In my little online world, there are several people who are writing books. I blame a lot of this on NaNoWriMo, where people attempt to write a book (or maybe just so many words) within a month. Seeing as how I am a 20something millenial, most of the online friends I have also fall into this camp and have attempted NaNoWriMo.
The premise sounds crazy to me. Almost like a goal immediately doomed to fail from the beginning.
And from what I understand, many do.
That's okay. I think the point of NaNoWriMo is to kickstart something, not necessarily complete it (even though people do, and those people are awesome). Anyone who has even attempted NaNoWriMo is awesome, and certainly a better writer than me because they are trying and actually writing.
I used to love to write.
In elementary school I made up stories all the time- I've found them decades later and been embarrased of the simplistic style and short-sighted views. But still, I was writing. I even wrote poetry when I was in junior high school. Terrible stuff, but I did it.
I had words that had to come out.
In college I turned to blogging. But that has mostly been me-centric. It's about the events that are going on in my life, or the pop culture I'm taking in. Sometimes it has stretched out to be about current events, but overall...it's not stories.
It's still a release. It's still something that, no matter how hard I have to push myself to get started, I breath a sigh of relief and think "Man, I feel so much better" after I do.
There are still words that need to come out.
I think somewhere along the line, I became scared to put myself out there. Not necessarily because someone might think I am a bad writer- that's certainly going to happen.
But because I would fail. Writing seems hard. Writing seems gut-wrenching. And I have a marriage and a family and IRL friends who already think I'm crazy for reading books, much less wanting to write one.
And writing during college? If it wasn't a term paper, I wouldn't have had time.
In a lot of ways, I feel like this is something that I should be attempting.
I have a lot of the same characteristics as most writers I've heard from- read a lot, wrote as a child, blogger (which is a type of writing, if not the same as writing a novel). The idea sounds like something I would do.
Lately I've almost wanted to attempt it.
But I don't think I would be serious enough to be worth it. It would take my time away from blogging, and probably from my marriage, and now my baby.
The saddest realization, though, is the knowledge that at some point, I became scared of my imagination.
I couldn't write my life story. That would be entirely too vulnerable.
So if I wrote, it would be something that probably had the same starting point as my life but went in a completely different direction. Something so made up that it couldn't be me- but people usually think it is.
I wouldn't want to have to defend things, or not explore an idea fully because of what so-and-so might think.
At the end of the day, that's why I'm not a writer. Too scared. Too complacent in putting my effort into other things.
Do you ever look at something and go, why not me?
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