All throughout NaNoWriMo, I try to find some sense of a recurring theme to my weeks in the hopes of passing on some small nugget of knowledge that I've learned from the past week. As the final day of the week draws to a close and a new one fast approaches, the lesson that these last seven days has taught me is perhaps the most basic, the most obvious, but also the most profound: we are never alone.
The week opened with a very prophetic status update by a friend who I did not know was partaking in NaNoWriMo. In this update, he said that he was considering dropping out this year due to issues with his narrative: how it was coming out cliched and uninspired. At the sight of this update, I found myself leaping in immediately to ask for his reasons in dropping out. Whether he was convinced to stay in or not I do not know, though only time will indeed tell. As I thought about this, and I look back at the week, I begin to wonder if there is more to NaNoWriMo than just birthing a novel in the span of a month. For after all, if this week has taught me anything, it's that while the process of sitting down to write may seem like a lonely endeavor, it is actually quite social.
While I have been keeping my writing rather private from my family - if only because they all have their own things to worry about and are not into writing - my friends are constantly a part of my experience. Almost all of my friends are involved in some form of creative expression: from composing music to creating graphic art or drawing to writing and roleplaying, which is how I met most of this group I am fortunate to be friends with. Some of these people have been actively involved in the creation of both my novel and roleplaying game from the very beginning, and they in turn are the same people I can trust to bounce ideas off of. Ideas, as I've discovered, are like raw, unrefined ore that need to be hammered at over and over again, heated through scrutiny, cooled by time, and then reheated and beaten into shape before they become something salvageable. And sometimes that means sprinkling elements in from other ideas in order to make something stronger or more malleable. It's a long, tiring, and exhausting experience that sometimes requires the stamina and brain power of a thousand aspiring nerdy artists! But in the end, it is so worth it that it makes one want to repeat the process over and over again.
No greater example of this for me happened just a few hours ago, where a very good friend invited me out to spend the evening brainstorming for a roleplay that she wanted to make. Our session today was meant to focus solely on the races, but as we talked it poured into everything: from the classes that would be available and races that would eventually become playable to the potential storylines that would herald such events, the geography of the world and governments and cultures therein. My favorite part was the country known solely as The Ruins, as it is a land littered with the bones of a long-dead empire whose denizens had vanished hundreds of years ago under mysterious and terrifying circumstances.
The joy of writing this, and some of the things that I have been working on, has not been that they were sole endeavors. The reward was in sharing ideas and creating a world with someone who has the same passion and desire to create something unique and fun. Do not ever be afraid to share your ideas with others, to let them grow and change and become something more. You may be pleasantly surprised with the result.
No comments:
Post a Comment