Folks want what they don’t have. That’s the way of things, and no mistake. Allow me to wax poetical for a slight moment when I say, “Desire is the strongest tonic in the world and in all the other worlds of the infinitesimal universe.” That’s my feeling anyway. Nobody never asked me ‘bout it, but I know it just the same. Desire. Strong stuff.
Category: NaNoWriMo (Page 2 of 3)
Each day this November, I will post the words I write for NaNo here on the blog. Unedited. Pure and unvarnished. My NaNo “novel” will take shape before your very eyes, out in the open for all to see.
My “novel” is not a novel this year. As I mentioned, I’m rebelling and writing a collection of unconnected short stories (plus a novella). And each day, I will post what I write so others can see how these stories take shape. No editing. Very little planning. I’m letting it all hang out.
This is probably a crazy plan, but I’m hoping the added pressure of posting my NaNo writing to the blog will help me stay focused and disciplined. That’s the plan anyway.
My first round of NaNo writing will be posted by the end of the day (she said with a fierce glint of hope in her eye).
Am I Supposed to “Pants” This?
I don’t have a lot of experience writing short stories. Am I supposed to outline them before I start writing? Do I plan? What’s the procedure here?
Over the long course of writing Thirteen Treasures, I’ve discovered that I work better as a “Plotter.” If nothing else, when the plot is outlined, I know what I need to write when I sit down at the computer every morning. Even if I only manage to eek out a few hundred words, I’m confident that I’m on the right track. When I used to work without a detailed outline, I’d sit down and have no clue what to do or what to write next. I almost always ended up with endings that were ridiculous and unsatisfying.
But short stories feel different to me. Maybe it’s because I have Ray Bradbury whispering in my head to write from my subconscious dreamland and let the deep-seeded obsessions of my childhood be my guide, but writing a short story from a detailed outline feels like overkill, as if the weight of the outline will crush the delicacy of the story. Or maybe that’s hogwash. I don’t know; I’m new at this.
Title First, Story Later
So I’m gonna start with my titles and hope that story ideas follow on their heels.
Story #1: “Lightning in the Black Bottle”
Story #2: “The Treasures Three” (this one is going to be in the same universe as my Merlin’s Last Magic serial)
Story #3: “Song Child”
Story #4: “Things” (yeah, I’m getting real creative here…)
Novella Title: Avalon Summer
“Where do you get your ideas?”
I’ve been thinking about Avalon Summer and the story I want to tell for almost ten years. It’s part memoir, part fantasy, and it began life as an R.E.M. song. More specifically, two songs, which came out when I was eleven, and which always makes me think of summers at my grandmother’s and the melancholy that comes with growing up.
“Nightswimming” and “Find the River” have become almost mystical songs for me at this point, telling the story and the mood of a time in my life that is at once real and unreal, actual and imagined, something that happened and something I dreamed would happen, the two sides — memoir and fantasy — swirling together so completely that it’s hard to tease any of the threads apart. “Nightswimming” is about the past, about remembering; “Find the River” is about the end of something, of the river flowing, of the march of time — the bitter-sweetness that comes from searching. It’s hard to describe the effect these songs have on me, but perhaps the best way to describe it is to write the story. After all, “story” is what we create when we can’t explain. Stories are how we communicate the elusive ideas.
It’s pretty obvious from the description of my Merlin serial that I’m interested in Arthurian legends, and it’s an interest that began when I was a kid. Rosemary Sutcliff’s books about King Arthur were transformational, and much of my childhood was spent playing “knights” (i.e.: running around my grandmother’s four acres with wooden swords, pretending trees were dragons).
I know that Avalon Summer has to have a forest in it. There must also be an evening spent eating Chinese food and playing the Dark Tower board game. At some point, an iron-wrought gate must figure in. And a bookstore. These are my ideas, but I’m not sure yet how they hang together, how I thread them into a tale.
More to come, I guess…
I asked my students this morning if they knew what day it was.
“October 1st!” (Yes, obviously. It’s written on the board.)
“Thursday!” (Thank you, Miss Wisenheimer in the back of class.)
“The feast day of St. Therese of Lisieux!” (It’s a Catholic school.)
Finally, one perceptive student:
“One month till Nano?”
Yes, one month until NaNoWriMo starts. A time for planning. A time for anticipation. A time for making grand plans about all the writing I’m going to do as soon as midnight hits on November 1st.
And then, of course, November 1st comes and goes and I barely eek out 100 words because… FILL IN THE BLANK (a. the Noodle has a terrible cold, b. *I* have a terrible cold, c. November 1st falls on my grocery-shopping day and I have to make dinner and grade a stack of papers and clean the house because my in-laws are coming over and the cats peed all over the laundry room floor, d. All of the above).
Or November comes and I start writing my brilliant novel and I’m hitting those word count goals — BAM, BAM, BAM! — and the world is my oyster and life is just grand. Until November 10th, at which point I HATE my novel and the words are dripping out like a tiny leak in the faucet and the world has ceased being my oyster and is only my half-eaten can of pickled herring that expired in 2008.
And so the cycle continues: Every October, I’m gearing up with fevered excitement for NaNo, and by December 1st, I’m crying into my stale beer.
So this year, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to join the rebellion. I’m going to be a NaNo Rebel.
And I’m going to do it all — unfiltered, unedited, unburdened by shame or regret — right here on my website. Every single one of my 50,000 words will be written here, on the blog, as I’m composing them, straight from my brain to you, the readers. No edits. No skipped days. Guaranteed, every day, for thirty days, I will write some fiction on this blog. (I can’t believe I’m promising this…)
“But what makes that rebellious?” (you might ask)
“After all” (you say), “blogging a novel is still writing one, and per the rules of NaNo, it still counts.”
