Shouldn't you be writing something that sells?

Yesterday I dug out a short story I had published in Yokoi, a quarterly journal of the arts, that came out in 1990. My short story, That Summer, appeared in the first issue. Almost twenty years later, Yokoi is only a distant memory.

But that short story and the reason behind why I wrote it still haunts me. And that I realize is why I'm writing a novel about that summer for NaNoWriMo, the month long writing challenge to get 50,000 words down before Nov. 30.

What I find strange reading that short story from 1990 is that I can no longer tell fact from fiction. Did those characters exist outside my imagination? And if not, why are they so real to me after all this time? Did any of the story even happen?

Reading it also made me wonder about where I was in 1990 writing wise -- and why it's taken me so long to get back to that story. Or why go back there at all?

I'm 20,000 words into a novel about that summer in 1959 in a campground resort on Hebgen Lake. Originally I wrote the short story because I'd just done an article for the newspaper about the 1959 earthquake and where I was on the lake when it struck. That article had stirred up memories that generated the short story.

The funny thing is that in the short story I never got to the earthquake. I reached a point in the story where I knew I didn't need an earthquake -- I already had my story.

I can't tell you how many times I've asked myself why I decided to write a novel about that summer for NaNoWriMo. This book isn't like anything I've been writing over the last 18 years. Shouldn't I be writing something that I know will sell?

I dug out the short story because I was having doubts about writing this story. But after reading the short story, I felt even more compelled to write the book. I'm not even sure whose story it is, the 12-year-old girl's or her mother's.

I definitely question what I'm going to do with it when it's finished. Writing the first 50,000 words is just the beginning. There will be hours and hours of rewriting, then editing and then what? Probably nothing. It's not a murder mystery like I usually write. Although there is a murder. The reader just doesn't know it until book two. Yes, I see this as the first book in a series. Which makes it all the more crazy. I should stick with writing books that I know will sell, right?

But when I wrote my first book, I knew there was a good chance it would never see print. It's the nature of the beast. If you only wrote things you knew would sell, how few things would ever get written and some people would never write at all because there was no market for what they had to say.

Writing is about taking chances. Sometimes you have to write about a summer that you're not even sure happened but still haunts you.