Tag Archives: NaNoWriMo

It’s All About Quantity

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5,553 words. That’s the exact amount of words I need to write today if I want to stay on track with my NaNoWriMo daily average. I just like to stay ahead of the game. Not that I’m competitive or anything…

But then, today doesn’t lend itself to long bouts of writing what with a couple of outings on the agenda (including dinner with the Bipolar Ladies Club—aka ‘K’ from my painting class and me). Of course I could do several short writing bursts, but then I prefer putting it off to another day and doing a 7250 word spree tomorrow. No biggie. That’s how it goes with automatic writing and me. It’s like the difference between shooting with a revolver versus firing with a machine gun. Not that I know the first thing about assault weapons. A better analogy might be that of playing the piano… once you play for a while and your fingers get limbered up, you can just get into the flow of the music and play for hours with hardly a thought or any effort required at all. Not that I actually know how to play the piano, although I’ve watched my fair share of recitals in my formative years. Which makes me think maybe I should have one of my characters be a concert pianist as well as a gun-wielding psychotic murderer. Which might eventually entail lots more research. Or TV watching. Or something.

Right. I’ll stop here and save up my energy for the next 6,961 words I need to get typed up between now and tomorrow. Sometimes it really is worthwhile to just focus on quantity. Quality can always be distilled from the resulting raw materials down the line.

What’s In a Name?

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I can’t believe I named one of my main characters Marcus. Makes me cringe every time I write out his name (sorry to all the Marcus’s out there…). It’s just a placeholder, but still. There’s also a Palmer. Palmer? Where the heck did I get that one from? Oh right, this scandinavian mystery I’m reading right now. The women’s names are pretty benign so far; there’s Katherine and Naomi and Nancy. I’ll have to come up with a really ugly one to even the score. Like Phyllis or Eugenia or Tarkneisha. Tarkneisha?? Yep. You can thank Google for that one. There’s not much humour in my story so far and an ugly name well… usually brings a smile to my lips.

The Human Condition

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“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward,
but he who has hope for it is a fool.” ~ Albert Camus

“Remember, no human condition is ever permanent.
Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too
scornful in misfortune.” ~ Socrates

“Every man carries within him the entire form
of our human condition.” ~ Michel de Montaigne

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how
all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage
to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear,
which is inherent in a human condition.” ~ Graham Greene

Sometimes when I don’t feel so hot, I remind myself that it’s all part of the human condition. After all, as the Buddhists say, Life is Suffering. That noble truth makes things more easy to bear (sometimes). But then there are times when nothing can make me feel good about feeling bad. Go figure. These days I’m taking my general confusion and frustrations out on my novel characters. They’re each more miserable than the other, and most certainly more miserable than me. Graham Greene would approve. I have to say there is something cathartic about piling up all this suffering onto these fictitious characters, none of which are very likeable. You’ll notice I haven’t posted any of my writings on my NaNoWriMo blog this year though, and that is because I don’t feel it’s appropriate to inflict this latest novel draft on anyone else. There is enough suffering out in the world without me adding my own miserable take on it. So far the story really is all doom and gloom. Everyone’s distasteful secrets splashed all over the place, just the way they do it in the tabloids, and I guess it could make for good reading if you like delving into other people’s misery. I don’t, generally speaking, so I’m not sure why it is I’m spending all this time writing something that basically offends my own sensibilities.

