I’m at 17,0330 words. If I was writing the minimum, I should be at 13,336 words, assuming I haven’t written anything for November 9th yet (and since it’s just a little past midnight I think that’s an okay assumption to make). So I’m ahead. But it doesn’t much feel like it.

Yeah, I hit a wall VERY early this year, which almost made me give up. For some reason I just couldn’t get excited about my idea. The writing was stale and terrible. I know that’s what every NaNo writer says, but this is my fifth year participating and it just feels different this year. The past years I know the writing isn’t much to look at (it’s a very rough draft, after all), but what’s kept me going is the potential. It’s to see what the characters will do and say next, it’s the thrill of spinning the story off into directions I’d never imagined and seeing the cool things that could come of it. Attempting NaNo with no real story outline is so much fun because the possibilities for the story are limitless. It lets me unleash my creativity and wacky (and oftentimes terrible) ideas on something that I’m not so emotionally attached to that I’m afraid to experiment. That’s what makes NaNo fun for me, because I write all year round, working on “serious” novels. Some of them are former NaNo stories that have been through a couple rounds of editing. Those are work. But NaNo is an unfettered, no holds barred race directly into the imagination. Whatever crazy thing I think up gets into the story because I don’t have time to second guess them. And sometimes those crazy things even work.

This year, though…sigh. I went in like I usually do, with just a vague idea for a plot and some characters. I had some scenes in mind that I wanted to build the story around. In fact, the first thing I wrote was those scenes, and then I went back and started at the beginning. But despite a strong start (over 6000 words on the first day) I soon had the feeling that the story wasn’t going anywhere. It was boring, and I don’t mean just to read. It was boring to write. I had three main characters, and not a single one of them was engaging in the slightest, not even my main character with his mysterious past. My third main character isn’t really even a character so much as a body for my MC to talk to so that he’s not talking to himself. I don’t know the first damned thing about Ben Lanie. He has such generic dialogue because I can’t hear any kind of voice for him in my head. He’s just…there.

It’s killing my writing. He’s been in a total of two scenes so far because even though he was intended to be a main character I have no idea what to do with him. So he gets to walk into a room and say a few lines and then exit. I hate it. He’s such a small part so far but his lack of personality looms over and taints everything about the novel. I dread writing him. My other two characters have stronger voices and actual personalities, but the only thing I can get out of them is relationship talk. And sometimes David, my MC, thinks about his mysterious past. God, it’s awful.

Don’t even get me started on Tabitha. She has the most personality out of all of them; unfortunately it’s all over the place. In one scene she’s sarcastic and no-nonsense. In the next scene she’s depressed and overwhelmed with what’s happening in her life. Then she’s overbearing and nagging. If you read the most recent scene I wrote with her in it you’d think I was setting her up to be an antagonist, or at least one of those annoying, clueless characters who get in the way of the hero and whom the reader hates. I really don’t want Tabitha to be that. She’s supposed to be part of David’s support network during his adventures in the story. I can easily fix this, by just making those last couple of scenes out to be her expressing her worry for David in a particular irritating way and then realizing that’s not how to go about it and becoming more supportive, but that’s what I’m planning to do NOW. Before, it was just yet another thing that made me hate the story.

I haven’t written the last three nights, and I feel guilty about that, but I also think it helped. I have more distance from the story now and I can see how to fix the problems in it. Since it’s NaNo I won’t go back and edit, but I can take the story off into a new and hopefully better direction. I’ve fleshed out the cast a little and have plans to introduce a real antagonist soon (which was a major thing that was sorely lacking from the original idea). I’ve got David up and traveling to Michigan, so at least his plot is going somewhere. I’ve figured out how to get his sister into the story (his sister features heavily in one of the scenes I wrote first). I know who the antagonists are and what they want. I know how I want to fix Tabitha. And, for some odd reason, changing the font also helped. I just…couldn’t write with the default Times New Roman at 12-point. It didn’t look right. Maybe it’s because standard formatting for the grants and things I wrote in grad school is 11-point Arial font and that’s what I’m used to looking at. Times New Roman seemed clunky and the 12-point was too big and I was just having a hard time looking at it. Changing to 11-point Arial has made me feel a lot better. Maybe it’s weird and overly-OCD, but if it helps I’m all for it.

Although I still have no idea what the hell to do with Ben Lanie.

