NaNoWriMo: On the Home Stretch

Well, in a few days, it will all be over. I’m down to having to write 1500 words a day to finish on time. I haven’t written my 1500 words for today, but I will.

What I won’t do is finish this novel; I think I’ve probably about hit the halfway point this month.

Since this is a “rewrite from scratch” of a previous novel, the main purpose of NaNo this year wasn’t to create something new, but to see whether it was worth returning to something old — something very, very old. The first draft of this novel was the first novel I wrote, fifteen years ago.

About 45,000 words in, I’m still not sure whether this is a story that is worth revisiting. Last night I had the rather jarring realization that I think I’ve been going about this story all wrong. It’s hard not to feel like all those words written so far were wasted — did I REALLY have to write nearly 50,000 words to realize I should have been doing it differently all along? (Although, if I’m going to be honest and count earlier incarnations of this story, it’s really about 250,000 words later).

I’m still not sure whether I’ve answered the question I set out to answer–namely, whether this story is worth investing in outside of the frenzy of November. I know that after Wednesday, I’ll put this novel away for a long time, as I focus on my other competing writing priorities. There is something about this novel that continues to haunt my psyche; in fact, I think it’s something of a roadmap to my unconscious. Whether I ever do something “more” with this story or not, I have a feeling that even after November 30, I won’t have seen the last of it.

Snow Days and Writing

Snow days are so good for writing.

Being snowed in today reminded me of living in Duluth, and the time I was snowed in my apartment for two days in a row. My room-mate was in India, missing the only blizzard we got that year. I was working on the novel I jokingly called “Go to Hell” because it was a companion novel to one that had the word “Heaven” in the title, and because it gave me so much trouble while I was writing it. But there was something about those snow days that kept driving me to the computer again and again to get those scenes down.

Today I finally collected my 30+ poems from November, pulling them from my paperjournal, my Pictojournal, my Livejournal, and even my program for the Call to Action conference. Now I need to cull the collection down to 10 – 20 pages (currently it’s 36, but I won’t be sorry to see some of those poems go.) Here are a few that I feel more comfortable showing in the light of day now that they’ve gone through a first revision:

Tower

Did I ever tell you how happy I was in that tower?
From there I saw blue water stretch out forever—
I thought the silver moon on the black lake
Was the essence of joy.

From there I saw blue water stretch out forever—
And a narrow bed is never lonely under a full moon.
Was the essence of joy
Lining up my shoes perfectly at the door?

And a narrow bed is never lonely under a full moon,
And no one ever kicks my shoes across the floor.
Lining up my shoes perfectly at the door,
I rearranged the furniture to fill the empty places.

And no one ever kicks my shoes across the floor
When the hours stretch before me like the water below
I rearrange the furniture to fill the empty places,
And I don’t wait at windows for you anymore.

When the hours stretch before me like the water below,
I thought the silver moon on the black lake
And I don’t wait at windows for you anymore.
Did I ever tell you how happy I was in that tower?
- Nov 5, 2010

Disturb the Dandelions

Did you hear what I said
as you glanced up at TVs and waiters?
This conversation
has been choking my brain
like dandelions overrunning the lawn.
I watched them grow as I watched you shrink.

She accused me of pulling out my hair,
dropping it in the breeze like dandelion fluff
just so she could make all
those nights of crying make sense
as I kept my secrets in the room upstairs.
We can open the door to that room tonight,
even if it says
Do Not Disturb.
- Nov 30, 2010

Up to My Eyeballs

My status over at gmail, which is where I keep my “freelance/writing” account, claims that I’m “up to my eyeballs in writing projects.”

And the end of the year certainly is a busy time for writers, but now that we’re on the last day of November, I’m finally able to tick some of those items off my list.

1. NaNoWriMo. No, I didn’t participate this year. But I did spy on my friends who were participating. How did you do? And when can I read your stories?
2. The McSweeny’s Highwire Fiction Award: This is a grant given to a woman younger than 32 to work on her writing. I sent my application off the week before Thanksgiving, and it wasn’t nearly as daunting as I expected it to be. The moral? Don’t ignore opportunities because they seem hard in your mind. Try it before you decide how “hard” it is.
3. The Gotham YA Novel Discovery Contest: This contest requires only the first 250 words and title of your novel, along with a $15 entry fee. I entered it last year, but the rules didn’t say anything about not being able to enter the same novel twice. So, I did. I’m sure the first 250 words are better this time around, anyway.
4. The PAD Chapbook Challenge: I wrote 30 poems in November, y’all! Although I’ve won NaNoWriMo 3 times, this is the first time I’ve successfully completed a poetry challenge. Now I’m putting them aside as I focus on December’s projects.

Numbers 1 – 4 above ALL have November 30 deadlines. What does that mean? If you read this post immediately after it goes up, there might still be time for you!!

Now that those writing adventures are behind me, I can focus on these, in deadline order:

1. Finishing the revision on my final chapter of the YA novel, in time to turn it over to my writers’ group on December 11th.
2. Frantically spit, polish, and shine said novel between December 17 (writers’ group) and December 31 (Delacorte Press First Young Adult Novel Contest deadline).
3. Turn my attention to this jumble of 30 poems and perform same treatment on them to send them off for the January 5 PAD Chapbook Challenge deadline.
4. Prepare a curriculum for Writing for Expression, Reflection, and Legacy, a writing class I’m teaching to senior citizens this spring.
5. And after the class ends in April? There appears to be . . . a void. For now. I can’t wait to see what fills it!

