Next week I am going back to Freewrite Friday. I’m still in my 100 days of writing about story and writing, but providing examples falls under the purview of this effort. Today I wanted to reflect on why I am doing the 100 day challenge. First of all it isn’t a challenge. I think the entire construct of these social media challenges is silly. Sure, there is good in some of them, but the good gets lost in the volume of bad. But I digress. I decided to spend over a quarter of a year writing about writing to dig deep and think about and understand what I have to say about the art. I read books on writing for years. I took notes. I followed advice. I photocopied pages into a binder so I’d have the ultimate mashup volume of writing on writing. Little of it made me better. While some of what I read sparked ideas and approaches to what I wrote, most of what I read made me second guess my writing. That is dangerous. The inability to freely construct a first draft is the death knell for writers. If you cannot write a first draft that feels like you and feels like the story you want to tell, then you’re sunk. For a while all I could do was construct stories that followed the tightly scripted rules of writing as if I were writing a Shonen manga. It went poorly because I was too busy trying to do it right.
So, why am I here telling you how to do it right? Stephen King.
No, seriously. King made me do it. He didn’t speak to me in real life or come to me in a vision. He wrote a book on writing that is the best thing I’ve read on the subject and it made me think that the best way to impart knowledge is to tell the story of where you went wrong–what worked and what didn’t and how that made you the person you are today. Each writer has that story and I think when you put those all together you see that we all know different things about how to get a writer to where they need to be. I wanted to find out what my thing was–what I have to offer you, dear reader. I am still figuring it out. I am still figuring writing out. My first major market novel only came out a year ago. I’ve got a lot to learn and I think telling that story helps me and helps you along the way. So, 100 days.
I’ll need to do a hard rewind to figure out what day we are on.