Making shit up

It sounds weird when you say it like this, but when you're a writer, you have to have the unique ability to make shit up. I mean, in a way that's kind of a given. For the most part, in writing a story you're trying to create something from nothing, and you're just taking these words from the aether and putting them together until they mean something. But I think the thing that people don't realize or think about a lot of the time, even when they've been writing for a while, is that you don't always know what's coming next. Sometimes you only know what's coming after the next scene, or what's coming further on down the line, but where you are right now, how you're getting to that part that you do know, you really have no idea what's going on.

And some people can skip around to the parts of the story they do know, and they can keep it straight what happens when and where and how, and that's awesome. But sooner or alter they have to come back to that scene that they skipped over because they weren't quite sure how it was going to go. Sooner or later they have to face something that they aren't already intimately familiar with. And by the time they get around to some of those scenes, maybe they have figured out some of what was happening. But they probably haven't figured it out entirely. And that's when they have to just start making shit up.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you ask me, it's both the most exciting and scariest part of telling a story. When you don't know exactly what's going to happen, and so you're figuring it out as you go. You just start throwing words at the screen hoping they make sense, and sometimes when you look back on them they really don't. They make absolutely no sense. And then sometimes you look back and you're utterly amazed because there's no way that you wrote that, and there's definitely no way that when you were in such a bad spot. It's utterly incredible what you just read.

Nanowrimo is made for these kinds of moments, and reading about other people experiencing them is kind of this big thrill for me when November rolls around. Just a few days ago, I read this great line from a budding author who said that "a few minutes ago, my main character and I both realized that he had been dead for five minutes." And that sounds so utterly bizarre, but it's absolutely a thing that happens to writers all the time, and it's the kind of feeling I strive to experience when writing - especially during Nano. That feeling of "Did that really just happen? Did I really come up with that?"

I love making shit up. It's literally what I live for. And man, I have been doing it for four days now, and I could not feel better about it.