I started right at midnight last night, which I haven’t done since NaNo 2004 (it kinds of helps not being employed at the moment and not having to get up early in the mornings, though I would prefer being employed and having to wait until evening to write. That worked fine the last three years, anyway), and wrote until about 2:30am. For my two and half hours of work I got 3993 words, which is so close to 4000 it’s heartbreaking, but I got to the end of the scene and was feeling too tired to dive into another (it’s not a good sign when words no longer make sense and you’re having to stop and think too hard about how to punctuate dialogue). Anyway, 3993 is a better start than I’ve ever had, so that’s a good sign. With a potential new job right around the corner I’m not sure how much of November I’m actually going to have available to me. It might be all of it. Or I might have to pack up and move to another state next week. I don’t know, so I’m trying to get as much done at the beginning as I can.

So last night all my words were dedicated to my one scene, in which my main character, David Ellingsworth, has invited his long-term girlfriend Tabitha No-Last-Name-Yet on a fancy dinner date. He means to propose to her. It’s been my first scene for a long time and it was killing me to wait to write it, which of course means that when I actually wrote it nothing happened the way it should. First, a French waiter who’s just pretending to be French popped up out of nowhere and somehow started developing an actual character even though he was only supposed to be part of the scenery. I might have to bring him back somehow. Then, Tabitha showed up and she and David had a banter session that kind of killed any kind of romantic mood going on. THEN, when David proposed, Tabitha told him she had to think about it instead of just saying yes like she was originally supposed to. I blame it on the banter, because it just didn’t feel right to have a schmoopy romantic moment right after that. So instead she broke his heart. Well, she didn’t say no, but poor Dave’s heart is broken just the same.

I was hoping to avoid the situation where Tabitha realizes David is her one true love during the course of their many, varied, and strange adventures they have waiting for them, because that’s so movie romance that it’s sad. I already had an opening scene where the protagonist proposes in a fancy restaurant, complete with comedy French waiter and snark.

Urgh, this is how second-guessing starts. I wasn’t feeling too bad about the scene last night, but now I’m just kind of cringing from the cliche badness of it all. Hopefully I can make something more about of the rest of it. And I need to give Tabitha a last name. It seems to me that I had one for her way back when I came up with her character, but I can’t remember what it was. That comes from my own paranoia about making outlines and notes for NaNo, because that’s worked badly for me in the past, while going in blind actually seems to give me better results. So I came up with some very basic stuff for the story and then shoved it all out of my head from fear that thinking about it too much would curse it. Of course I didn’t write it down; that would bring the curse down ten-fold if I had done that! So now I can’t remember anyone’s full names except for the main character (because his full name is actually an important plot point).

Yeah, I know I have issues. I’ve just been very nervous and superstitious about this NaNo. When I started doing NaNo in 2004 I was in my first semester of grad school and while I was busy, it was a kind of unstructured busy-ness (outside of my two classes). I was doing lab rotations and had whole weeks where I wasn’t in a lab at all because of the way they were structured. Basically, I don’t do well with no structure. I wrote whenever the inspiration struck, which I could do because I had the luxury of free time (in the sense that I could put down my textbooks whenever and just write for awhile because I had nowhere else to be). And at the end of the month I had about 33,000 words. Which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but which is far short of the NaNo goal of 50,000. All that unstructured time killed me. I didn’t write for whole days at a time, telling myself I could easily catch up the next day or the next. I didn’t write a single word after I went home for Thanksgiving that year. I probably could have gotten the words I needed in that last week but I just didn’t.

The past three years? I was working full-time while still attending classes. I often had only an hour of free time I could eke out during the evenings, and I spent a lot of lunch breaks writing instead of eating (because who needs food when there’s NaNo). And I totally OWNED NaNo all three of those years. Because I just do better when I have to tightly schedule my time. It doesn’t give me a chance to goof around or put things off, because I know if I don’t do it NOW then it’ll never get done.

This year, of course, I’m not working or attending classes, and my days are a whole lot of unstructured mess. I job hunt, I read, I watch TV, I try to get to the gym on a regular basis. But there’s none of that I have to get around to at a certain time. There are no deadlines. I’m afraid this doesn’t bode well for my writing.

