On Writing to Order

[scribblemyname]

So I was a little surprised to discover... myself in this 365 Challenge. My writing self anyway.

Somewhere back in time, I realized I was a post-fandom writer, that there would always be a fangirl lurking in my heart. I suppose it's because I love words, love literature, love taking it in and absorbing it and resonating with it and letting my response flow back into my own creative expression. I weave favorite poems into my prose. I reference material others have written. I write fanfic from the same impulse.

But I hadn't truly suspected that fandom was key to my writing process. Some writers work in a vacuum, solely to please themselves. I wrote within the community, inhaling feedback and prodding and an outside audience wanting more to motivate myself to produce and answer questions and clarify, and that's why I wrote more than 200,000 words the year I got back into fandom. That didn't happen with original fiction.

I thought it was the structure that I needed to replicate and so I started—and temporarily abandoned—two serial novels. Initially there was enough feedback to keep me pushing, but as it lessened to lurking, so did my motivation. Weird, but true. I finally realized 20 days into the 365 Challenge that it wasn't the structure that drove my writing at all. It was the community.

Knowing someone is waiting on my fiction motivates me to produce it. That's why I can write a story in whatever amount of time required to have it done for the family on Christmas. That's why I'm motivated and inspired and have almost a dozen pieces percolating in my head and item 20 out of 365 posted on my Challenge page. It's why I'm writing every day and disciplining myself and growing and still being creative. I'm not just pushing words through my teeth. They're flowing out of me.

Suddenly, it doesn't matter what I read 'cause there's a story somewhere in the mess that feeds it. Suddenly, comments and prompts anchor my ideas until I have time to scribble them down. Suddenly, I've written more than 14,000 words of fiction and 180 lines of poetry in the last twenty days. That's amazing for me. And the momentum is only building.

The creative life takes me off guard sometimes. I always thought I loved writing simply for the sake of writing, but that's apparently not true. I love stories for their own sake and writing for the sake of sharing them.

Has your writing process surprised you lately? Are you a lone writer or community inspired or both?

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.