day 11: making friends with the slog

It's been kind of a hard week around here on personal and professional fronts. Yesterday was a doozy for reasons I don't want to get into here, but let's just say I needed a giant-sized margarita at dinner last night.

It's been really important to me not to let go of my dream of completing this month-long challenge and to write something daily, though, so every night I've dragged myself to my desk to put in a few hundred words. Except for one brief five-minute period where Husband said it was fun to listen to the rapid clatter of the keyboard, it's mostly been peck-peck-peck. And I ended the week a few hundred words short of where I need to be. It's hard to want to write well, make lovely understated copy, and churn out schlock, but I'm doing it and am managing to feel darn proud.

This morning, Husband took child Blossom grocery shopping and deposited child Sprout at a friend's house. I sat down to an unfinished scene and in the quiet (and without the sleepiness of my usual 10 p.m. date with my desk), I found the words flowing again and even got a couple of ideas to move the plot along a little further in a section that was so hazy it was starting to feel like it didn't belong in this plot--even though it was the spark for my original idea. It made me realize that, even on these hard nights where I planned to just sit down for 50 words so I could keep my promise to myself to write daily, I usually ended up with at least 500. And with a weekend that promises at least a few more 30-minute bites for working, I expect by Monday, I'll be groovin' along again--with the added bonus of having learned that the slog works, if we just keep at it.

day 6: calamity

Tonight, thanks to a hiccup in the internet universe, I lost my whole day's work--only about 800 words, but a pivotal scene. I grappled briefly with shall I try to rewrite this scene while it's as fresh as it's ever going to be? or just go on to the next one and come back to this one later, when I'm not trying so hard to chase the words that. Are. Just. Gone?

(Ugh. Because they really are gone. When you're writing this fast, the good thing is that the words can get flowing pretty well. The bad thing is that you don't really remember what you wrote until you review it.)

Suffice it to say, my love affair with Google Docs from day 1 is over. And I am reminding myself about the utility of the lowly flash drive. Stupid rookie lessons, ignored in my optimistic hubris that this project is just going to go smoothly, dammit.

Okay, it's not a calamity--it wasn't the whole 10K--but it does have me thinking about how ephemeral the act of "making" truly is. Lots of writers have their "lost manuscript" story--Garrison Keillor and leaving the finished manuscript on the train comes to mind (perhaps apocryphally). I am still convinced that the lost pages of my master's thesis (disappeared during another freak computer snafu, come to think of it) are the best work I would write on that project, and perhaps ever.

But I know better now, right? These are just words, and there are plenty more where they come from. The only works of art I've ever made with true staying power in a tangible sense are sleeping in their beds down the hall right now. And they will wake up tomorrow and tell me a joke or insist on my addressing them as "Baby Rabbit," and the world has gone on spinning just fine, lost 800 words and all. It's quite possible I will write a better 800 words of that pivotal scene now that I have the first dross-y version out of my system.

But from now on, I am backing up like a rabid mofo.

day 5: the swim test

Just finished my word count for the day and have banked a little cushion. My husband took the two kids grocery shopping this morning, so I had a good chunk of writing time and hustled down to work. Historically, my process requires rumination when I sit down at my desk, before I actually start writing. Now I'm finding the rumination happens during other pockets of the day. I'm sure I seem pretty distracted, but I can refine this approach when the month is over and I figure out my real rhythm.

I'm especially glad for the time today because yesterday was a bumpy one. Friday I got a call with some not-great news about my ailing father. It wasn't entirely unexpected, but it still was a shock. I woke up in a funk yesterday, sad about my father, which triggered full-on active grief for my mother who died last October, and finally, for my best friend, who died in an accident in December. And then we were just off to the races.

I wanted very much to channel this emotional state into productivity--in my novel, there are losses and griefs--but there was just no diving in yesterday. I kept my commitment to write some so I wasn't skipping a day, getting a few words down and then recommitting to catch up tomorrow.

So I ended up doing another "two-fer" day today. I'm not planning to do this very often (I keep thinking of Doyce Testerman's advice about not trying to prove anything with your daily word count), but I'm glad of the cushion right now because I suspect I'm going to need it as the month goes on.

