Ghosts

Day Two of NaNoWriMo, and I feel lucky to have found time to meet up with my girl GEW today to write. Seeing her is inspiring, because she's cranking right along despite so many other demands on her time, and it's also clarifying, because I can see how much farther along she is in terms of conceptualizing her project.

Unlike her, I am all over the place. I've written about 3500 words, but they're only tangentially related to each other. There might even be three different projects tangled up in there.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I ended up tonight, after wandering through a couple of digressive scenes, focusing on stories from my own life that have been rattling around in my brain (and, let's be honest, my heart) for years now. Probably haunting more than rattling: "One need not be a chamber to be haunted," and all. The words themselves came easily, just like the memories that informed them, although, as I was writing, I felt 20 years old again both in spirit and in skill level. It was as if I'd used Scrivener as a time machine to transport myself back into that era again. Maybe this little trick will help me write dialogue eventually, but it definitely isn't helping me write great prose right now.

So, I must admit to myself now, if not to others in my circle, that it appears that my chamber is, indeed, still haunted by ghosts from my past. This is probably part of the reason I've avoided "creative writing" and turned toward the safety of academic writing since my college years. I've read before that you have to get rid of your own stories before writing anything truly imaginative. Yup. These old, not-even-that-interesting stories are bleeding out of the edges of the little worlds I've been trying to build with words. I'll see if I can wrastle 'em. If not, it looks like, for me, NaNoWriMo might become an exercise in exorcism.