Using Words to Expand Your World

What has writing done for your life? Today, NaNoWriMo participant Lolita shares her personal writing journey in the hope of inspiring writers from around the world to find their voice:

I was born in France. 

From the time I was in high school, I developed a love affair with fiction books. I read to understand people and escape my own teenage life. At fifteen, I was often writing in secret. This continued for a few months before I left that draft on the side and wrote some poems that helped me deal with family issues at the time. After that, I went several years without writing anything.  Although, from time to time, I remembered that draft I’d written and put aside. At that point, I viewed these writings as a weakness people would look down on instead of seeing the work as an achievement.

Years later, after I finished my maternity leave, I was back at work. I started to write the story of a young woman who would one day become an Amazon. I barely finished the first draft, putting it all aside for about two years. One day, I took a pen and paper and wrote my second draft by referring to the first draft. Then I started to research and sketch what I had in mind for characters and settings. 

With a full time day job, my life as a mum, and a contemporary painter, it took me months to realize that I needed to slow down and appreciate all that I was doing. 

Otherwise, I would burn out and give up temporarily (like I had two years before) or perhaps, permanently.  

Coincidently, a health-related issue made me stop everything.  I was laying in a hospital bed where I couldn’t write or paint or be with my family. I started thinking of all the things that were going wrong in my life as well as in my book. I did more research. I rearranged things to make them fit together like puzzle pieces. I also found books on how to become a better writer. It felt like my creative process didn’t fit within the methods being suggested. It made me question whether I’d been doing things the wrong way. 

So, when I did Camp NaNoWriMo in April, I really thought about whether I was a writer or just pretending. I felt this need to be validated as a writer. 

The community of writers I found in the virtual cabin at Camp, showed me that I am a writer as well as a mum, an artist and a book addict.

I think that my passion for books has made me more empathic. Reading has shown me things I didn’t know, things we can’t find in textbooks or on TV. Now, I observe people on the streets, in the bus and in shops. I make notes of people’s mannerisms, knowing that the details I see are things that I can use in my book.

I write in English now instead of French. Sometimes, a character feels something that’s better described in French, and I face the challenges of writing in a language that’s not my native tongue. My advice to people who are facing the same issue, is use the words you do know to describe the things you don’t have the right words for, yet.

No matter what, just write!

Lolita is a French native living in the UK for the past ten years. Mother of two and working in a library, she writes fantasy fiction and paints in her spare time. In a life where we live fast, she wants to read books where heroes (males and females) are not perfect and take time to learn to become better. Lolita is still working on her first novel and hopes to publish it this year or next. You can follow her on Twitteror her blog.

Top photo by Ben White on Unsplash.