DAY #13
You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.
- Carl Jung
That was the peace quote in my e-mail this morning. Much food for thought.
I should be typing these words in one of the rooms at the back of the house because that’s where the sun is pouring in its early morning light, most welcome after yesterdays Sturm und Drang. One cat is on the back of the couch, his perch so he can look out the window at the passing people and cars; the other is curled up in an African basket underneath the coffee table. It’s a much better morning than yesterday and all because of the abundant light.
I actually did two NaNo sessions in one yesterday so, technically, I’m free to have a day off today. Again, I reworked a piece from earlier so it was far from a challenge. So what I’m planning is to do another session this morning, post-cereal and shower. I also need to go through and list all the various chapters I’ve made up in the order I have them to see if 1) there is any narrative flow and sense as to what follows what and 2) figure out what gaps and missing scenes I need to fill in. I actually rather like what feels like a bit of random juxtaposition of these various non-linear bits.
I was noticing that Kate Atkinson does something similar and to quite a strong effect in the novel I’m now reading, One Good Turn. Shell start in a character’s present moment, let’s say Martin the mystery novelist. Then travel back to a field trip to a prison with his writing group, then back to his days at school, then a scene with his agent and finally, back to the present where she has him meet up with Jackson, her main character and now-ex detective. I don’t know about her other readers, but I happily follow her along. I guess its because she gets inside these quirky, flawed people and offers them up with both tenderness and humor.
Anyhow, I am hoping to be surprised and not thoroughly depressed and/or disgusted by what I notice as I scroll back through the 104 pages I’ve somehow already amassed! Novel-in-a-month. Wow!
DAY #14
I wrote for a couple of hours with cold hands and often shivering because I didn’t bother to change out of flannel PJs or to turn on the heat. It must be colder outside today as it stayed about 59 degrees in here in spite of the gas fireplace. Maybe I was able to keep going because I was writing a scene with a campfire in it. Or maybe I lost myself in the continuous, fictional dream as I think John Gardner calls it. All I know is that now its time for a banana smoothie and a hot shower. After that I’ll decide if I want to crank further beyond today’s 1900 words.
It is absolutely great to have the evil Inner Editor on vacation—and necessary for a crazy project like this novel-in-a-month. Otherwise Id have to be worrying that I have at least three narrative threads going at once, all of them flailing about and nowhere near resolved. If I followed every one down its primrose fictional path, I’d have a (most likely unreadable, uninteresting) novel the length of War and Peace. But all that is OK because this is a rough draft, its impossible to write a finished novel in a month, and isnt it with revision that we truly figure out which story we are meant to tell?
It has evolved that it works better for me to dive in, almost helter skelter, into some writing every day and then figure out where it might fit after the fact. Crazy quilt. Necklace with differently-sized and colored beads. An olio, isn’t that the crossword puzzle word, the one that means a stew or cooking pot, a miscellaneous mélange of things? Pick which metaphor for this project works. Of course this means, at least for now, there are many jarring jolts in the flow of the overall book. Big stuff like point-of-view shifts (whose story is this anyway?) and yet-unclarified timelines (just when is this particular scene, chapter, section taking place anyway? and did they really have mobile phones back then?)—that sort of thing. Egregious errors of basic writing craft let alone the requisite attention to detail, but what the hell? Were after word count and not anything that makes any sense, right?
I continue to be amazed at how much writing I’ve done over the years. I have been taking this writing life seriously for quite some time! I suppose I could be distressed that more of it didn’t “go anywhere.” I guess by that I mean getting something published, even though much of what gets published doesn’t sell and isn’t read by much of anyone and ends up on the remainder shelf. Of course, it may be simply that my fiction isn’t good enough. Truth to tell, I find what I write a little boring at times but then I have no desire or inclination (as of yet) to change that.
So maybe I should head back into therapy to sort out why I seem to have had trouble bringing these projects to a satisfying completion. Not that that would mean publication either. Assuming, again, that is the end game in all of why we sit here, typing away, trying to make new worlds with words. I have to resist feeling like a failure because I’ve accumulated all this material and it remains vague and shapeless, incoherent at times and likely full of cliché. If the only thing I get out of this November novel project is acknowledging how much hard work I’ve done to become a better writer over the years, then that will be a good thing.
Also, an insight that occurred to me yesterday: I couldn’t be successfully writing poetry if I hadn’t taken the time to apprentice myself all these to better learn how to be concrete and specific, how to self-edit, how to manage the flow and energy of lines and paragraphs in prose. I may not want to be a novelist, I may no longer care to write (let alone read) short stories but all of this hard work has not been for naught.
Later after more writing:
Maybe it’s the shivering that makes a person stick with the words and do a yeowoman’s extra word count duty on a blustery Wednesday morning. Or maybe it was the sex scene. The first graphic one I’ve let into the novel. I haven’t sorted how much of a sexy, sexual sub-text I want this novel to have. That’s one of the many narrative threads that, for now, is all clouded up. Just keep writing, right, and then when the shapeless blob reaches 50,000 words (which also, hopefully, means some kind of respectable end) then see what plot lines jump out and need further developing, see which characters you really want to spend more time with and learn more about, including all the secrets.