Draft #3 of ETD: Status update 1

ETD are the initials of my new title for the YA novel I’m revising. I don’t feel comfortable making titles public while I’m in the process of drafting, but it’s a little misleading to just call it “my YA novel,” since four of my novels fall into that category.

After doing a ton of untangling between drafts one and two, I expected this round of revision to go a bit more smoothly. But I feel as if I’m untangling wet hair after not using conditioner in the shower–and you might need to have my family’s curly-hair genes to fully appreciate that analogy.

How much can I rearrange the same paragraph? Oh, let me count the ways . . .

Unwriting

Now that I’m heavy into the revision of my novel, I spend my alotted writing time doing a variety of things to it: writing completely new material, cutting and pasting sections, deleting a lot, and scratching my head during it all. I’ve been using the “timed” method of making myself work for a designated period every day, and accepting what comes out of that time. When I’m writing a first draft, I often count my words at the end of my writing session, then pat myself on the back if the result contains four figures.

I learned that using this method of measuring success while revising is rather disheartening. Almost every day this week, I’ve ended my scenes with fewer words than when I began to work. I know slashing all those extra words cluttering up the story is a good thing, but it’s still a bit of a disappointment to learn that all that came out of an hour of work were 450 words. I feel a bit as thought I’m “unwriting” my story for an hour a day.

But it is not NaNoWriMo season anymore. Quantity over quality was justified then. But now it’s time to flip the coin. And I’m off to unwrite some more.

Step One, Intimacy; Step Two, Distance

I’d like to follow up on yesterday’s post about the vulnerability of putting a lot of “yourself” into your writing. I think that the blurred boundary between self and characters during the writing process is incredibly beneficial. Why would you keep returning to these characters again and again if you weren’t personally invested in them? If you think of them as extensions of yourself, or as your “children,” the thought of neglecting them is rather painful, immoral, even. This is all good. It also ties into my advocacy of honest writing. If you’re truly being honest, sharing your work is going to feel a little scary, whether it’s a first draft of a novel or a letter to the editor.

This kind of intimacy and blurred boundaries are less healthy when revising. That’s why part two of my advice is this: when the first draft’s been written, allow yourself distance. Accept the reality that those characters are NOT you, nor are they your children. When someone doesn’t like what you’ve written, or when a writing buddy does an honest critique — good, bad, and ugly — they are not disliking or criticizing you. Just as a child must “grow up” and learn to differentiate herself from her parents, your writing must “grow up” to exist without you.

So rather than get defensive when someone says something seems unbelievable (“What do you mean?!? That’s how it really happened!!”) or when someone points out that a character comes across as whiny (“What?!? I am NOT a whiner!!!”), take a step back. Don’t jump in to defend yourself or your character-extension-of-self. Let the critique settle with you–it will point you to the truths you might have been too close to the situation to see. Just as the “customer is always right,” the “reader is often right.” Sure, you’ll get readers here and there who clearly want something totally different than what you’ve written, and you have to take their feedback with a grain of salt. Yes, as the writer, you have the ultimate say over what you’ll change and what you won’t (I know I’ve certainly dug my heels in on certain points). But if the reader is telling you she doesn’t buy it, listen. And listen well.

At the end of the Mary Sue Litmus Test, there’s a question that asks, “Do you think of your characters more like tools than like friends/children?” This question has stuck with me since I first read it. Yes, think of your characters as friends and children to motivate you to spend SO much time with them. But after the initial draft, remember that they ultimately are tools, to be wielded and refined as you see fit, for that all-important task of telling your story.

Let’s pretend that never happened

I admit, I feel a little embarrassed to show my face here again after my unplanned and unexpected Thanksgiving absence. I can most certainly give very good excuses, but that doesn’t change the fact that I wish I would have found a way to write here, anyway. When I was a kid playing dolls with my sister, when one of them did or said something really stupid, we could invoke the magic words: “Let’s pretend that never happened.” The doll got to preserve his dignity, as if making a fool of himself were just a bad dream. In real life, this doesn’t work quite as well. Denial, as useful as it is, is at best a temporary state.

The good news is that you CAN invoke the all-powerful “it never happened,” when you write fiction. You can wipe the slate clean or even just tidy it up around the edges. As I was entering the last week of my NaNo, I became aware of what the ending should be, and I was giddy with its discovery. The problem was, there were some details in the beginning of the story that would make the ending come across as a little less believable. I tried and tried to attach that ending to what I had like trying to jam pieces together from two different puzzles. And then, eureka! I realized all I had to do was make minor adjustments to the beginning, and the ending would fall into place. And since endings are the hardest part for me (I feel a little jealous of writers who see the ending with perfect clarity before they begin), making some changes to the beginning seemed a small, not to mention obvious, price to pay.

I think that as writers, we often think that, as soon as we’ve put it on paper (or screen), we’ve written it in stone. We’ve sealed our characters’ fate. But we haven’t. We get to change our minds in writing in a way we can’t in our own life. We get to pretend it never happened — and by our very pretending (and judicious use of the “backspace” bar) — we can make it so. What a wonderful world.