Fearlessness

Hi everyone! Sorry I’m posting this a day later than I said I would, but I have a good excuse. I swear. I was writing my story which is tentatively called GUARDIANS (yes, I know it’s a  horrible title—I’m the worst with creating titles and) and my next blog post will be about that story and Nanowrimo. 

Short interlude for Nanowrimo—you have to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s an amazing way to get the motivation to write. It’s torture and bliss at the same time. I suggest it for anyone who wants an external motivation and a community to cheer you on. 

Either way, I was up late writing and finally caught up on my word count. I’m even ahead of schedule since I am officially at 36,209 words! To give you a picture of how horribly behind I was, let’s just say I wrote about 10,000 words just yesterday. 

Now onto the real topic of this post—fearlessness as the title of this post so kindly puts it. 

So last night, I attended a writer’s group and it was my third time going. It’s where the local writers in my area meet up to talk about their writing, share writing resources, and bask in the glow of other writers. I’m usually the youngest one there, but yesterday there was a 12 year old girl. Let’s call her Amy. 

Amy was…interesting. You could see how much she loved writing and she was super excited to be at the writer’s group for the first time. Her enthusiasm for writing was great to see. Especially considering how young she was and the fact that I started writing when I was just one year older than her. 

The thing that really shocked me was how fearless she was. She was very vocal about wanting more writing time in her school classroom. She was eager to get her stories read. She was willing to butt herself into the conversation with adults 40 years and older as they talked about writing.

I don’t do that. I didn’t even think about asking my teachers in middle school for time to write instead of read. I don’t bring any writing to have them read it and I definitely say less than I want to just because I’m terribly shy. I still have trouble telling people that I write novels in real life. 

An author runs the writer’s group and asked Amy what the hardest thing about writing was. Do you know what her response was? She said her hand cramps up. This question was directed to a 12 year old girl who should be the most self-conscious out of all of us with writing, but she was the exact opposite. Her only problem with writing was that she couldn’t physically write fast enough to get her story down. 

True, she most likely misunderstood the question since the author was asking more about the “craft of writing” and wanted an answer like world building, POV, or plotting. We can just ignore that tidbit because in my opinion, she answered in the way that any author should. Her hand cramps. 

And just to illustrate how driven Amy was, let me just tell you that she has a plan written down for what type of story she wants to write very month from last June all the way to December 2015. Every month she had a plan. I distinctly remember next February is her horror/romance story. 

This girl….I am in awe of this girl and her fearlessness. Some people will comment and just say that she’s a little girl that she doesn’t know what she’s actually doing. She’s not actually writing things that could be published, but I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to be the best writer in order to love it (I’m proof of that honestly). She might not be able to publish anything at this age, but if her love of writing continues, she might just beat me in a race to getting a book deal. 

So next time someone asks me what’s the hardest thing about writing—I want to take a page from Amy’s book and answer that my hand cramps (which wouldn’t make much sense because I long abandoned writing with a standard pencil and notebook—computers are amazing inventions). 

That’s all I wanted to say.

Comment below if you want to talk. I’m always looking for more friends!