On the other hand, if anyone can pad out a story with wordiness, it’s me (as you can probably tell from this post, in which I spend a whole lot of words talking about nothing). So maybe it’ll be all right, as long as I remember my own advice and make myself write every single day.

I thought I’d come up with some tips for NaNo success, based on my experiences (this is my fifth year doing NaNo and the only year I didn’t win was my first). There are no dirty tricks or cheating here, just advice on how to get to 50,000 words the legitimate way. Many of them you’ve probably heard before (there’s a reason for that: they’re usually good advice!), but hopefully these are helpful to someone.

*Disclaimer: I’ve tried to make these general enough to apply to a wide range of writing habits, so that they’re not just a list of things that only work if you write like me. But as always, your mileage may vary*

1. Write every day. Everyone gives this piece of advice, but I’m giving it again and putting it first because it really is the most important and can’t be emphasized enough. When you break it down, 1667 words per day isn’t a lot. One day you really won’t feel like writing for whatever reason: you’re unmotivated, your muse absconded with your plot, you’d rather watch a rerun of a movie you’ve seen a hundred times. You’ll tell yourself that it’s not a big deal because it’s just 1667 words and it’ll be easy to add that on to tomorrow’s count. DO NOT FALL INTO THIS TRAP. 90% of the secret to a successful NaNo is perseverance and the rhythm that comes from making yourself write every day. If you break that rhythm it can be very difficult to find it again, and before you know it’s been a week since you wrote and you’re 15,000 words behind. So again: write every day.

2. You will not write every day. It happens. One day you’ll have a better excuse than a burning desire to rewatch Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets. You’ll have a nasty cold and a burning desire to sleep. You’ll have a big school or work project due. Your family will demand that you spend an evening with them. That’s fine. Don’t panic. Don’t think you’re going to fail NaNo because you miss a day here and there. I’ve never made it through a NaNo where I managed to write every day. Just assume you’re going to miss at least 2-3 days during November. What you shouldn’t do is PLAN for them. Don’t set aside a day and say, “That’s a day I’m not going to write,” because you’re going to want that day back when you have an actual reason for not being able to write. For the same reason, when you have lazy days don’t tell yourself that you can get away with not writing. See Tip #1.

3. NaNoWriMo is part of your life in November. Yeah, you’re busy. You have a schedule to balance, and things like work and school are more important than NaNo. But schedule in NaNo just as you would anything else. Plan an hour each day to sit down and write. Write for that whole hour and don’t do anything else. It doesn’t matter where the hour comes from. Go to bed an hour later. Get up an hour earlier. Spend one less hour watching TV. It doesn’t even have to come all at once: you could have two half-hour sessions or four fifteen-minute sessions (though I recommend writing at least half an hour at a time because any less than that and your writing period is over before you’ve really gotten into it). After an hour, you’ll probably have close to the amount of words you need for that day.

4. When it comes to planning, take your cue from how you normally write. If you don’t usually make detailed outlines, character sketches, and extensive notes before you start writing, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have to plot out your whole novel just because a lot of other people are doing it. You don’t want to get burned out on a story idea before you even start. On the flip side, if you’re a writer who usually outlines and doesn’t do well with “by the seat of your pants”-style, then it would probably be a good idea to do what you need to do so you don’t find yourself flailing come November. And if you are writing from an outline, no matter how detailed, don’t be afraid to leave it in the dust. If the writing starts feeling like a chore then do something to change it up. Otherwise you’re going to start dreading the writing process, and then you’ll procrastinate, and then you’ll lose NaNo.

5. Don’t edit. Don’t even read back through what you’ve already written, unless it’s just a little bit to remember where you left off last session. Reading back over will only depress you and make you want to fix everything you see wrong. Don’t. Other NaNoers are not going to judge you for not having perfect, sparkling prose, because everyone is in the same boat. What you should be coming out with at the end of NaNo is 50,000 words of a very rough draft. You should not be coming out with 2,000 perfectly-crafted words. If you’re writing a novel that you want to finish, the former is going to be a lot more useful than the latter. Once November is over you can take your time editing until you have 50,000 perfectly-crafted words. Then you’ll have a novel instead of just a couple of beginning chapters.

