The Wayward Celt

Saturday was pretty much a failure all around for me. Wordstock was essentially just a book fair with some authors reading passages from their books. Neither is my cup of tea since I find I am rather annoyed by author readings (there is a reason they are writers, not orators) and shopping for books is only fun for me when I am looking for something particular. Jean brought home a stack of tomes, so she made out well and the day wasn’t a total loss for her.
Back at home, a quick nap turned into a lost afternoon into evening, and the drive to do –anything- had completely vanished. Two dvds later and we called it a night.

Sunday was off to a slow start as well. I sat down around noon to get some writing done and found that some system maintenance had to be done, requiring a reboot. So I addressed those issues before digging into my word doc (so as not to interrupt my work flow for a system restart). Three hours later and I was just opening my draft doc to start writing. Nothing like system maintenance to steal hours from your life.

Luckily I was able to pull out just over 3500 words again within about three hours time, making up for the loss of my Saturday in terms of pure word count and bringing the grand total thus far to 14,886. This puts me just slightly behind track for 50k words by Nov. 30th, which I should be able to recover if I up my daily count to 2k per day instead of the 1600 I have been shooting for. This will also take care of the travel at the end of the month where I doubt any writing will take place at all.

On the actual story side, things are starting to come together and are finding a bit more clarity. I’m starting to see the characters in a bit more dimension and they are pushing the story forward as a result. It seems to be working its way into a techno thriller, but I think it is way too early to really make that call and define the genre. I feel a sense of excitement as well as a sense of fear moving forward. I want to figure out how the story plays itself out, but I’m also wondering how I can pull off another 35,000 words by the end of November. I’m not sure the story has that much in it. I have a feeling towards the end of this little project, I will be going back into what I have written here at the beginning and build out some scenes even further to make the 50k goal.

Tweet

Friday was off to a rocky start, even though I had taken it as a vacation day. Or, perhaps, -because- I had taken it as a vacation day is what led me into a half day of doddling, watching a movie, a random nap, cooking some lunch, etc. I got nothing down on paper before noon.

After lunch, and a nap, I sat down to punch out at least 1600 words for the day. In all honesty I had hope to nail down substantially more since I had the whole day to write, but that didn’t seem possible when I started. The motivation wasn’t there, and it was slow going at first.

But…

I tried something new: The location and two characters weren’t taking me anywhere interesting yet, so I built out a scene instead. Starting tight with a vague concept of something I had been rolling in my head for a bit (prior to NaNoWriMo), I pushed out just over 3500 words in about three hours. Whenever I’d hit a snag, I’d toss in two dashes separated by a return so I can go back in and fill in missing stuff in December, and then continue pushing forward wherever the story was taking me. It was quite a relief to finally be interested in the story. The motivation that interest provides was the biggest key for me yesterday, and hopefully into today/tomorrow.

Speaking of which, in a moment Jean and I will be heading out to go take a gander at WordStock, http://www.wordstockfestival.com/
The timing is impeccable, and there will be a NaNoWriMo booth as well as an area for NaNos to site and write together… should be intriguing at the least. Plus, it gets me out of the house and in the midst of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals alike. That should be good for my atrophying social muscles…

Plus, dinner in the city is always nice. The only downside is I am not sure how this will affect my 1600 word goal for the day. Perhaps I’ll just need to bang out another 3500 tomorrow.

Tweet

So I sat down last night to work out a better tactic to move this piece forward in a direction I could sink my teeth into, or if not, at least a direction I could see. I failed to that end yet again, as I still have no idea what I am writing about, even with 7k+ words about two characters, and now, a location to boot. I figured I try taking a hint from something I heard long ago, that location can often be a solid character. I though that since I was just focusing on building characters and getting words on the page, that this may be a key for me to build out a third character without flooding my writing with a bunch of people. Additionally, this would hopefully force me into concrete imagery as well, since it is easier to descriptively write about solid places in ‘concrete’ terms… ok, that was bad, but hopefully you get where my head was on this angle.

