to start flowing, stories like these flow very easily. They flow so easily that I find myself writing far later than I expected to.
Accidentally writing a novel also leaves a glaring question: what are you going to do with it? Ever since I started writing intensively when I was 11 years old and filling notebooks, my parents always asked when I was going to publish something, and they seemed to wonder why I would write anything without an eye towards publication. In our society, there’s a push to commoditize your hobbies, to approach whatever you’re doing with an attitude to make money – even when creating art. It’s not about writing what you want to write, it’s about writing what will sell.
After over a decade of writing different characters, in different genres, with different word counts (this isn’t the first time I’ve made it to 100,000), I’ve realized just how much I love the process of writing itself. Most of the time, no one else reads what I write. Occasionally I’ll show my work to friends, but for the most part, I write what I want to write. I write articles for various on-campus publications – always aware of the need to vary what I write to improve my skills – but my stories are, at their core, for me. My love for writing grew out of a desire to write what I wanted to read. Of course, I’d love to be a published author someday, but it’s not why I started writing, and it’s not why I kept at it. I worry that if I wrote solely to publish something I’d get too bogged down in perfectionism to finish the story. Or, even worse, my stories would start to seem more like a job instead of the place where I can be the most myself.
Maybe I will publish this novel someday. It needs some revisions, but it’s much easier to edit a story once you have a first draft done and know exactly where it’s going. I think it has potential. But the first thought I had once I finished it wasn’t about sending it in to publishing houses. Instead, I opened another Word document and moved on to the next story. There’s a reason I always have five or six documents open at one time.
In my opinion, you don’t need to be published to call yourself a writer. Being ‘published’ can mean lots of different things anyway. To me, what makes someone a writer more than anything else, is that they write. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, but they get some enjoyment out of being a storyteller. As the world gets increasingly commodified, it can be tempting to try and monetize every hobby you have. While there’s nothing wrong with doing what you love and getting paid for it, I have to make sure I keep my love of what I do front and center at all times, no matter what happens, whether it brings me financial success or not. Even if I never published a book at all I’d probably still be writing. And at the heart of it, that’s why I do it – out of a sheer love of characters and storytelling and creating new worlds. If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t have been able to reach 100,000 words in the first place, or be confident that I could do it again. I’d like to publish at some point, but for now, and hopefully for the rest of my life, I write because I adore it.