6. Do occasionally throw your inner editor a bone. This goes against the advice a lot of other people would give, but this is from my personal experience. If you make a typo and catch it immediately, correct it. If that sentence you just wrote is complete garbage, rewrite it. Fixing small mistakes that you catch right away isn’t going to slow you down that much, and it’ll probably save your perfectionist side a lot of grief and anguish and guilt.  But look at what I wrote there: “fixing small mistakes that you catch right away.”  That doesn’t mean reading back over stuff you wrote days ago so that you can fix the grammar. That doesn’t mean agonizing for hours over how to make sense of that garbage sentence. If you catch something as you’re writing it and immediately know how you want to fix/reword it, then do it. Otherwise move on.

7. Start strong, because you’re probably not going to finish strong. You’re going to have a lot of enthusiasm ready to go when November 1st comes around, so use it. Don’t write 1667 words the first day and think, “Okay, that’s it, time to close this up until tomorrow.” You’re excited. You’re full of ideas. Take that energy and use it to write, because hey, this is what you’ve been waiting for. It’s here. Do it. And do it the next day and the next and rack up that word count, because the second week is going to suck. And if not then, the third week will. Your energy will flag and you’ll start second-guessing everything you write. You’ll come to the conclusion that you’re a terrible writer and you’ll wonder how insane you had to be to even consider doing this. Having more than the target number of words will be a nice cushion for those middle weeks when you just want to curl up and cry. If on those days you cannot possibly get more than 500 or 1000 words, then you aren’t in as much danger of falling behind if you’re already ahead. But still keep in mind Tip #2: your days off should be for unavoidable circumstances, NOT because you feel lazy or uninspired.

8. Have fun online, but be careful. The best part of NaNo is taking on this crazy project with the support of thousands of other people. I’ve made some great friends through NaNo. It’s awesome. The NaNoWriMo forums themselves are great sources for inspiration, research, friend-making, and cheerleading. Writing is normally such a solitary activity that it’s not surprising so many people get energized from the social aspects of NaNo. It’s new and different and fun, and it’s only for a month, so it’s good to take advantage of it. Except…be careful you don’t take so much advantage of it that your writing suffers. Go to the forums, chat to fellow NaNoers, participate in word wars. Do all that if you want. It’s great. But do you remember that hour you set aside way back in Tip #3? Remember the part about not doing anything but write? That means no forums, no chat windows, no LJ, no Facebook or Twitter or anything else. Close it all down. Unplug from the Internet if the temptation is too great. Write for your hour. After that you can browse and chat to your heart’s desire safe in the knowledge that you’ve already written what you wanted for that day. And yes, when I say don’t do online stuff, I’m including word wars. Word wars are great, but aren’t reliably organized. A group of people can get together and do a fifteen-minute word war and then spend two hours just chatting and goofing around. If you’ve already written for an hour that day, great, and hey, you just got even more words with your word war! But if all the writing you end up doing that day is for one fifteen-minute period, and this is a pattern that’s repeated day after day, then you’re not going to end up with much at the end of November.

If I want an easy, quick answer, I’ll say that I write fantasy. But that word bothers me for a couple reasons:

1. I write things other than fantasy. I also write some contemporary stuff, but even if I want to keep this specific to genre, then I also write science fiction, and I write things that blend the two. I’m not a purist that says there’s some kind of dividing line between fantasy and science fiction, but simply saying “fantasy” feels somehow incomplete.

2. When I say “fantasy,” most people think Lord of the Rings: elves, dwarves, magic, pseudo-medieval world, etc. But that’s just a subsection of what fantasy covers. I’m tired of telling people I write fantasy and getting the response, “Oh, like Eragon?” Ugh.

What I need is a new word. For awhile I was going around saying that I wrote speculative fiction. And really, that’s the term I still prefer to use, because it’s an umbrella term that covers fantasy, science fiction, and horror. It doesn’t pigeonhole my writing into a particular subgenre and is a more accurate reflection of the fact that I don’t stay in any particular subgenres. Is it too broad? Perhaps, but I’m looking for a quick easy answer, remember? If someone wants more detail I can give it.