Suffice to say I am as equally dispassionate with the location as I am with the two characters I have already worked on. This, I can assure you, is going to make it much more difficult to pull 1600+ words a day for another 3 weeks to make the 50K mark. I need to find my interest in this all. My two characters are flat, one dimensional, and lifeless, but worse, I don’t care what happens to them; which is the death of any piece of fiction. I need to care about something here, otherwise this is an exercise in the abundant use of unnecessary and unconnected adjectives. Hmm, I guess that last sentence kind of proves the point, doesn’t it….

I was hoping that pushing through with a location would spark some sort of emotive connection to this all. I want to be passionate about my characters. I want to care what happens to them. I want to know who they are. And this is the problem I have with fiction; they can be anything I want them to be, but not until I care about them, and I wont care about them until I know more, and I wont know more until I write more, but I can’t write more until I know what I want them to be. BAH. Travelogues and diaries, and ed-op columns, and general musings on life are so much easier than fiction. All I have to do is write about things that exist. With fiction I have to create things which don’t. And that, my loyal readers, is NOT EASY.

So, today, I am going to step away for a bit. Do some laundry, watch some crappy TV, and try tot relax. Rest up. Build back those reserves of emotion that have been drained from me for the past few weeks and then sit down this afternoon to really crank out some big time word counts. I will not focus on ‘trying’, I won’t over think it like I have above, but rather I will just sit down and continue building these three characters until something snaps, or until I hit 50k, whichever comes first.

Tweet

My Twitter update last night pretty much said it all:
“AcdntlPoet… pushed through a hard fought 1658 words in an hour and a half. Today felt like blood from a stone, but the words still came.”

I was exhausted, physically and emotionally from the long day of work that was behind me. Because of that, I fear the 1658 words that came out last night will end up on the cutting room floor at the beginning of December when I start editing. To this point I haven’t read ANYTHING I have written, but I have the sense that one of my old problems and criticisms from my creative writing classes has reared its head again: lack of concrete imagery. As I pushed through last night, working to attain a 1600 word evening, I knew as I was writing that I was missing that solid item. What ended up coming out was just more esoteric internal babble surrounding the character, not describing or showing, but platitudes and clichés.

So, tonight and into tomorrow, the focus is concrete imagery. Still need to build out the characters more, and I have the sense that I am on the edge of some surprise to me, but it’s not quite attainable with what I have yet. I’ll be working to 1600+ words tonight again, and have the day off tomorrow, which I am thinking I’ll use to play catch-up from the beginning of the month and perhaps over achieve for the days later this month when I know I won’t be able to put any words down at all.

I’m also finding that fiction is not one of my strong points. The act of creating something from thin air is daunting, and what I can muster seems only thinly veiled from real life. I find writing about reality much easier to accomplish. I find I work best when a definitive structure is present. With fiction, it seems to me, I have no map to guide me on the way, leaving the journey a rambling mess of a path, at the end of which I find I haven’t gone nearly as far as I had hoped I would, and didn’t experience anything out of the ordinary or exceptional.

Not surprisingly, I have the same problem when I go out to ride my motorcycle; without a destination chosen, my journey is stalled at the beginning not knowing whether to turn left, right, or continue ahead. Some of my best rides were all based around particular destinations, providing that structure to work within and find the most enjoyable way to get there. Not knowing what to write about is leaving me in that same space currently. I fear I will make three right turns and end up finding my journey was a short circle leading me back home.

Tweet

Also behind me is another 1831 words. Marking a grand total (as of Day 5’s start) at: 4,262 words in 4 days.

As I intimated previously, last night’s effort would be on a different character. This worked well to get me started, but things soon swung back to the initial character’s focus. A scene even began to build out unexpectedly and led me down a path I hadn’t planned on. While I am happy I got so much out of that attempt, I am a bit annoyed that I wasn’t able to build the character more, but I guess that’s how this game goes, eh? Just let it take you where it will and don’t worry about what you, as the writer, desires the story to be.