My principal character hasn’t spilled the beans about what she has to hide so far, and I’m hoping it’ll be something really juicy, like maybe she has superpowers and is able to kill people by just thinking about it or something. She’s on the run right now, and there are people from her sordid past who are trying to catch up with her. She may or may not have created a new life for herself to put it all behind her, but one way or another, she won’t be able to outrun them forever. I’ve been putting off dealing with her story by writing about all these other unfortunate characters who are dealing with loss, cheating, lies, heartbreak, kidnapping, rape, self-hatred and self-delusions, freakishly small penises and so on. The longer I draw the whole thing out, the more pressure I put on myself to make this woman’s past truly horrifying. You know, just so the wait will have been worth it at least, otherwise it’ll end up being totally anticlimactic, and that, in my opinion, would be worse than just writing a bad story. “They say write what you know”, I keep reminding myself. One person’s nightmare is another person’s reality and vice versa. Goodness knows I’ve got plenty of personal history to draw upon, between things that I’ve personally experienced and things lived vicariously through others (real of fictitious). Whatever the big secret turns out to be, it’ll end up being part of the human condition, and that’ll just have to be good enough for me. For all we know, maybe her big secret is that for all her independence and the efforts she makes to remain uncommitted, she keeps a copy of Martha Stewart Weddings hidden under her bed? Not that I do that anymore obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t tell you about it now would I? :-)

Hijacked By Dreams

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Looking at the date today, I’m not quite sure what happened in the last three days. I recall going to the day hospital to finish up some of my crafts pieces yesterday, where T and E where friendly familiar faces who have since followed me here to blogland (you are most welcome of course). I’ve helped my friend M narrow down the selection from the hundreds of shots we took last Friday (and was reassured to see how naturally that part of art directing still comes to me. Some things really are like riding a bicycle). I remember eating jam and cheddar toast with Earl Grey tea, which is a no-brainer since I like to start off my days with that combo lately. There was an early yoga session with J and a evening of wrestling with M on Tuesday which has left every muscle in my body screaming ever since. There wasn’t so much writing for NaNoWriMo since I felt both mentally and physically exhausted.

This morning was slated to begin with an early yoga session again, but my body would not cooperate. Then the doorbell rang at 10:30 and I was so engrossed in my many confusing dreams that I couldn’t understand how it was possible for my mother to come ringing at my door like that when just the day before she had still been writing me from France. Of course, by the time I actually made it to the door it wasn’t my mother at all, but an accountant I had made an appointment with who was coming to collect papers to finally get my taxes done as agreed. But I was so out of it that, after apologizing profusely, I sent him back saying I was coming down with something and couldn’t possibly get on with our meeting today. He didn’t protest too much. These days, with H1N1 seemingly looming in every corner people will pretty much leave you alone if you imply you might be getting a bout of the flu.

Many hours and many more dreams later, my friend M put his head through my bedroom door to see how I was doing. It was well past three and I had been sleeping all day, lost in one series of dreams after another. There was lots of traveling, there was lots of flying (which apparently I’m getting more and more proficient at), there was a cyclone and a stay at a posh and deserted hotel waiting for the weather to calm down (five suites with four rooms each to share among a couple of hundred people with limited food supplies to distribute fairly, and somehow people were looking to me to make major decisions. I think they figured if I could fly, I was probably also good at survival skills in general). There was a pregnancy which lead to birthing hundreds of tiny little animals; cats of course and tiny elephants and giraffes and snakes and lions and horses and countless other creatures. I was meant to feed them but they were eaten first by the many predators who were surrounding us and not having the resources to fend them off, they got to most of my brood and only a few of them were able to survive for a while and grow a little bigger. There was a serial killer who sent his victims beautiful picture postcards before striking and I was hired to foil him somehow, being an image specialist and all. We finally managed to arrest him because of some violation with Canada post he had apparently repeatedly committed. There was a job for domestic defence involving putting a sign up in front of a juvenile prison parking lot warning would-be escapees that the stealing of cars would be severely punished, then a road trip across North America tied up to the top of a truck to avoid being seen by various affiliated gang leaders who apparently wanted to exact revenge on me for helping prevent an all-out bloodbath at the juvenile detention centre. Then a late-night TV show starring me as a tall blonde in my late 40’s who didn’t look like me at all, throwing around a basketball in a modified game where the hoops were three times as high as usual and the all-girl team wore uniforms composed of leggings and flowery tunics—very pretty but kinda silly. Somehow this was very important gig for me because it could lead to more career opportunities in late-night tv programming, even at my advanced age.

