day 13: writing what I know

Crap. I’m having just as much trouble trying to figure out where my characters are going to go to college as I did choosing where I would go to college myself! The second college I’ve chosen for them just fell through since I found that they require all entering freshman to live in dorms, and my characters live off-campus in the story. Blah!

Writers don’t generally write college-aged characters, do they? Or not that I’ve found anyway. There’s plenty of high school fiction, plenty of grown up fiction, but no college-aged fiction, and why not, I wonder? I mean, I’m not about to write boring lecture scenes or anything, and in fact, I don’t know of many scenes at all that will actually take place on campus. But I just find it a very interesting time of life. Is it because everybody was so drunk or high in college that nobody remembers it? 😉

So maybe it doesn’t matter? Maybe I’ll just send them to any college? Make up a college? Make up a whole city? Has anyone ever made up an entire university in a work of fiction before? It needs to be a non-selective four-year university, allows commuter students, nearby a metropolitan area, in a city near a river, in Ohio, or Michigan – any ideas? Crap, maybe I’ll just send them where I went, which actually fits the bill.

I keep trying to be creative, and keep trying to write about things and places wildly outside my experience base, and keep coming back to exactly what I know. But most writers do set their stories in the places they’ve lived and worked and studied, right? I mean, that’s pretty normal, isn’t it?

NaNoWriMo Stats: end of day 12
18162 words (on track = 20000)

So anyway, I had a pretty productive day yesterday, and ended up logging about 3000 words. I’m trying not to let this college drama mess up my groove for today.