pen ink river

NaNo #5

This morning’s peace quote is from Basho:

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

Just another manic Monday, to quote a Bangles song I used to be most fond of way back when. Up early to drive J. downtown as he had to take luggage and then get a rental car for his three days down in Corvallis this week. Then back here for more caffeine, then a phone call and saying yes to an early lunch plan that began a half hour earlier then expected but luckily just as I was finishing up some edits to 1900+ already-crafted words.

This so-called novel is, right now, a bit of a patchwork quilt. I have taken a number of bits I had, added new fabric, then temporarily joined and spread the mess out to see where there are holes and in what ways, if any, they should be more permanently pieced together. There’s still so much to figure out, to do! A lesson I learned long ago about morning and distractions played its hand this morning and now, half past noon, I’m almost ready to shift into errand-running mode so I can get back here, do a few household tasks and then, if I’m lucky, feel this day’s second creative wind.

I think that is what I will do. Go out for a bit, then start the day over. I feel scattered and a bit out-of-focus. There’s still time to make good on this writing day yet.

One thing worth noting from the file drawer cleanup over the weekend:

It was good, even encouraging, to read comments on my fiction from the teachers I’ve worked with over the past ten years. They were pretty much unanimously complimentary. I suspect that’s a good bit of why I’m feeling OK about adding the novel material already worked over as more beads on my creative necklace. I worked hard on it way back when, had the courage to have it read and critiqued by strangers. Rather than toss it out, or belabor it more, or start everything from scratch.

A painter friend reminds me that, in this, I’ve already learned things, which is a large part of the zany goal of working on a novel in a month. And that I miss poetry. And that my old work is of good enough quality to mesh with the know. All important things.

I also skimmed another of the volumes about the writing process that I found on my bookshelves as part of unpacking after the move. No major revelations, no rocket science or contributions to understanding the origin of the universe or stars but a few decent bits of advice about the percolation process that is so key to a creative life. I think the author, a Bonni Goldberg, is correct in reminding those who word with words to spend some time figuring what aspect of the writing process you privilege. For example, I think I give more value to the creation of new material rather than the research, the mulling, the freewriting, or the revising of earlier drafts. Which would then mean (according to her ideas) that I am stressing myself out all the time by discounting those other necessary aspects which I am doing, happily and quite regularly, as part of my dedication to the writing life. Another how-to book that can join the pile of books to be sold to Powell’s or Browser’s in Corvallis but still, useful to spend some time skimming it as this Monday edged from afternoon into dark.

NaNo Day #6

It’s noon, I’ve had my low-cal tuna sandwich for lunch, the dishwasher’s loaded, and the trash is out at the curb. Now if I could just stop eating the Paul Newman’s Championship Chip cookies I foolishly bought at New Seasons yesterday afternoon. Or maybe the cookies are part of a necessary reward I somehow need now for showing up and starting the day typing away at this keyboard, adding more words to my NaNoWriMo count. Today I pretty much went right from the coma of sleep and crazy, disconnected dreams to writing. A sentence came to me that would allow me to shift from ending of yesterday’s scene to the beginning of a new one. Once I dove in with that, the words flowed.

What did I notice or learn today? Maybe it’s the sign of a fictional amateur but digression into memory, into scenes that have nothing to do with the action at hand, seem to be popping up for me more and more I wrote. At least, that’s the way the story wanted to go today. I think it’s partly because I have lots of source material, much of it somehow lodged in my psychic memory from when I worked on these ideas four or five years ago in 2002 and 2003. As a result, I’ve begun to notice that, as I am shaping scene—stringing words together in sentence after sentence to describe a setting, or report a conversation, and hopefully advance the story line as well—I am thinking something like, haven’t I already written about this, before? And lo and behold, in my fairly organized source material and previous files, I might find a shard of something to keep me going, inspire a free write or send the chapter off into an entirely new direction.

Because of the NaNoWriMo “no revising, keep on writing” mantra, I can let myself explore, even digress, without fretting at this stage about whether or not it actually makes sense or fits in, both elements of novel writing that, I think, have paralyzed my forward progress in the past. What a blessing and a relief. Very freeing to experiment and fool around, rather than fuss. I also like that I don’t have to have much of an idea of where I am going to begin my writing the next day. There is comfort in knowing that 1) I am going to show up 2) I am going to write and 3) By the end of the time I’m spend writing, the story will have inched forward in some fashion.

This morning I returned to the necklace metaphor I came up with for this story way back when. My original idea was to let myself simply string together differently shaped and crafted bits as I go along, seeing them for the individual lovely beads that they all are rather than worrying if they add up to a coherent something. I think it suits the kind of writer I am to work this—less plot-fixated, more poetic and non-linear—especially when it comes to longer narrative/prose/fiction. I even have a necklace as a model: a gorgeous strand of vintage Mardi Gras beads from when they threw glass ones to the crowds. I think I will wear it when I go to hear Krishna Das this eve. The trickiest part so far with the writing this way is figuring out how to structure it in a single document. I also had to go back through all my work days and re-do word counts. I just realized (re-noticed?) today that Microsoft Word has a tiny feature that counts the words and shows me the running tally at the bottom of my document. Duh. Now, with today and double-checking my arithmetic, the tally-to-date is now (finally) accurate.

