pen ink river

NANO DAY #17
Saturday morning, rainy, fog, gray. J. back from his week in DC. We are off to look at houses with a realtor in a couple of hours. I’d like to run errands, stop by the library, maybe see a matinee or make a nice dinner, finish my Kate Atkinson book. So I’m taking at least the morning off, possibly the whole day, from novel-writing. I hate to say this but all that seems much more interesting and fun to me than sitting around adding more words to a shitty novel that will never make it out the running gate. Bad attitude? Or realistic? After reading the interview with Norman Mailer in the most recent Paris Review, I’d say the latter. I guess I am ready for a change...

NANO DAY #18

Low-word count day here as it’s a Sunday morning after a bad night of sleep with wheezing and feeling like I am coming down with a cold. I know that’s no excuse but, between that and the ongoing PMS, I just don’t have the fiction-writing drive inside me today. Sometimes feeling unwell in the body trumps everything else.

Yesterday, I finished One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson’s wonderful (second) Jackson Brodie "mystery" novel. I’m not sure assigning this novel to the Mystery section (as the library has done) does the humor, irony, complexity, and biting social commentary of her work justice. She’s just so good. It makes me want to throw in the towel re: writing even mildly decent fiction and get a lot more honest and real with myself about what I am and am not going to write from here on out.

Meanwhile, the galleys of my poetry book are arriving by priority mail Monday or Tuesday. I have to make sure to make time to celebrate and feel excited about that because, really, it is a milestone and I do feel proud. I did it—thanks to my tenacity and doggedness and a great deal of feedback from L. and B. in our chapbook on-line class. It is still hard to believe I am such a beginner, returning to seriously think about writing poetry barely two years ago and already, to have this book. After all those years struggling with fiction, the rejections and then the eye-opening lesson in all that dreck that is the Tin House unsolicited manuscripts pile. I think I already know the answer about me and fiction—actually, I’ve known for quite some time but remained somehow unwilling to speak it to the world—was that it? Or is it even more difficult and complex, something about me feeling that IF I admit I don’t want to do this—for a ton of carefully considered and defensible reasons, somehow it marks me as a failure. In whose eyes? My own or some other outside of me I shouldn’t be listening to anyway? A voice I should have exorcised long ago?

Still, I’ll continue with NaNoWriMo just for the hell of it. I have to be able to crank out another 10,000 words in the remaining days. Maybe I’ll even have something to show for it by the end. Not that anyone would want to read it!

NANO DAY #19

I think today I’ve finally concluded? realized? accepted? that (of course) I am writing a novel that is more like a collection of linked stories. Which is fine. And what I really loved about many books I read including Joan Silber’s book, Ideas of Heaven. It’s also a way to have more characters who may or may not have to be related (something I love about Kate Atkinson’s books) and a way to tell a story like a kaleidoscope or a necklace, images I used when I was first thinking about doing NaNoWriMo. And it is the kind of fiction I often prefer to read and therefore what kind I should be writing. So maybe my NaNo mess can actually be pared and edited into something, in spite of all my negative feelings about its shapeless idiocy the past week and that this was only an exercise in piloting me back to poetry.

And more realizations. (Again, these have been known for a while but I guess I was in denial or some state of refusing to accept them?

I am not a plodding, plot-driven person. This happened, then this happened, then that. Or what if Mr. A decided to do X to Ms. B and then run away with Mrs. C., what happens then? For some reason writing like that bores me. Not able to fool with the nuances of language enough? Not poetic enough? Not fracturing and bending narrative to stir up questions enough? I don’t mind reading books that do that. Far from it. But the stuff that I learn from, that intrigues me, that I guess I would say are some of my all-time favorites—Ulysses, Proust, Beloved, Michael Ondaatje’s work, Denis Johnson, even Alice Munro—that material hardly follows a straight line.

So a good NaNo morning as I inch close to come kind of end. I suppose if I get to 50K before November 30th, I can keep adding more or go back and see what is salvageable and could work as a coherent whole from what I’ve already done.

