Right?

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NaNoWriMo is nearly here again, and I've just spent the night trying to come up with a plot. Two plots in fact, but the detective mystery had too many holes, and the science fiction was just...well, boring. When you're bored by your own plot outline, it's probably not a good idea to write the story.

So I'm asking myself: What is a writer anyway? Is it someone who has a story to tell, and the determination to find a way to tell it? Or is it someone who wants to tell a story, and is determinded to find one?

In other words, which comes first - the thing you want to express, or the desire to express something? I only ask becuase after eight hours bashing ideas together in my head, I'm not sure I've got either.

Samuel Beckett (who I usually list as my favourite author) said the need to express is innate - with the twist that for him there was nothing to express. Dorothea Brande (author of "Becoming a Writer" - the only book on how to write that I've ever found useful) says the thing to do is sit down and start writing, and you'll be surprised how much of the result is good stuff. Martin Amis just said "I want to have written a novel."

I went to school with someone who, at age 15 was a published semi-professional writer of science fiction. Apparantly I appear as a character in one of his long short stories - as "the fairly intelligent man who's trying to be very intelligent." He said the one thing a writer needs is "human compassion".

On the one hand, I have very little sympathy for or interest in the vast majority of the human species. On the other, he said I should definitely try to get my stories about telepathy and time-travel published, 'cos they were good. Incidentally, I was 20 at the time - but that's another story.

So, I have one day to figure out what a writer is, and whether I am one. Or could be one, depending on what it is. Or would be the kind of one that I'd want to read if I decided I was.

One thing I'm sure about: Novels about existential crises and people on a quest for their own identity bore the hell out of me.

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