So a bit of first thought, best thought and I was off and running this morning. And I even have notes for what I think I’ll likely work on tomorrow—the rest of the cabin cleaning scene and lunch at the Burnt Woods Cafe. Now it’s time to turn into housefrau and deal with changing the linens, putting the rest of the trash out on the curb, and folding and putting away yesterday’s batch of clean clothes.

NaNo #7

Today I think I will be noveling (is that a real word?) in two parts. My morning shift was fixing a huge hole in the narrative I realized at the end of yesterday’s marathon session: I’d made no mention of the box of dead Hank’s ashes which would surely be a presence in his house as his son and ex-wife started to clean out his personal effects. So, this morning it took a 574 words or so to start the cabin cleaning chapter differently and add Hank’s ashes as a presence, watching over them, as Miles and Irene go about their cleaning, sorting and packing up work. Since whatever I turn to next is likely to be unrelated to the cabin scene, I’m going to head out on errands in a bit. When I return, if the fog has burned off and it’s sunny, I may go on my walk to the co-op and back. If not, more words, I suspect.

Anything noted or learned this morning? It’s awfully cozy (and easier on the back) to sit and type seated on the couch in front of the gas fireplace. And it’s pretty darn easy to accumulate close to a third of the NaNo daily word count simply by returning to earlier material, fleshing it out, filling in the holes. I think this is what is meant by setting an intention for one’s writing work for any given day. Today I knew I had to deal with Hank’s box of cremains (as they are known in the death industry), that this was an object that couldn’t be MIA until the revision process. In fact, if anything, I probably need to write about it more.

NaNo #8

Simply by typing along this morning for about ninety minutes or so, I reached the daily word count. Have I mentioned yet that, unfortunately, what I’m writing totally sucks? I can already tell (even with my critic on temporary vacation) that there’s no dramatic tension, no crescendo of narrative development, that the dialogue between the mother and son as they drive to a diner is flat, and I’m definitely not selecting the most illuminating, original, to-die-for details to best depict each and every scene. Still, the word count amasses. I begin to think I’ll have no trouble getting to the 50K word count. More likely, I’ll lose interest in the project, idea, story, characters before then. Because I’m in a bit of that place now. This in spite of letting my fingers to the talking this morning and keeping my evil inner editor at bay. I edited a letter that my main character found while packing up a dead man’s files from his desk. I had two characters move boxes from the back of an SUV to a post office counter. I had them enter a diner and described the stools and booths. I stopped just before I’d actually have to have some interesting, dramatic interaction between several characters. It will be interesting to see if I begin here again tomorrow or avoid what I don’t know (don’t care to explore and find out?) about the people who, so far, have shown up in this book.

Since beginning this project a short week ago, I have noticed a pattern. The day afterthe days when I crank, when I really push and have ended up with a word count above and beyond the requisite 1667 goal, I seem only able to squeak out a tiny number of words, 500-600. There may be a lesson in this if the pattern continues for the rest of the month: stop before you burn yourself out on a single writing day so you have reserves and a desire to keep going when you return the following day. Which is a maxim I remember Jack and others talking about in grad school. And something I’m sure I already felt certain I learned other times I worked on short stories and my grad school novel. Oh well, here comes the insight yet again. Some of us take a while.

What else? There is something to be said for just plugging along and not caring if the details mesh rather than contradict one another, that the timelines are in synch, that what you’ve already made happen fits with who these characters are, what their desires and engines of purpose seem to be. There remains a part of me—and this is not a new insight, rather one I had at least five years back, the one that led me back to poetry and shorter pieces—that does not like the on and on and on process that is writing a novel. I really do prefer to begin and complete, begin again and complete. I don’t mind the revision process with a poem, where you might come back to it after a time and hear a sound differently, alter a word choice from the previous draft that now, for whatever reasons, clunks.

But the novel-as-a-form and novel-writing process feels more like an ordeal to me, what with its length, its unwieldy structure, its humans you have to care about if you want to have your reader identify with them or at least be amused by so you don’t bore yourself silly while moving them around. Maybe I’’ve always been a sprinter and not a marathon kind of gal. And all of this is perfectly OK. It’s part of why I wanted to do this NaNoWriMo in the first place, to compress my sorting out the kind of writing I prefer in the short, efficient span of a single month. And why I’m doing these daily blogs, to try and chart what I feel I’m learning, what insights are bubbling up. Not that I expect any surprises; I already have a pretty good idea of what I’ll conclude. I guess I’d just like to make peace, once and for all, with the whole open-ended blah blah blah indecisiveness as to what kind of writer I truly am. And then to get on with that.