My Hobonichi notebook has become a place to do a quick bit of writing every day. I write a page or so with text of varying sizes depending on my motivation. I pair that with an actual attempt to document my day in Day One. These routines are meant to keep me writing even when I don’t get a lot of time to do anything else.

I have been keeping up on it, but beyond some pending reviews, the drafts folder for posts sits with a bunch of fits and starts. I’ll circle back to some of them, but none of them feel fully formed as ideas yet.

I have been trying to think more about the process of how people make things. Spurred on by watching the Neil Gaiman masterclass on storytelling, I’ve gone down rabbit holes watching interviews with writers, musicians, and other artists working on their process. I’m scattering a few examples here, including a twenty-ish minute talk from Gaiman that has some of the same ideas as the Masterclass. (The real highlight is Flood’s Martin Gore impression.)

I’m staring at the calendar, seeing that NaNoWriMo is two weeks out. I have a couple of percolating ideas that I feel like aren’t quite ready. I am basically watching all of these, hoping that I can get some things to start connecting in my brain.

Last year’s novel is sitting in Dropbox, and I’m not sure if even I will ever read it. The idea wasn’t a bad one; in fact I came across the Day One entry where I came up with the idea. It reminded me that these daily habits aren’t just about putting ink to paper and pixels to screen, but should be sources to go back digging for ideas that never made it out of the larval stage.

The thing that I like about NaNoWriMo is that it’s a challenge to push yourself to hit a word count. It’s ambitious enough that your mind is forced to keep moving. It’s cathartic just to finish something, which tends to be the best advice almost any creative person will give you. Make things and keep making them until people pay attention.

And yet, I think there’s a deeper message that I missed. If you’re only creating on the idea that an audience will discover you, you’re missing the fun part of creating. Starting to play tabletop RPGs was a more significant boon to my fiction writing than a decade of freelance journalism.

It allowed me to think about characters as agents with histories and not just conveyances for ideas and plot. Giving them real agency to be people, and headspaces to inhabit gave me a new way to approach writing people and their personalities first and then to let them connect the plot together in more natural ways.

NaNoWriMo will tell me how successful that change in approach will be. I felt that huge chunks of the book last year had to be dragged out of me, and I finished half asleep in the middle of the night. If you’re participating, I’d love to hear what your approach is to the task ahead, and if you aren’t, I’d encourage you to give it a try. The worst that happens is you have a couple of dozen pages on your hard drive.