The Wayward Celt

Yesterday was a beast. Over the course of a chat with theJamez, I realized that I was focusing on the wrong things to make NaNoWriMo completion a possibility. Coming from someone who successfully ‘won’ with over 50k in a month, I take his recommendations seriously. (Well that and he has an MFA in creative writing, so there is academic AND practical experience talking there.)

Given his pep talk and profound advice, I sat back after work yesterday evening and broke into a flurry of prose. I focused only on building out a character. More description than anything else, but it allowed me to pull off 1700 words in just under 2 hours. If I can keep up that pace and do some extra over the weekends, I can easily reach 50k by the end of the month.

The whole process last evening was quite interesting to me. I sat down without knowing –anything- surrounding what was to come, other than the fact that I was going to write about a character. And by that I don’t mean I was going to write about ‘this character’… I mean that all I knew I was going to write about was ‘A character’. From the first word, I began to figure out the basics: man/woman/adult/child, etc. and a scene began to build out of it, hints of a back story started mixing in, and before I knew it, I had six or so pages filled.

I’ll be doing the same tonight before Jean gets home and we sit down to laugh/scream/cry at the television coverage of the election results. Tonight, however, I’ll step away form yesterdays character and work on someone else. That should give me two points to focus future energy when one just isn’t working… I can step away and work on the other to keep things a bit mixed and fresh.

We shall see if this process works as well a second time around.

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I added about 200 words yesterday, and another 500 or so today… what I have discovered in the first two days of attempting the month long novel: I need a guiding direction. Right now, I have no idea what word will come next; no clear concept of –what- I am writing about.

I sat down last night to watch a few movies, and had my notebook and pen next to me to start building out some sort of inspiration or direction. Nothing. I was only able to put down a few ideas of things to help inspire me, nothing about what I want to write about.

It seems it has been so long since I flex my creative muscle that it has atrophied to a scarily stagnant point. I have been so focused in the past ten or so years in building out my technical writing muscles, that I have completely neglected the creative ones. I have substituted any thought about what _I want_ to write about with what I _need_ to write about for work.

I thought I would start by putting a few ‘first lines’ down, but that resulted in tripe. So, instead I pulled out a short piece (which accounted for the first 200 or so words) which I had written ages ago, to build out and use as a basis since it is the one short piece I am most proud of in terms of the craft of writing (the content is really irrelevant). Alas, I can’t even find the inspiration to build that out yet, since it has always stood as a complete piece in my mind.

So I pulled out one of my favourite short works of fiction to read: Earnest Hemmingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
I figured a good read of an inspirational work would get me in the groove… which worked for another 500 words, but resulted in a poor imitation of what I had just read.

I knew when I started this process that it wouldn’t be easy, and that I was setting myself up for failure; after all, I hadn’t written for over 10 years, what made me think I could pull out a 50,000 word novel in 30 days when I also had 40-60 hours of work to focus on each week?

I think what I need to do right now is NOT focus on writing, but rather focus on a topic/theme/subject and find my muse to throw some inspiration my way. Perhaps pulling out a few of my books on writing fiction and novels may be a good start; a way to step back and evaluate or discover what I want to say, what story I want to tell.

At the same time I think I will still continue to try putting down a few paragraphs each day as an exercise in writing and flexing that creative muscle. It doesn’t matter if they are disjointed and unrelated. It doesn’t matter that they may be only exercises in building character or scene, or just focusing in on imagery or dialogue, it will hopefully help me build up those creative chops so when I find that story I’ll be ready to write it down at the speed of light and make my 50K words by the end of the month.. ah, hope springs eternal!

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Yup, I am a glutton for punishment: I committed myself yesterday to writing a 50,000 word novel by the end of November. Given that I haven’t a clue what I am going to write about, this should be a very interesting month indeed…

You can follow my word count progress here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/434324

So, I guess it is time to dust off those writer’s reference books and get to it. At the very least, I am hopeful this will get me a bit more motivated to write and actually put some words together; something this blog was intended for but seems to have been ignored in the recent past.

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