So, tonight I feel, may be a bit more difficult. I am tired from a late elections night and a decided lack of sleep during the work day. Not to mention all the actual work getting in my way of catching up on sleep during the day. Additionally, I feel a need to totally redo what I wrote last night. A feeling which I am fighting, but one that will make it more difficult tonight. Perhaps if I just step back and work on building that second character again, things will come out in a different way, but in a way that will still build on what came out yesterday. Still, the drive to build the character is there, so I should be able to pull out another 1600 in an hour or two tonight again.

Tweet

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.

Tweet

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!

Tweet

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.

Tweet

Down another 4.something pounds from last week’s weigh in. That makes for a total of 8.8lbs over the course of the first two weeks on Jenny Craig. Not an overly dramatic loss, but not a gain either, so that’s good.

Now that the mundane stuff is out of the way, I am going to switch gears….

I caught about an hour and a half of a show last week (or maybe even two weeks ago now). Normally I wouldn’t mention anything about a TV show because, really, TV is boring and the crutch of modern society (ok, except for Feasting on Asphalt, THAT show rocks!). This particular show was a taped conference panel/lecture from a Writer’s Symposium featuring Joyce Carol Oates as the speaker.

Ever since my introduction to writing in high school, I have had a deep appreciation and love for Joyce Carol Oates’ writings. More particularly her short works, though her novels are amazingly well written as well. There is something in Joyce’s voice on paper that drew me in from the first story I read: “Where are you going? Where have you been?”

While I don’t think I can credit her –completely- for sparking and subsequently encouraging my desire to write (both as a hobby and for a living), I do hold her in high regard as both an influence and an inspiration. In fact, I find it amusing to have two “Joyces” so close on that small list; the second being, of course, James Joyce, for nearly the exact same reasons. But I digress…

I realized, while watching Joyce speak to an unseen audience about non-fiction writing, that my own hobby level writing has come to a dead stop and my professional writing has transformed from actual writing to more of an “editor” level capacity while I correct the technical documents and articles being written by my knowledgebase teams out of Bangalore. The only “hobby” writing I have done in the past few years has been in this journal, which as fun as it is, I don’t think really counts. On top of that, I found out that one of my support reps who immigrated here a few years back from Romania, has recently published a book of poetry in his native tongue and in his native country! While the translation he sent me was sub-par, I have no doubts that in the original Romanian his words bloom and flourish beautifully to convey his thoughts in a way that only poetry can deliver.

I can hear you all asking now, “Well if you want to write, then why don’t you just WRITE?!”. Ah, if it were only that easy! I have no doubts that if I could write for a living, I would be much more prolific, but alas, when my work day is done, and I actually have time to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard as it is now), I am greeted by a decided lack of motivation and desire as well as an overall exhaustion preventing me from DOING anything other than turning my brain off and watching “COPS” for hours on end. I long for a day where I could have the luxury of time and a lack of responsibility to just sit and pontificate and spew words out onto paper and see what comes of it.

Even when I do feel energized enough to do anything, my muse seems to have left me high and dry. While I have the desire to write, I can’t seem to find anything of import to write about. I think I need to begin doing some daily or weekly exercises to get me writing again. Perhaps some general character sketches or tackling all my old work in a review/revamp capacity will get me moving forward in a positive fashion. Perhaps I need to do the Jenny Craig for writers, where all topics and assignments for my writing are defined by some seemingly arbitrary yet clearly structured menu system designed to provide the highest return on my investment. Perhaps I just need strict deadlines for creative works with random topics to get me moving forward again.

At the very least, I know I should start reading both Joyces again, as well as some of my other favourite authors; there’s nothing worse than a writer who doesn’t read. And while technical writing is a very good thing for me and my career, it doesn’t quite quell that desire to create something FOR myself rather than for consumption in some professional or commercial way. Looks like it is time to start assigning myself homework…

Tweet