An in-between place...

The pre-NaNo season is very strange. All around the interwebs, people are posting ideas for their plots. So here I am reading all these fantastic synopses and getting all excited and thinking "I have got to add these books to my reading list" and then I stop and realize that none of them have been written yet.


I don't recall if it was from a published book (a Thursday Next book?) or perhaps an original piece of fiction somewhere on a writing site, but I once read a story about a library where all the books that ever could have been written are shelved. They might not have been written, but there was the potential for them to have been written and so they exist in this library.

That's what pre-NaNo feels like to me, knowing that there are so many novels right now that are begging to be written and that they will exist at the end of November. It feels like a time out of time, like I can see the future and I know what is coming, yet it hasn't arrived yet. It's different from anticipating a movie from a trailer somehow. It's different from watching prerecorded images from a film that is in the works. These are novels that literally have not been written yet. They don't exist yet, and yet they do.

Somehow, that idea makes me emotional. Writing does occasionally, the idea that with just words, we can create entire universes that ring just as true as our own. There's a certain grandeur and mystery in that power that I take for granted sometimes. But when I stop and think about it, I'm floored. The idea that our words could be remembered for posterity, that we brought people into the world who don't really exist yet actually do, that you can pour a soul into little black marks, really brings writing home for me. It makes me love writing again, even as it frightens me that anyone would entrust me with this kind of power. It makes me afraid to attempt anything, fearing that I might screw it up, and it gives me a sense of confidence, knowing that there really isn't anything to screw up.

That concept of writing can make me cry when I think about it too hard.

Good luck, little future novels.