But that’s just it. I’m not going to be writing a novel.
Noveling during November hasn’t worked for me. I’m tossing aside the task of writing a novel.
I’m taking on a challenge I’ve never really taken on before. I’m doing something for which I have had no practice and very little skill. I’m doing something that is (for me) slightly bonkers.
I’m going to write short stories. Four, to be precise.
And a novella. Because that’s what’s itching inside my brain.
All completely disconnected from each other. No shared universe. No shared characters. Each one separate.
Rebellion.
For the next 31 days, I’ll share my ideas and outlines and some world-building for these different stories, and then, on November 1st, I’ll begin writing.
Each day, new words. Five different stories (or maybe more). One month. All in real-time.
I’m pretty sure this is madness. But I’m doing it anyway. Stay tuned.
I teach high school English, so of course, I give a lot of writing advice to my students. It’s my job, after all, to teach young people how to write. And for years, I’ve passed on the two “golden rules” of writing, the same essential words of wisdom that I learned from my own mentors: 1. All rough drafts suck, and 2.) Writing is rewriting.
And yet… When I think of some of my best writing — the stuff that soared and sang from my pen and felt true from the first word — much of it came fully formed on the first draft, with only a few minor touches and polishes coming afterward in the editing phase. If I’m totally honest with myself, my rough drafts didn’t suck at all. In fact, they were usually right on the mark. The only revision I really needed to do was clean up some prose, fix a few grammar issues, maybe add a line or two here or there, and cut out a few extraneous bits. But the works themselves — whether essay, poem, story, or article — were anything but sucky. And those times when the first draft truly was bad, even in revision, I couldn’t fix it all that much. There is one time — and only one time — when I remember revising an essay multiple times and making it really good.
So I’m not saying revision or editing are bad things. I have had to polish and do minor edits on most everything I’ve written. But the whole “first draft is crappy” thing? I’m kinda not buying it (at least not in my case). In my case, if the first draft is bad, it’s a sign I need to write a new draft, not try to revise the bad one. It’s a sign that something was off about that first try, and that the way to go is to give it ANOTHER try, not try to polish something that’s no good.
What’s got me thinking about all of this is my decision to start the Thirteen Treasures of Britain over from scratch. There were too many things in the first draft that I didn’t like, that didn’t work. Instead of trying to patch the first draft into a Frankenstein’s monster of a story, I decided to simply start over, to write the whole thing new from the beginning. Perhaps this IS a form of revision, but for me, it doesn’t feel like revision; it feels like a new start, a new story. And this story, this new creation, is already much better than the old one. Yes, I will still need to edit and polish, but this time, I won’t be working with a sucky draft. I’ll be working with a draft that soared and sang and felt true from the first word.
Realigning my thinking when it comes to drafts and revisions means that I’m not forcing myself to write everyday. I check in with my draft nearly everyday — reading bits here and there, adding or changing things as needed, keeping my enthusiasm and imagination charged — but I don’t feel required to plop down 250 words at the end of the night after the baby’s in bed and I’m tired from the day’s work. Because those 250 dead-eyed, zonked-out words are usually crap, and when I read them the next day, I end up deleting them all. What good are 250 words if they’re totally irredeemable?
So I don’t write everyday. I write when I feel fresh. When I have a good chunk of time to devote to thinking. When the story is clicking. And if the story isn’t clicking, if the effort feels strained, if I’m writing garbage, I stop. And I come back to it another day. I try a different chapter or a different type of writing. I don’t force things, because when I force things, I end up with a lot of splintered and broken things. And there’s no way for me to fix something once it’s splintered.
If this seems like I’m breaking the number one rule of writers (i.e.: write everyday), then yes, I’m breaking that rule. What can I say? I’m a rebel. I always have been, so why change now? I tried the conventional “write everyday,” “first drafts suck,” “don’t get it right, get it written,” and frankly, those conventional ways don’t work for me. And perhaps that’s the point of this post. When it comes to writing, there is no ONE way of doing anything.
I hold to the old ways of celebrating the twelve days of Christmas. So happy Feast of St. John!
I’m on Christmas break (two whole weeks off from work!), so it’s been a good time for getting writing done. Unfortunately, I’m not where I wanted to be at this point in my novel, but I’m still making headway.
I am getting into the third act of my novel (I trained as a screenwriter, so my lingo is still very much screenwriter-ish), and it’s looking like the story will be shorter than I originally planned. At least in the rough draft stage. It’s possible that when I write the second draft it will get longer again, but for now, I’m looking at a 75,000 word rough draft instead of an 80,000 word one.
This is a bit of a relief, since I’ve been struggling to reach my word count goals each day. Maybe there’s just not enough plot/conflict/urgency in my story (which I’m hoping to fix in the second draft). I’ve also given myself an extended deadline. I’m off from work until January 5, so my new deadline is January 4. This means I’ve got to write about 22,000 words in the next week. This is still ambitious (my average words per day usually hovers around 1,100), but it’s doable.
I’m getting to the point in the rough draft where I can see how much editing needs to be done and I want to skip ahead to the editing/revision phase. It’s hard to focus on writing this crappy rough draft when I’m so desperately itching to focus on writing the much-better second draft. At this point, I just need to Get It Done, but it’s proving a hard task.
I will now rub my NaNoWriMo “Inspiration” sticker for some inspiration. Also, St. John the Evangelist and Apostle (whose feast we celebrate today) is one of the patron saints of authors and booksellers. Maybe his intercession will also help me.