I'm starting to understand how Camp NaNoWriMo is, more than anything, an exercise in jumpstarting your process. It's like the swim test at camp--all about the distance, about not getting stuck in either executing the crawl stroke so beautifully you can't make it across the lake, or going down when you get hit by the cramp. So far I'm feeling good about making those leaps every day and relieved that yesterday didn't sink me.

day 3: doing a two-fer

Today I have the day off work and I'm shooting for a two-fer: 3300 words. Here's my challenge: what to do with their hands?

One of my writing professors once suggested I read some Raymond Chandler to get a better handle on dialogue. It was good advice, almost as good as just listening to how people talk. So far, my characters' speech is flowing fine (don't get me wrong, there's a hella lot of cleanup to do later, but I'm not sweating it right now as long as I'm getting the words out), but they just don't seem to know what to do while they're speaking. Are there gestures? How much is too much exposition about what's going on around them? How can their gestures show, so I don't have to tell?

It makes me realize the real greats of modern realistic literary fiction and really good historical fiction make this part look so easy. If I had any time to read right now, I'd go back to my favorite novels and overlook the life-breathing characters and snapping dialogue and engaging plots and just look at all the cartilege, all the bits that tie these things together. In the meantime, I'll probably go screenwriter and concentrate on what they're saying.

So, fellow writers or people watchers--what tips? What do you do when you don't know what to do with their hands?

daily word count update, 11:40 p.m.: 3353

day 1: "meeting" the cabin

Day One word count: 1924. Goal met, with a little cushion. (Unexpected discovery: Google Docs is the greatest tool ever for taking advantage of time "bites." I wrote some this morning using my Kindle Fire, a few more words on my phone while at a stoplight on my way to work. I love mobile life.)

Facing the blank page at 6 a.m. was a little like waiting for the roller coaster to climb the hill--scary, butterfly-inducing. I hadn't picked a scene to start with. Even though I have plenty of scenes outlined to keep me writing this month, somehow I fear facing the day when none of them has enough juice, so let's just save them for that day, thank you very much. . . And so I dorked around for a good five minutes just trying to get started with the previously-unplanned scene (you know, the one that had so little juice it hadn't even bubbled up onto the scene list yet). Then I remembered: leap in. Don't wait for the muse. Just begin. I left for work with a few hundred words, managed to sneak in a few hundred more at lunch. Ideas for expanding the scene and its place in the plot floated in throughout the day.

I checked my "cabin" assignment last night (Camp NaNoWriMo groups you into a virtual cabin with other writers who are like you--age, genre--or at random), and that got me thinking about my good friend Katherine, a Christian Scientist whose belief in the perfection of the world, especially about the balance of abundance and need, has been very sustaining as I try to reclaim this part of myself. In the past, I would have spent a lot of time comparing myself to the other writers in my cabin, judging their work, figuring out my place in the idea coolness or experience pecking order: a deficit-based orientation. This time--remembering Katherine--I was like, hey, that sounds like an interesting idea, isn't it great we're all doing this? I took a deep breath and posted my very-rough synopsis, knowing it would not fare well in anyone's coolness evaluation at this point, and just not giving a damn.

I've become the high-on-camp girl, the one who posts cutisms on the message board. Isn't it great? There's enough creativity to go around!

We'll be singing Kum-Ba-Yah and eating s'mores soon.

getting on the bus

Camp NaNoWriMo starts tonight at midnight. I've prepped my scene board, written some character studies, figured out where in my day I can write "bites." Tonight I explained to my kids that I'm doing a contest, trying to write a whole lot of words in August. My five-year-old said, "Mom, winning the contest isn't the most important thing. Contests are about having fun." This got me thinking. . .

One summer when I was fourteen or fifteen, my best friend and I had a series of sleepovers where we cooked up a story. In between sleepovers, I wrote the scenes we had planned in our lengthy way-after-midnight conversations. Eventually I pulled out my mom's Smith-Corona and pounded it all out. The plot isn't so important (it involved our meeting and marrying movie stars, and wild horses could not compel me now to reveal which ones). The point was, we had a total blast doing it. I was driven to write it. My BF was a great plotter and wonderful collaborator (and is such a good friend, she recently told me she rereads her copy of the story--there were only two ever produced--every few years just for fun). It was pure play.

