NaPoWriMo – almost there!

I'll actually be kinda sad when this month is over, because while there will be nothing stopping me from continuing to write a poem (almost) every day, I really can't see it happening. It's almost over, and I'm quite pleased and rather surprised that I've actually managed to write almost every day - I think I've missed four days (including yesterday), but I've more than made up for them on other days. I didn't expect to be this diligent.

When I wrote my last update, I was finding it a bit wearying - I was feeling like I was just writing a bunch of unnecessary words, with no real point and no real purpose. I had an inkling that I might get something out of this experiment though, I just didn't know what it might be yet.

I feel like I won't really know until it's all over and I've had a chance to read over what I've written, and have a bit of a think about the whole experience, but late last week something started dawning on me.

Last week was a fairly full-on week for me - a lot of stuff was going on, mostly with people I care about. I had a couple of shocks, and things that really sent me into some soul searching and some feeling and some worry. I have a pretty busy life, what with my full-time day job, my people, and other (often literature-related) commitments, so I don't have an enormous amount of time for writing (this seems to be a common problem), so I've mostly been writing my NaPoWriMo poems in my lunchtimes, which I also have to use for eating lunch and running errands and processing what's going on in my head.

On Friday, while writing a poem, I realised that my poems from last week were about things that really mattered to me, and people who really mattered to me. I was writing directly from my heart, kind of as a way of processing and exploring the things that have been going on - killing two birds with one stone.

I've been coming to terms with the fact that I'm a heart reader - of course I require art and skill and clever images and surprising metaphors and so forth, but what I really want from my art is to be touched, and so it makes sense that I should be mining my heart for my own work. It sounds so simple, to be writing from the heart, but I've been struggling with it, and I'll still struggle with it, for lots of reasons.

Whether the poems are any good remains to be seen, but yesterday I did give one to the person who inspired it, and she said that it articulated things she'd felt, but hadn't had the words to say. I'm feeling pretty pleased about that.