Anyway, I stopped using that term because I was afraid that it seemed either too pretentious or too false. There’s something about, “I don’t write fantasy, I write speculative fiction” that seems like I’m simultaneously devaluing fantasy while implying that my writing is better or above or more valid than all that genre schlock. Basically, I got the impression from some people that the term “speculative fiction” was something used by obnoxious amateur writers who were too ashamed or arrogant to admit they were actually writing genre. Which upset me a little because I don’t think I ever used it in that way. I do write genre. I write fantasy. I’m not a snob who thinks genre is inherently inferior to literary. I mean, who the hell defines what “literary” means, anyway? There isn’t really even much of a dividing line between literary and genre, and authors have been blurring that line for a long time anyway. Which brings me right back to why I liked the term “speculative fiction.” I hate that line and I love reading stories where it’s obliterated. I like to write stories where that line is obliterated (in addition to things that are more straightforward fantasy or science fiction).

So I think I have some kind of point. I want to say I write speculative fiction, and it’s not because I’m trying to make my writing more respectable by denying it a more genre-specific name. It’s my belief that the snobbishness and ignorance that leads people to think one kind of writing is naturally better than another is bull. That’s why I use the term, because I don’t like little boxes when it comes to story-telling.

So I guess I have a question for you: what do you think of the term “speculative fiction?” Does it sound too much like snobbishness, arrogance, or cluelessness? Or do you think it’s in any way a useful term? This is actually something that’s been bothering me for awhile, so much that I stopped using the term entirely. I think I want to start using it again but if the SF/F writing community looks upon that term with scorn (as I’ve gotten the impression of from some people) then I’ll put it away and never use it again.

Yeah, that was just some rambling and me being insecure.

1. Do you write fiction or non-fiction? Or both?
Well, I do a lot of non-fiction writing for my job. But I suspect that isn’t what this question is asking. Mostly I write fiction when I write for fun.

2. Do you keep a journal or a writing notebook?
Well, I keep my writing in a members-only LJ community, Skylar Town. I’ve also accumulated a huge number of writing journals over the years, all of them filled with partial stories, finished stories, poems, notes, world-building stuff, etc. I don’t put much into actual paper notebooks or journals anymore. I do everything on the computer now.

3. If you write fiction, do you know your characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts before you start writing or is that something else you discover only after you start writing? Do you find books on plotting useful or harmful?
I know some basic stuff about the character: their background, where they are emotionally, mentally, etc. at the beginning of the story, and a general direction I want them to go in. The more specific stuff comes as I write. As for books on plotting, I find them a little tedious because they always say stuff I already know. I would love a recommendation for books on plotting that don’t assume the reader is a first time writer who doesn’t know anything about crafting a story. Are there like intermediate level books somewhere?

4. Are you a procrastinator or does the itch to write keep at you until you sit down and work?
That really depends. If I have a deadline looming and I really don’t want to write, I’ll procrastinate for as long as I can. If I have a deadline and I feel inspired, I can’t wait to get started. Same thing even if no deadlines are involved.

5. Do you write in short bursts of creative energy, or can you sit down and write for hours at a time?
Again, it depends. Hours at a time, though, hasn’t happened since I finished a novel a few years ago: I wrote all night, finished at 5:00 in the morning, and wrote 10,000 words in one sitting, because that particular novel took me forever to write and I was finally so close to the ending I was determined not to stop until it was finished. Usually, though, I’ll write for one or two hours at a time.

6. Are you a morning or afternoon writer?
That depends entirely on when I get inspired. Probably more of an afternoon/night writer, just because I’m not a morning person at all.

7. Do you write with music/the noise of children/in a cafe or other public setting, or do you need complete silence to concentrate?
Sometimes I’ll listen to music, which is actually a new thing for me: it used to be that I needed mostly silence in my general vicinity. I could stand instrumental music occasionally, but anything with lyrics distracted me too much. Now I’m better at tuning it out and I can write to most music. Background noise such as people talking or a TV being on in the next room usually doesn’t bother me unless it’s really loud.

8. Computer or longhand? (or typewriter?)
Now all of my actual writing is done on the computer. I’ll usually write notes or world-building longhand in journals. I like writing down ideas and then crossing them out or modifying them on paper, because then they’re still there if I decide later on I like them better. On the computer I would just delete stuff and not think about it ever again.

9. Do you know the ending before you type Chapter One? Or do you let the story evolve as you write?
I’m terrible with endings, but I have to have some idea of an endpoint, even if I don’t know the exact ending. I need some kind of goal to work toward. Otherwise my characters just sort of wander around aimlessly in the middle while I try to figure out what to do with them.