I have too many characters in the draft so far, too. Or at least too many differently-named people to keep track of, and who may or may not matter to the advancement of the story. Today I did a party scene and that required a crowd of attendees. Or so I thought. It will be interesting to read this all through at the end and see what jumps out, what zings. And if, God forbid, I want to continue working with it.
Apparently, there is NaNoEdMo for editing and revision in March. Yikes!
One other item worth noting: a while back, I wrote the following in the “current projects” section on my website, about something I planned to do in 2007:
I’ve returned to my many writings-to-date about the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania—where I grew up—as springboard for maybe a new poetry chapbook, Meander.
In many ways, that’s what this near-two weeks of NaNoWriMo has been for me, a revisiting of ideas and themes and fixations about home and exile, about the idea of returning and what repercussions that might have. It seems without meaning too, or even conciously, I’ve begun to work on mining my writing about the place where I grew up.
DAY #15
The halfway mark.
Today was diving into the VISTA house pot luck hippie dinner scene and Hank and Irene taking their first walk down to the river. I should have put on some vintage Neil Young for inspiration but, instead, I worked away. Two+ hours with the laptop on my lap and me sitting in front of the couch with the gas fire roaring (can gas fireplaces roar?) I meet the daily NaNo word count short one word. And Hank has finally begun to woo Irene. If it can be called wooing when you go from a shared joint to the back seat of a junker car.
The NaNo advice that came via e-mail this morning was to jump around, write whatever scenes appeal and worry about how they all fit together later, which is exactly (mostly) what I’ve been doing. I have gone back a few times and looked at my current line-up to see if in any way, shape, or form, it might be said to flow. But I haven’t dwelled on that. Move on, type more, go for more word count. I’m at 37,567 words and 128 pages as of today. Of course, I also went back and looked at the 233 I’d amassed on my grad school novel way back when. A brief skimming through the various sections and I wanted to puke. No wonder no one wanted to publish it. So much of the writing totally sucks. There is something to be said for the wisdom one acquires with age and the continued, so often humbling practice of working with words.
Walter Mosley is definitely right. If you show up and spend a couple hours writing, sooner or later you amass a book. Of course he writes ones about a great character, Easy Rawlins, and his don’t suck and need years of wrenching revision like what I am working on now. But I have been showing up and we are now halfway through the month of November. At this point, I suspect I’ll easily make it to 50,000 words. But will it be interesting, populated with engaging and complex characters? Readable? Will it actually have a coherent plot line or two? A climax? A conclusion?
In the next fifteen days, all that remains to be seen.
NANO DAY #16
Today, Friday, Day #16 of NaNo, past the halfway point, I don’t feel like writing. I’ve been awake an hour and did my journal, found a poem on the Nation website that I read and liked yesterday (before leaving the mag in the rack at the Kennedy School for someone else to find and read) and bought our tickets for our 2008 pilgrimage to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Today was the day the first category of our membership was allowed to buy and I wanted to get the jump on good seats.
Very rainy outside this morning. This may be my day off from walking, too. A good day to be in the kitchen making soups, listening to the radio or CDs. Chopping carrots and celery might be just the rhythm my imagination needs in order to get a feeling of where in this damn novel I need to fill in the holes, and where I need to dig deeper.
I can already feel that Irene needs more obsessions—like Jackson Brodie, the main character in Kate Atkinson’s latest books. He’s got his listening to all the soulful country girl singers like Lucinda and EmmyLou and Trisha, moving to France, the basic melancholy dreariness of life once you get to be of a certain middle age. Right now, Irene isn’t fully formed in many sections of the so-called novel. She seems to me to be simply out there, wandering, reacting, mostly observing. Maybe she could be learning Italian—why? Or Meanders little literary angel trying to put her already-read magazines in public places where others will find and perhaps be enlightened by then? Or leaving books to be found—wasn’t there some project that actually encouraged people to do that? Not unlike the “find a red book” treasure hunt that was part of the Wordstock Literary Festival. I’ll have to muse on this more.
As well as ask myself, does this story really need to be told? If yes, why? And why me to tell it? And if yes, whose story is it? what is it really about?
I went through the whole mess a few days ago, charting the rise and fall of action, the connecting between one chapter and the next. I can see it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re accumulating particularly when you are in crank-out-the-words mode. I’m not quite ready to waste printer ink and print out the whole to-date draft. Maybe next week.
A crow is perched on a thick black wire that runs to a telephone pole. Another flies off into the tree across the street. Cars going down 22nd have their lights on, to pierce the gray of this day. I drink my smoothie and ask myself, what would Irene do? But maybe that’s the issue. Maybe I can’t inhabit Irene.
