For My Own Enjoyment

In taking a break from second draft work on Saving Grace this afternoon, I read selections from 2009’s Daily Writing Exercise and scenes from a cozy mystery I started last year.

The Daily Writing Exercise was a year-long challenge that began with a desire to write a minimum of 700 words of fiction each writing day (every day but Sunday) for the year. The fiction could be related to the pages that preceded it or followed it or could be a totally random and independent scene.

It could also be any form of fiction. I recounted a few dreams in those pages. I wrote about new characters as they came to mind. I recorded scenes that ‘appeared’ in my awareness and explored alternative ideas for stories that were in the rewriting process. I even have a page or two dedicated to opening lines and another page given to opening paragraphs.

There were, in other words, only two rules. 1) 700 words or more; and, 2) it had to be fiction.

I didn’t intend the Daily Writing Exercise to also be a source of enjoyment and relaxation after it was finished, but it has proven to be both. It is almost like my own library of selected scenes from a variety of sources. The sorts of things that remind me what I was thinking or feeling on those days or leaves me wondering what was going on. What thought spurred the words I wrote?

That cozy mystery about two elderly widows attempting to thwart a consumer fraud artist also falls into that category, as does a document I started just this week. These are the stories I tell myself with little or not thought of anything beyond writing and telling stories. Just like the stories parents make up one night at a time for eager children. In this case, I am both the storytelling parent and the listening child.

Worries about plot are minimal with these tales. It’s all about what happens next. I do think about plot and writing skills, but the guiding star for these tales is “Then what happened?”

I claim no wide-eyed wonder at the tales I’m telling myself. It’s more about the process than the product. Just like it was with the Daily Writing Exercise last year.

But I’m certain that, given time, I’ll find myself going back to read them again and again. Reliving the moments when I wrote the words as well as enjoying the words I wrote.

I know that will happen because it has already happened with almost everything else I’ve written. Serious novel or just a story, I find a good deal of enjoyment in reading what I’ve written in the past.

It is, in the end, all about writing. Whether the words are part of a serious novel designed for publication or a simple story I tell for my own amusement, it all advances the goal. It is, in the end, all about being a writer.