NANO DAY #20
I woke, made coffee, wrote in my journal, drank more coffee, worked on the NaNo pages, updated my word count, drank more coffee, and am now turning to the rest of the day. There is sun down south of here in the Willamette Valley; soon, it’s supposed to make an appearance here.

I suppose it feels like an even longer month, a long, lonely novel-writing slog, when you don’t approach this like a party and go to NaNo events and interact with people from your NaNo home region and have a passel of NaNo buddies and, in general, make this Something to Remember rather than the basic Nothing it’s turning out to be for me. Not that I anticipated anything much different. I’m not a socializing writer. I have my routine and then move on to whatever is next in my day. I don’t have a tribe to turn to for therapy or angst-sharing about whether or not I’m doing the work. Even if I did, I’m not sure I would. That said, it would be good to have a handful of friends to call and chat with about this writing life and work. I think that is what could be had by joining a real, functioning writing group here in Portland. I’ll wait and see if the Attic workshop morphs into anything like that. I suppose there’s always placing a note on Craig’s List.

It seems this NaNo is just another excuse to party for some of the participants. To feel connected to and part of something that a collective we are doing, have done, and can wear the T-shirts to prove it. One more attempt to bring together (Internet-enabled) like-minded souls. Except it’s not for me. Because, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned this month it’s that getting to the 50,000 the word count isn’t the problem. I have written, am able to write, have made writing the priority in my life. One of the big issues for me is the why. Why do I think I want to do this? What am I trying to prove? And to whom? And for what? Seems that after my NaNo sessions nearly every one of these twenty days so far, I’ve also spend some time reflecting about these concerns. Soul-searching some might call it. More realistically, it’s an attempt to figure out why something that (increasingly) comes easily to me (the words, not necessarily all the other novel subtleties) is something I don’t enjoy or find fun. I think it’s because I only like the words, that I maybe even hate all the mechanics, all those other novelistic nuances and subtleties. I know, this month we are only supposed to get the words down and out and counted up. And I have obviously done that. But to what end? Is that what my lesson in all of this is? To practice letting go of outcomes? of achievement? Of adding this as another notch on the resume belt?

It seems this NaNoWriMo might be best suited to those who say they want to write (and maybe even do want to write) but never find or make the time. And those who need a kick in the pants to just do it. And those lucky who have a great idea with lots of momentum and energy and need to get it down fast as possible so that it can then become what it is meant to be under revision. And let’s face facts: most of the 50,000 word novels written by would-be novelists this month will suck. Won’t go anywhere. Never needed to be written in the first place. And I definitely would have no interest in reading them. There is (I agree) something to be said for sticking with a project. That, indeed, was a lot of the energy in Chris Baty’s book, No Plot? No Problem. Participate, stick to it, have something to show at the end that says you stuck do it and met your goal. All well and good in terms of the perhaps-Zen-like, in-the-moment, unattached-to-outcomes element of such an endeavor. Not so great in terms of foolishly wasting precious time I could be devoting to other projects, work, etc. Maybe I’m sounding like a tedious 50-something here, what with this obsession with efficient use of the time I’ve got in the “rest of my life”—rather than going with the fun, the flow, the living in the moment. Unfortunately, I’ve been there and done that and it’s in large part why my first book of writing (albeit poetry not fiction) hasn’t come out until now.

I guess thought it would be a useful exercise for me because of the Inner Editor on Vacation part. And, in light of that, it has been. But mostly what I’ve discovered are two things that actually seem in opposition to one another: (1) While it’s relatively easy for me to amass words, that once started and committed to daily writing practice on a subject or even a project, they tumble out. (2) Still, I mostly don’t have any interest in sustaining the interest or drive or energy to figure out to shape them into a novel anyone would ever want to read.

Read my lips: I am not a novelist. Now, can I just accept this fact and (finally, definitively, once and for all) move the hell on?