Somewhere along the way, writing got too serious. As a kid, all I needed for entertainment was paper and a pen. Then I majored in creative writing in college--at one point in time I was willing enough to declare as a writer that I repeatedly faced the blank page and suffered the excruciation of reading aloud to people for four years. Some aspects of that exercise killed my joy and convinced me I wasn't "supposed" to write. What really happened was that I lost my ability to connect to the part of me that loved the play of writing. I looked for awhile, and never found a writer's home--not with my blank pages, not with other writers. I stopped writing, and I stopped thinking of myself as a writer.

I've learned some things since then. It's supposed to be hard. It's also supposed to be essential. No one will ever again make me believe I'm not a writer, as long as I'm writing. And ultimately, when all the gears are moving, it can be play.

My son is right--this contest is not about "winning," and getting the camp badge or even proving I can write 50,000 words in one month. It's about making the time and space to remind myself that once, this was the most fun I could imagine having. I'm going to camp--I'm so very excited!

survival guides

Preparing for camp, I've found a bunch of great resources for writers, to get us started writing and to help keep us going. Here are some of my favorites so far:

Bob & Jack's Writing Blog: a writing master class in a single blog. This quote is going on my Post-It Quotes wall: "Start a story now before your mouth talks it away."

Write or Die: I learned about this one from a coworker who is also a poet. This tool will get you writing for sure (but if you set the consequences to Kamikaze, you might also pee your pants if you pause too long and your words begin to delete themselves)

Doyce Testerman's series on NaNoWriMo: a great series of blog articles that follow the progression of the month, with tips for making it through each stage. Favorite quote: "Moods are for sex. Writing isn't sex."

The Plot Whisperer's YouTube series: another writing master class on that inscrutable beast of plot.

Dispatches from Utopia's Writer With Kids series: a writer interviews other writers who are also parents, on how they keep all the balls in the air with a creative life and fine parenting.

The Writer's Portable Mentor by Priscilla Long, a Seattle writer and teacher of writing:

The Writers With Kids series in particular blew my mind: is it possible for reasonably normal human beings to parent and write productively and creatively? (The answer seems to be yes, but so far my kids haven't read the memo.) There's a gazillion more of these resources out there, these are just the ones that have given me the boost to start writing again.


Has all this generosity and abundance been here all along, just waiting for me to search for help? 

There's a life lesson in there somewhere.

going to camp!

I'm all signed up for the August trip to Camp NaNoWriMo. Na(tional) No(vel) Wri(ting) Mo(nth) usually occurs in November, but there's also a camp-themed reprise in June and August. Here's the scoop: between midnight on August 1 and August 31, I (and a buncha other people) will write 50,000 words.

I mentioned this to a friend, and she said, "It seems if you are writing thoughtfully and with literary merit, about 500 words per day is the most one could manage." I said, yes, it is. I will not be writing with literary merit. The goal is to write an average of 1,667 words per day. This is crank-it-out-city.

The whole point of this exercise is to blow past that nasty little editor whispering in our ear, "Eeep! I can't believe you would write that! That's just awful! Who would be interested in that muck? Why don't you clean it up just a little before going on?"

And before you know it, you have novelis paralysis. Or even novelis rigor mortis.

I attempted NaNoWriMo several years ago. I had a bare wisp of an idea that truthfully didn't overly excite me, and around about day 8, I was seriously in the weeds. Not only was I so terribly behind in word count I would have to write around the clock for a week to catch up, my idea choked. If I'd known my characters better, I might have been able to listen to where they wanted to go. If I'd really understood that being in the weeds is a completely normal place to be on day 8 or almost any other,  it might not have been fatal.

As I've started writing again in the last few months, part of my practice has been to read a lot of good writers on writing, and they all agree on one thing: bad is the pathway to good. You have to produce something, even something truly heinous, before you can produce anything really good. So for the month of August--and the days leading up to my departure for camp--I'm embracing "in the weeds." I'm going to own that patch before we're done.