NaNoWriMo Day #5

Words Today:   2201

Total Words: 10,237. I have passed the 10,000 word mark and for that I am grateful and excited. 

I am unsure why I chose to write about closets today. It was a personal piece, certainly more memoir than essay, possibly more fictionalized than reality. I burrowed into some pretty sparse and deeply buried childhood memories. I don’t have many memories of growing up, or even through college. I have some theories as to why, but I am reluctant to speculate at this point.

I haven’t written much of my life story before age 25 or so mostly because I don’t have a strong sense of my own history. I find it weird and unsettling. There are few pictures of me or my family, we just weren’t photographers. Stories I’ve been told about myself are filtered, obviously, through other lenses. I don’t trust these versions.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve wanted desperately to write a novel, and I believe that mining one’s own past for starting points, for descriptions, for characters is a great beginning. You can see my problem here.  Most of my writing now that I’ve taken it up as a career has been about my adult life and/or things that matter to me as an adult.

I read a lot of writing prompts the last few days, and there was one that eventually led me to describe closets (it wasn’t a direct prompt, but I’ve learned to use prompts however the hell I want to. I’m not in 6th grade anymore, I can improvise.) It was a weird feeling, writing what felt like a gauzy, dreamy version of my own past, yanking things out of my subconscious. Meaningless things, images, nothings, moments that I can’t contextualize.

As a writer, pretty cool and really sloppy. As a human? Weird. And very sloppy. This is something close to what I’d hoped for when I committed to this writing. Close, but not quite what I expected.

I think this will be, perhaps, the a cornerstone, a starting brick in a short fictional piece. It’s exciting. I feel like I’ve been allowed to peek into a room everyone else has been partying in for awhile.

Also, and I shouldn’t even have to say this at this point — two kids home sick again today. Le sigh.