Baraka_Guru

I've been perusing your pieces, comrade, and you should be pleased. Although you fell quite short of "winning" the official NaNoWriMo, you did well to reinvent what the experience means to you. I think that's fantastic.

Whether this becomes a core for something you can expand on later, after it has fermented, or if you take away from the experience an insight in the writing process, it would seem to me that you had a good month.

I myself can say the latter. I learned a lot about the process of writing—the psychological and the physiological. I fell just shy of 17,000 words at the midpoint of the month before I hit a wall, which I think happened because I was writing without an outline. Without an outline, a plot-based story gets unwieldy and fast. I felt I wasn't making the story go anywhere productive, that I was wandering, and so I came to a halt.

I originally went on with the intention to work on outlining, but I seem to have lost interest in the story, at least for now. I'm not sure I want to continue it. I'm not sure this is the kind of writing I enjoy. But I do enjoy writing, but I need to find out how to make the process more naturalized—that is, inclined more towards my strongest and most heartfelt curiosities—and not so forced. It felt like I was pretending, like I was writing into a genre or towards an audience rather than for the sake of writing fiction itself. I'd like to think writing should be about what you want to create rather than what you think you should create.

That's what I've learned, and so now I'm reevaluating my approach to writing. I've been doing some soul searching. I've been thinking about weather I want to continue with fantasy and explore the genre more from a readerly and theoretical perspective to get a firmer grasp on it. I've been looking underneath the hood with regard to Tolkien's writings on fantasy (Faerie-stories) and the idea of myth-making. I'm not sure this is where I want to go. I do know want to avoid the trap of cliche and genre fodder, and so I want to steer clear of conventional fantasy, namely, epic and heroic fantasy trilogies and the like. I'm not even sure I want to write genre fiction at all, as I'm not sure I even fully enjoy it as a reader.

I'm learning a lot about my aesthetic sensitivities, and this, I think, is what it comes down to. My approach to writing fiction is more artistic than it is something that is merely fun. I don't want to write fiction that is merely entertaining; I want it to have some artistic merit as well. I'm not saying that fantasy or other genre writing is devoid of art; I'm saying that I must determine what form my approach to fiction will take. I'm doubtful it will be as fantasy or other mainstream genre writing. Magic realism, perhaps? I don't know.

Like I said, I have soul searching to do. I think this month essentially opened up a can of worms, which I think is a good thing. I've been sitting on the fence and waffling for a long time now. Jumping into something, even if I consider the output a "failure," was in itself a success, and I consider myself a victor of sorts, as I have vanquished (at least this once) one of the greatest enemies of the arts: fear.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot