Kevin Here in these parts, we’re all about holidays and observances, and National Write Your Story Day 2023, or National Write Down Your Story Day 2023 is no exception. In fact, I was today years old when I found out this was even a thing. To me, every day was Write Your Story Day, starting in high school. According to this post, National Write Down Your Story Day is a fairly new observance, having had its origins in 2017, and became official in 2018.
I’ve probably mentioned a time or two that I read a lot of magazines, including a super-obscure late 1990s/early 2000s publication called Jump. No, it’s not the manga publication, since that would be Shonen Jump, despite its’ super similar name. They’re wholly unrelated, but anyways, it lasted for like a nanosecond in the scheme of things, and it’s sad that it didn’t last long.
I’ll admit, some of the stuff in Jump aged like milk, and some of it was weird as shyt, but overall, it was a damn good read each month.
One of the things I remember from it was this big list of stuff to do over the summer break or whatever. In that list, it said to write your biography by writing out answers to various questions in a notebook, and then swapping it w/ friends.
Another similar list I remember, probably from a different magazine publication I’m totally drawing a blank on, said to write out your life story one page a day or something like that, starting on the first day of summer vacay, so that by the time school starts again, you’ll have like a hundred or so pages.
That’s an idea! That’s what I was gonna do, write my story up to that point.
I had a new spiral notebook from the store, and a bunch of pens ready to go. Only instead of limiting myself to one page a day, I wrote however many pages I could before I got bored w/ it and moved on to something else, haha.
I almost filled that notebook completely by the time school started. I never showed it to anyone, and it’s never seen the light of day. I still have it in my old cedar trunk that’s now covered in random stickers and white-out doodles.
I still haven’t been able to read what I wrote that summer. It’s still too upsetting for me. I probably won’t ever read it, for that matter.
I went through high school, and attempted it again the summer before my senior year, but that project didn’t last. I forgot all about it during that tough year, and all through college. After graduation, I took another stab at it, only that time, it was on the laptop I had at the time and loved to bits. It either ran on Windows Vista or Windows 7.
It’s long gone now, and so is that attempt at my story, since I didn’t write it in hard-copy or print it. I didn’t have the ink to do so, and I wanted to save paper anyways.
Probably for the best, imo, since I was in a bad place w/ myself at that time. I decided to stick w/ the journal, and save my story-writing efforts for fiction instead.
Speaking of fiction, I feel like that could count towards Write Your Story Day 2023. It may not be ‘your’ personal story, but it’s a story of your own making, so to me, it counts anyway. Besides, who says whatever you write has to be your autobiography? If going the autobiographical direction’s too upsetting, then I vote to go for something fictional instead. There’s no sense in triggering yourself or ruining your day over some observance or holiday.
Instead of doing another attempt at a real-life story, I’ve decided to devote this observance to working more on a story I started a long time ago. It’s for my own amusement, so it won’t be published. It’s sort of a spinoff of other NaNoWriMo sagas, so it’s basically morphed into an anthology.
Since my mom’s old computer doesn’t have Word, I got a bunch of folders categorized by years, and a bunch of notepads in each one. My earlier NaNoWriMo sagas are all in Word, w/ infodumps and scene ideas in notepads that I’d add onto, even after that year’s NaNoWriMo ended.
Since I’m sick as hell this spring break, I’m gonna spend some time working on some stories that fell by the wayside long enough, and we’ll call it even Steven for National Write Your Story Day 2023. How bout them apples?
Over to you, readers. Have you heard of National Write Your Story Day 2023 or National Write Down Your Story Day 2023? Did you celebrate it last year? Is this year your first year, or are you an old-timer and were in it from the beginning? Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts, your takeaways, and anything you got plans to write about (but only if you’d like to, no pressure!), so drop it all like it’s hot, and let’s talk.