10. Does what’s selling in the market influence how and what you write?
Not really. I write stories based on ideas I have that I think would be interesting to write about. I have thought about market influence: what I write would not be popular at the moment, because urban fantasy, YA fantasy, and paranormal romance are the BIG genres right now and while I do have a YA novel that’s kind of on the backburner at the moment, it’s actually more science fiction than fantasy and it’s very subtle science fiction. It probably wouldn’t even get classified as sci-fi. So I don’t really write anything in the current best-selling genres, but that’s not so much a concern. Market tastes change, and I’m not at the point where I would seriously start considering sending out manuscripts right now, anyway.

11. Editing/Revision – love it or hate it?
A lot of the time I love it, actually. I used to hate it until I found out what worked for me. My problem was that I was always trying to go back and edit earlier chapters before I’d finished the novel. What works better for me is to have an entire first draft before I start editing, because the revision is easier and more fun when I have a fully functional backbone to hang it on. I can better draw threads together and fix inconsistencies, and I really love it when things that might have given me trouble before fall into place.

First prompt is: What made you start writing? My answer:

I can’t say what made me start writing. I remember I started writing when I was pretty young, maybe around six or so. My early stories were mostly series of drawings with very simple captions, or made in the style of comics with the words in speech bubbles coming from the characters’ mouths. The narrative was very simple because I had to make do with words I already knew how to write, which wasn’t very many when I was six. The very first stories I remember writing were about a mother and her two daughters, one of whom misbehaved all the time and broke things and made messes, and the other who was well-behaved and the “nice one.” This wasn’t based on my real-life family, because at the time all I had was one baby brother. I had no sisters and no older siblings (the well-behaved daughter was always the older one). I always wrote the story from the “bad” daughter’s point of view, so I wonder what those stories say about my psyche at the time.

When I started elementary school I began participating in this Young Author’s writing thing. I can’t remember the proper name, but it was something that elementary schools all around the city participated in. Students would write little stories and the teachers would laminate them and bind them, and then they would be put on display at the local high school one Saturday morning and there would be a competition. I never won anything but participation stickers, but I didn’t care because the students who won were always middle school students, so I always just figured I was too young. Of course, I never did it again after fourth grade (because my fifth grade teacher neglected to mention it to me, which upset me a lot at the time, and then I just forgot about it after that).

In first grade I started a series of stories about a family of ants that lived in my friend’s sandbox. This grew out of our regular game of building elaborate “ant cities,” complete with skyscrapers and subway tunnels in her sandbox. Then one day I made up a story about a specific ant family living in one of our cities, and I liked it so much that I went home and wrote about it. It was the most elaborate thing I’d done at that time: I made lists of characters and family trees (it was a very large ant family) and planned out a whole series of adventures they would have. I think I actually only wrote two or three of them, but they were fully illustrated and had covers and proper titles and everything. Anyway, world-building has remained one of my favorite aspects of starting a new story.

I didn’t try writing novels until I was in fourth grade, because until then I was more interested in illustrating my stories than writing for them. Often I would start stories, get bored, and then just finish the illustrations and not the story itself. It was around fourth grade when my interest in drawing started to wane and I became more concerned with the actual words of a story. My first longer stories and attempts at novels were all very reminiscent of the kind of young adult stuff I was reading at the time: child protagonists, less-than-intelligent adult figures, lots of supernatural/fantasy elements thrown in. I liked writing about large families that traveled to exotic places (Florida seemed quite exotic to me at the time), because I was from a relatively small family (and there was such an age gap between me and my younger brothers that I couldn’t have the kind of sibling relationship with them that I was reading about in books with brothers and sisters who were only a couple years apart) that rarely traveled. They were stories I wished were true in my real life.

I finished my first novel (about a family who goes to Florida on vacation, naturally) when I was in seventh grade, and then I kind of stopped writing after that. I guess the move to high school gave me different priorities. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school that I started writing again, and this time my repertoire was greatly expanded: I wrote poetry, mainstream contemporary short stories, and straight fantasy novels. I’ve continued to write pretty much constantly since then.

I’ve wandered a bit off the topic, I think. It’s just that writing has been part of my existence for so long it’s hard to think back to a time when I wasn’t making up stories. I can’t tell you the definitive moment where I thought it would be a good idea to put idea down on paper; ever since I learned to write doing so has just seemed like a part of life.