The End Is Near, But The End Is Not The End

It’s the last day of Camp NaNoWriMo this April! Today, Camp participant Curtis C. Chen shares some insight on following the path of a writer and how valuable a writing community can be along the journey:

“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

—Lawrence Kasdan, screenwriter of The Big Chill

Good news, Campers! You’ve almost reached the end of April, which means you’re nearing the finish line of this year’s Camp NaNoWriMo journey.

Now the bad news: you will never actually be done with this whole writing thing.

If at any point this month you felt excitement about a particular scene, sentence, or turn of phrase you put down on the page—if you were moved to tears or laughter or exasperation by something one of your characters did, thwarting your original plans for their story—if you felt the fire of creation burning inside you and an irresistible urge to breathe it out in narrative form, well, I’m sorry, but you’re now ruined for anything else.

I’ve dabbled in various creative arts over the years, ranging from playing musical instruments to vocal performance to improv to legitimate theater, and to me, nothing in the world feels as rewarding—or as challenging—as being able to write a story that engages readers at a deep emotional level.

That’s why you’ll always want to write another story. You’ll always want to say more about your protagonist—what happened after this adventure? what did they encounter over the next mountain, around the next corner, through the next wormhole?—or explore a totally different setting with new people and places and conflicts. 

But every story will always have the same thing at its heart: the desire to connect with another person through your words.

And that never goes away. Having written one work is not the same thing as being a writer. The former is something that anyone can do, with enough time and effort; the latter requires a long-term, almost spiritual dedication. And it’s not for everyone. To paraphrase Lawrence Kasdan above, not everybody wants to do homework every night for the rest of their lives.

But if you think this might be the life for you, if you feel that compulsion to tell stories in any form, you will have to learn to deal with the bad times. When you’re not feeling driven, when life interferes, when the words don’t come easily or don’t come at all. It’s a different struggle for every writer, and navigating it alone can be debilitating.

That’s why it’s so important to have a community, and hopefully you’ve found (or reconnected with) a good group of like-minded folks at Camp NaNoWriMo! These are the people who will help you through the bad times, celebrate with you during the good times, and never give up on you even if you feel like giving up on yourself.

However much progress you made this month on your writing project, remember: the real NaNo was the friends you made along the way. 

And even if they won’t let you copy their homework (PLAGIARISM IS WRONG DON’T DO IT), you can be study buddies forever after.

Once a Silicon Valley software engineer, Curtis C. Chen (陳致宇) now writes speculative fiction and runs puzzle games near Portland, Oregon. His debut novel Waypoint Kangaroo (a 2017 Locus Awards Finalist) is a science fiction spy thriller about a superpowered secret agent facing his toughest mission yet: vacation. The sequel, Kangaroo Too, lands our hero on the Moon to confront long-buried secrets. Curtis’ short fiction has appeared in Playboy Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and more. Visit him online: https://curtiscchen.com

Top photo by Kimson Doan on Unsplash.