I’ve been up for almost four hours now, and two cups of tea (with jam and cheese toast, of course) later I still can’t seem to shake off the dreams. My main consolation is that this sort of thing where my waking life is overtaken by the dreams is happening less frequently these days, because there have been periods fairly recently where this state of affairs was the norm. On the upside, I guess this is the right headspace to be working on my NaNoWriMo novel right now, since I’m running behind on my word-count and this business of not being all there sure is conducive to automatic writing. Of course it could lead to even more unexpected occurrences for my characters and chances are it won’t help make my already convoluted story lines any more decipherable, but as it happens, that isn’t a consideration I need concern myself with at this time, so may as well just go with it.

Sleep-Writing

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There are now so many characters in my NaNoWriMo draft that I can barely keep track of all the storylines each of them is leading me to. I haven’t even bothered to name them all yet. I just sit there and switch from one to another from one chapter to the next, making them more and more unlikeable and creating as many unpleasant situations for them as I can come up with. I do all this while I sit in front of the TV half-watching whatever is on the movie channels (Edward Scissorhands, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Bored to Death, Dexter, and now Underwold: Rise of the Lycans). I’m hoping that by some kind of magic, all these imaginary’s people’s lives will somehow converge and this will all form a cohesive story. But something tells me I need to be paying more attention if there’s any chance at all of that happening. Then again, I HAVE read some best-selling thrillers and wondered page after page what these overpaid authors were doing while they were writing their own drafts for those crappy novels. But unlike them, I don’t have a formula down yet, and I doubt my work will ever get published. You never do know though. For what it’s worth, I’m enjoying the process. And I can’t really ask for more considering I’m so tired I fall asleep a little every time I blink. Energy comes and energy goes, yet somehow I manage to write through it all. Go figure.

If You Can’t Fight ‘Em, Join ‘Em

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With NaNoWriMo just begun yesterday, I’ve committed to sitting down and punching out a minimum of 1667 words every day for the next month in a crazy attempt to come up with a rough draft of what could presumably become a readable and maybe even publishable (!) novel someday. I’ll only find out on Nov. 30th and beyond whether the third time is a charm or not, and I certainly hope the first 1700 words I put down yesterday are no indication of things to come because as I was inventing this character which emerged out of nowhere, the exercise quickly became boring and tedious; I may has well have just copied a few pages from my old diaries, though of course I had no intention of making the character anything like me to begin with. But I won’t let my difficult and unsatisfying start deter me: I know better now. So what if I come up with not one good cohesive story but 30 different unrelated mediocre ones? So what if some bits make me want to cry with frustration and other end up making me laugh my socks off for no good reason at all? So what if it all ends up being a royal waste of time? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past couple of years, it’s that no matter what, if creativity comes calling, my job is to just get it down on any available surface, keep the inner critic locked up and gagged, and stop worrying about the outcome. It’s a lot of work. A very small part of it being the actual act of creation, but on the whole, the work mostly resides in not letting the all those doubts and turmoil get in the way of JUST GETTING IT DOWN. Whether or not I choose to share excerpts in my fifthythousandwords blog will depend on whether or not I find quotable bits to show the world this time around. TBA.

I’ve come to accept that whenever a creative project comes calling, my great and most developed talent for procrastination will inevitably take the lead. And since it seems that whenever I try writing fiction, sudden urges to add posts to my blog become impossible to ignore, I decided to make the best of that situation and also join NaBloPoMo this month (also known as National Blog Posting Month) which will turn my proclivity for procrastinating into a noble pursuit (of sorts). Something like that. Whatever it takes to keep the guilt monsters at bay. In the meantime, I’ve put up the official and unimaginative badge which is available on the NaBloPoMo site, but of course as a self-respecting ex-respectable art director, I’ll just have to make up my own. Another exercise in futility, all in the name of creativity, self-expression and the right to posting decent-to-good content.

NaNoWriMo Jitters

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For the third year in a row, I’m at that crucial point where I start telling myself: “What the hell is wrong with me? I’m no fiction writer! Why did I have to go and tell the whole world I’m participating in this stupid NaNoWriMo competition? I haven’t even got a decent storyline to work with and it’s starting in less than two days! Maybe it’s still time to just call the whole thing off?”

