Stories

Well, ladies and gentlemen: I'm near finished. I haven't written nearly so much this month as previous attempts at NaNo, but I'm glad to have gotten as far as I did, and I think that writing this story has taught me a lot of things about character driven story writing that I hadn't considered before. What's actually strange is that as I'm writing this story about knacks and magicks, I find myself mentally balancing the characters as if they were heroes in an online game. "Hmmm, that chararacter is tad overpowered. I'll have to balance that out with some great weakness" as though each character pulled from a limited pool of resource points, and tallied these into their character.
And this is an odd nanowrimo in another way in that I won't finish the story. Every other attempt at the novel writing event concluded with a finished product. The first year, it was a fairy-tale mythos that was the lousiest thing I've ever written ever. The second year, I attempted a Lloyd Alexander-esque piece, and met with some limited success. This is my favorite thus far, for obvious reasons: the first sucked, the third was a split piece that ended up being a bit of a mess (sorry Matthew), and this one is unfinished, and doesn't count yet. The third year, I co-wrote a mystery-dystopian with Matthew, and... well... I like the plot!
It needs a lot of work. They all do.
But it's interesting to look back over each year's renditions and compare the stories with my life experiences at those times, looking at my journal entries and such. It's interesting what you write based on what you've read, what you experience, and how you feel at different stages of existence. It explains a lot, seeing some of the characters that have written novels over the centuries: Poe, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Donne, Keats, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and so on. Authors, and artists in general, are often peculiar personality. Perhaps we all are, and we merely shift the lens of scrutiny upon these individuals like historian peepers scouring the tabloid wikipedia for tidbits of juicy non sequitur from these artist's lives.
Writing is an adventure. I find out more about myself each time. It's a foray into wisdom, if you'll allow your external inspection become introspection. And motif, metaphor, themes, and beliefs all surf the rocky waves of the ocean we brave to create, whether we skim the tips of the salty surf in schooners, or flounder like a hound treading water. This is how I examine my life