A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Five-Hundred-And-Fifty-Five

One of the things that keeps slowing me down, right now, in terms of the writing I am doing at the moment for this new novel is that I am basing a lot of the beginning on real experiences I had many years ago, and a part of me is very invested in being accurate with what happened.  This is not, I need to remember, a memoir or other kind of factual document.  I don't need to be all that faithful to the actual details of the real world, but it is an easy habit to fall into.  I hope that just being aware of it will help me to make different choices going forwards, and I know that I am going to be diverting from the factual very soon, in any case.  I find it quite interesting, though, to discover this documentarian urge.  I so often find myself writing in ways that resist mirroring the real; I did intend to write this piece in a more conventional mode, but I hadn't expected that drawing on a real experience would push me in this direction.

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