What is NaNoWriMo you ask? “National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.” This year will be the 10 year anniversary for this worldwide event which started out in the San Francisco Bay area in 1999 with just 21 participants. As of last year they had over 100,000 novelists on board, including published writers and countless aspirants. It just keeps growing every year as the word gets around thanks to good organization and a web site which, among other things, provides connectivity for all the participants and supporters out there.

I should know better than to commit an idea to memory because 9.9 times out of 10 I am bound to forget said idea, no matter how “good” or even “brilliant” it seems. Around this time last week I came up with a “genius” idea about what and whom my novella would be about this year but forgot to PUT IT IN WRITING and now it has all but vanished. All I know is that there will be a despicable character in the mix: a married man with two kids who decides to troll around on internet dating sites to get himself a little extra action on the side. I don’t know much about him yet—have no clue whether he’ll be a principal character or just be mentioned as a passing anecdote—but interestingly enough, there is one very intimate detail I am absolutely certain of: the guy has a freakishly small penis. I have Anne Lamott to thank for teaching me this great literary device when the need for vengeance becomes too great (a small penis as a literary device? Why not?) though she suggested this trick for those times when the inspiration for a character is taken directly from a real person in order to prevent said muse to sue the writer’s pants off. It’s pretty well my idea of retaliation after a friend went through a terrible shock immediately followed by a difficult separation very recently because her Cro-Magnon of a husband never once considered that sitting down with her and having an honest talk might be a good idea.

Other than that, I know the brilliant story idea I had in mind was very clever, and very suited to my writing style, and… (did I mention it?) very clever, but that’s about it. Funny how the cleverest ideas are the ones you can never quite remember. I’ll just have to do what I do best—sit there in front of a blank screen and let my fingers do the storytelling; there’s a part of my brain which apparently knows what it’s doing. This is not a guarantee of good writing, or of a story that people will actually want to read but sure enough, if I sit there long enough and drink plenty of tea, and dutifully punch out 1667 words (or more) every day, something is bound to happen. Can’t hardly wait. Well, that’s not quite true, but in terms of letting creativity take over, it’s a pretty good way of passing the time and a challenge that’s just difficult enough to bring plenty of satisfaction along the way. After two consecutive wins, can a third be far behind?

Crossroads

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Tomorrow is my last day as a patient of the day program I’ve been participating in at the Allan Memorial. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I hadn’t expected the camaraderie or that I’d make buddies there, but in retrospect I guess it was inevitable. So many different types of people find their way there and the one thing we all have in common is we are all at crossroads, trying to find ways to make ourselves better so we can just get on with it, whatever “it” happens to be. For some it’s a clear goal like getting back to work or school. For me, it’s getting to a place where I can trust myself to make the right decisions.

In the meantime, one door closes, and several others open. There’s NaNoWriMo, which is starting in just two days. There’s a yoga practice to get back into. There are schedules and lists to write about all the lists I need to be making so that I can break things down to simple steps, which should help keep me from freaking out at the thought of the challenges still ahead.

Right now, there’s True Blood to watch on HBO, there’s a vegetarian frozen dinner to eat, along with casual chit chat with my friend M who’s staying over for a few days. Not so long ago, I don’t think I could have handled having a guest over for more than an hour at a time. Progress comes along in unexpected ways, but every little bit counts.

Sweet Sweet Victory

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Yayyy. So. I’m totally dead tired, but I won. Yay me. Now I have my work cut out for me turning that thing into a readable novel, which will probably mean having to cut out half of it and then writing another 50-75K words (not necessarily in that order), but it’s all good. Off to bed for now.

Another Day Another 2K

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“I followed her to the tv room where mother was watching one of her soap operas. I was standing next to, and slightly behind Edith feeling like a henchman from the mafia. My white minidress worn with green tights and a blue turtleneck belied just how dangerous I could be to mother’s peace of mind…”

35,254 and counting… things are moving right along. Sometimes I even have a little bit of fun, like when I end up writing these little bits shown here and on fiftythousandwords of course!