fifi’s graffiti and graveyards

Guess I need to remove the “NaNoWriMo participant” badge from my site. I’m happy I did a week or so of daily writing; it was a revelation that I could type so many sentences in such a few sittings. After a week of writing what was supposed to be a novel I came to the realization, not surprisingly, that I don’t care that much for fiction. Oh, I enjoy a good noir detective story, and there have been occasional recent works of fiction like “The Secret Life of Bees” that I’ve enjoyed, but I just don’t read novels much. I prefer the stranger-than-fiction tales of true life.

As I typed my “novel” I realized I was digitizing scenes from my own life. It was cathartic to get the words out, but I didn’t think I wanted people to read them. I began to combine characteristics of several people I’d known into a single fictional character, but I couldn’t help but think I’d be sued for libel, that the characters were so obviously this real person that they would immediately recognize themselves and say “what the hell??” And finally, I realized I was twisting the facts of my life into scenes that I had once wished for, but which had never happened. I was trying to change an “unhappy” ending into “happily ever after”, and found this distressed me a good deal. If I can’t accept that my past is over, I’m not accepting who I am today. I didn’t like that.

The best thing to come out of Nano is a non-fiction project that I’m working on. Upon re-reading some of the peptalks fromt the Nano folks I find the same doubts that cloud the novelist’s eyes also cloud that of the journalist. Hard work ahead, but I think this is the track I should be on. I hope to get this blog back where it was once upon a time; a daily practice to help shift my thoughts from idle into first gear.