I never gave much thought to serious writing before. I wrote stupid little stories when I was a kid (doesn't everyone?). I got into fandom as a teenager and wrote Harry Potter and band fanfiction, because that's just what everyone did. But the notion of creating a world entirely from my own head was such an alien concept to me. That was something other people did - professional authors and writers. Not me. I had a bad habit of writing things halfway and leaving them as soon as another idea came. It was not often, or at all, that I ever finished a story.

(Let's be honest, I still have that bad habit.)

Around my junior year of college was when I first heard about National Novel Writing Month. The goal is simple: write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I thought, hey, this could be fun. I thought, maybe I’ll meet fellow writers this way. I thought, this could be my chance to actually finish something.

So I signed up in October and started anticipating that rollover from 11:59 to 12:00 when I could officially start writing on November first.

On October 27th, my roommate died of an overdose.

The next few days were quiet, and numb. I went home to process everything. I had to figure out where I was going to live and what I was going to do from now on. Everything seemed to exist outside of reality; I went through my normal routine, saw some friends, talked about it a little, but it didn’t feel like I was a part of it at all. And I only had a weekend to get myself together and go back to campus and classes. Somewhere in the middle of it all I had to decide if this silly novel thing was really worth it.

After all that, on November first, I took my computer into the library and found a quiet corner. I sat down. I began to write.

That November I wrote over 51,000 words of a fan fiction idea that was in the back of my head for a few years prior. And without really quite meaning to, a good portion of the story was devoted to the death of a character close to the protagonist, and the effect it had on the story.

The dedication in the hard copy of that story is for my roommate. Her life was taken far too early and suddenly. Her Facebook page is still up and something about her will come across my feed every now and then. Every time I see it my stomach twists a bit. Not many people in my life know about this, and I don’t go out of my way to say much. But I still like to think she lives on in some form in my writing.

So many people, advice columns, blogs, etc, will tell you to write every day - this is the only way to improve. I don’t adhere to this whatsoever. In fact, trying to write every day hinders my creative output. I find - and I’m convinced this started with that first National Novel Writing Month that I participated in - I write best during emotional extremes.

I come home near tears from a particularly grueling work shift, and I write. Sometimes the scenes turn unexpectedly dark because of my mood. Sometimes I write something completely ridiculous to get myself to laugh. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth just to get the next sentence out, but I still try it. I write during my commute so I don't risk awkward encounters with other passengers, and it doesn't seem to take so long. I write at three in the morning because I was about to fall asleep and had the most brilliant idea.