Finally, I reached my first goal for NNWM. Today, I got up to 10,000 words for my novel. I’m so happy, but I’m only a 5th of the way there.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m writing about reading my childhood diary. Some of my entries so far have been pretty fun to read, but today I reached one that made me a little embarrassed. I wrote about saying something mean to someone and knowing deep down that I didn’t mean it, but encouraged someone to say it anyway. Bottom line, I think I just wanted to fit in. That’s a pretty terrible reason though.
This makes me so upset, because I know how it feels to be on the receiving end of those types of words. I was just talking about a similar situation a few diary entries earlier. Why would I encourage such a comment to be said to a friend? It doesn’t make sense to me. There is no way in hell that I would ever say anything like that to anyone , why would I have laughed and encouraged those comments? So frustrating.
I guess this is one of the challenges that I having with writing this novel. The things that I wrote in my diary are personal. They are my thoughts, my views, my feelings at that time. It’s all me and how I felt when I was 13 or 14 years old. Bottom line is that I’m responsible for my younger self.
IF I was to publish it, would I leave this diary comment in or take it out? I don’t know.
It’s an interesting question — whether or not we’re responsible for our younger selves. Personally, I can’t imagine holding any adult accountable for something they did when they were 13, so there’s no real reason for the person themselves to still feel accountable for it. Of course, I suppose it would depend on how bad the thing was, how much it damaged someone else. Sounds like you have an interesting theme going on there. And when you’re done, you should think about trying to make it publishable. Why not?
By: XUP on November 13, 2009
at 5:43 am