I must admit this is a strange feeling. As a blogger and then a social media person, I have always been in the habit of writing to publish. Whenever I type a thought out (like I am doing right now), I do it with the awareness that this is going up before the hour is up.
Now, as I work on the first, second, and third drafts of various long form fiction projects, I am writing thousands of words that no one is going to read, perhaps ever. Maybe some of what I am writing right now will be published, but much of it won’t, and I am feeling weird knowing this.
The last time I wrote without hopes of being published was when there was no publishing mechanism at hand – in the pre-internet days. I was writing sitting by the window, and I was writing for my own happiness. To get back into a habit that you gave up before the internet came around, is a decidedly strange feeling.
Last month, I participated in the Clarion West Write-a-thon and wrote 14,000 words in 14 days. Actually I wrote 19,000 words, if I include the last two months. It was a fun experience, and ended up reinforcing my commitment to my present path. The last time I sat down and binge-wrote was in 2017. I hit 40,000 words in 3 months. I realise that if I am to do justice to my projects, I can’t afford to go five years between writing sprints. I will have to do this more regularly.
The word counts themselves are not the real thing, the commitment they bring is. If I just wrote daily blog posts, I would easily hit word counts larger than this on a regular basis. But the point is that these are large-scale fiction projects – novels, novellas, entire worlds. They have been living inside me for ages and I have been negligent in bringing them to life. That is exactly what I cannot do anymore.
While I do want to make sure that these stories find their way into your hands some day, that is not why I am writing them presently. I am writing because I must. If I don’t, these worlds will grow inside me like tumours and kill me. I am writing them into existence because I feel I will die if I don’t.
It’s a matter of survival.
