Nanowrimo - Libraries

A student cancelled her appointment with me today, which freed me up for one hour.  I should have used the time to grade essays, but I'm all about putting those on the back burner this month in favor of dedicated writing time (I will get to it, but I'm going to be selfish about my grabs for writing time).  

I could have stayed in my office, but the risk of getting interrupted or distracted by the duties of my job (of which writing is one, I keep telling myself) was too high.  So, I packed a yellow pad, a pen, my coffee mug, and I set out for the library.  I was pleased to find it almost empty at 10 o'clock in the morning, and I had my choice of tables on the second floor.  I chose one near to a bank of windows but still in the shade.  The sunlight outside radiated that golden quality of fall, and I was able to witness the colors of the season from where I sat.  

I wrote.  

It was great, and it reminded me of how I used to write when I was in grad school.  Escaping my house, I would often drive over to hospitals or libraries so I could concentrate away from the newborn.  The technique still works today.  I began the next scene that advances my revision work from the other day.  See this post.  I started and stopped a few times to let my hand rest, and this is where the library comes into play.

In order to stretch my hand, my mind, and my body, I got up out of my seat and began walking the aisles.  I found myself in "American Literature 1961-Current Shelved by Author's Last Name."  This is my section right here and it felt great to read the spines, to finger the individual volumes, and to read a page here and a snippet there.  I wound up returning to my seat with Charles Bukowski's Factotum in hand.  

I opened it to find tiny bursts of chapters.  Chapters a paragraph long, a chapter dedicated to a setting, a tiny observation, and it inspired me.  I loved the idea that a chapter could be a tiny unit of measurement and not a volume, a catalog of thoughts.  This got me writing again.  

His language, the poetry of his lines, got me inspired and I set back to writing my own manuscript.  It was a mini-lesson in craft in the middle of a writing session.  

A dear friend and fellow writer, Katey Schultz, wrote about "writing through it" on her own blog the other day, and her lesson seemed somewhat appropriate to how I was using the library.  Without the immediate access of writing friends, mentors, or advisers, how does the writer sustain his/her focus/energy/ambition for a project?  Sometimes the answer is another writer's work.  And where do we find other writers' works?  That's right, ladies and gentlemen, in the library.  What a lovely free resource!

Nanowrimo - Moving Forward

Now that I've gotten my first 50 out of the way for my writing group, it is time to move forward.  While I have the first act of the novel plotted in a general sense, there are lots of little nooks and crannies that have yet to be explored.

I struggle with the concept of outlining when it comes to my creative work.  For essays I can understand it in a way, but I have often felt constrained by working from outlines in the fiction.  I don't know why that is because I haven't done too much of it in the past, maybe some outdated, unproven bias that I've convinced myself of over the years.

As I push into the next pieces of new work, I will be referring to this loose outline and trying to gauge whether or not I have been denying myself a useful tool due to a previous and unproven assumption about my own process.  We'll see.

All in all, today was a good day.  I wrote 776 new words on the story today and I'm looking forward to marching ahead in the coming days.

Total Word Count: 21,573
Favorite Sentence/Sentences:

The headache that struck Oliver that night might have been the first migraine in what would become the ever-increasing line of vomit-inducing blinders that lead up to him lying in bed and snooping on his neighbors. As he surfaced from his recollections, he observed that the neighbor's patio was empty, his opportunity for eavesdropping gone, and, in the lingering wash of stale cigarette smoke, Oliver again wondered if his father would be disappointed with his actions.

Nanowrimo - The First Fifty

The last couple of days have been anti-Nanowrimo in some senses.  I've been revising.  National Novel Writing Month is all about production, forward momentum, and not looking back.  I've broken that rule.

But, what happens when you need to know the beginning before writing the middle.  I've been working on this novel in many different ways over years now and I have a lot of little inconsistencies in my early pages.  Carol is the aunt, no she's the mom.  The mom is alive, no she's dead, nope alive, but she has cancer.  With all of this reversioning, I was a bit confused.  So, I printed my first fifty pages and I set about revising the good ol'fashioned way with a comfortable chair and a pen.

I had a lot to work with, or should I say on?  With so many inconsistencies in the draft, many a page was marked from tip to tail.  It felt good.  I also have a much better sense of how this thing is going to open.  I've sat down now and worked through the first 14 pages of my marked-up draft.  I've made a lot of cuts, but my word count total for my session today still amounted to 1,298.  I'm doing a lot of cutting, but I'm starting to add a little more of the necessary texture to the draft.

My first drafts are often quite lean with dialogue and action accounting for most of what's going on.  The setting, the time, the context for the story all get added a layer at a time as I move through revision.  I've got notes in my margins saying, "Describe house here."  Or, "Avoidance!  Make the conflict happen here."  Each time I come across one of these notes, I write.  I push the draft forward to a tighter, more cohesive whole.

So, while I broke the rules of Nanowrimo, I'm feeling good about the work I got done this weekend.  I don't think I'm going to get anywhere near my word count this month, but I think this time I'm setting aside is some of the best I've spent on the novel in months.

Nanowrimo - New material and Taking Stock

The last couple of days have seen me produce a couple of new pages of material, but not enough to meet my quotas.  I'm behind for the week, but I'm going to make a couple of pushes over the weekend that I hope will bring me back up to speed.

What I have done, which has been interesting to me, is to take stock of the work I already have compiled.  I've printed off the first 50 pages of my manuscript and I'm reading through them for continuity.  I'm using Nanowrimo to fill in the gaps of my first act, and to give me a sense that I'm moving closer to a more cohesive whole of a first draft.  So far, it's been working. 

Two things happened as a result of the work I've done this week.  First, the review of the early pages is giving me a solid sense of my opening and where my characters "live" when the novel opens.  The other is that this increased sense of structure and continuity has influenced my writing of new material.

The three complete handwritten pages I wrote today is a thread that needs to be woven into the story.  I wrote a couple of small scenes, little pieces of the storyline today and I had a solid sense of where each of the pieces would fit into the larger work that is already typed and part of the manuscript.  This is the first time this specific brand of intentionality has crept into my work, which is exciting.  I'd like to see that happen a little bit more as I work to complete my first act.

I hand-wrote everything over the past couple of days and haven't transcribed it to my Scrivener software, so I don't have word count updates.  I do have some fun sentences, I think.  This is a passage with the main character's best friend Willy.  I love writing his character.  Oliver has just told Willy that he can't hang out on Friday, but he won't say way.  He has a date with his ex-girlfriend.

Favorite sentence/sentences:

Willy stood over him as he worked, waiting for an answer.  Once it became obvious Oliver didn't intend to respond, he said, "Wow.  She must be one ugly bitch."

"Shut up," Oliver said and shook his head to show he wasn't going to take the bait.

"I mean if you won't tell me, you're best friend in the entire world, then she must be hideous."  Willy let the words hang between them.  "Unless," he said and raised his finger as if experiencing a great epiphany, "she's fat.  That's it."  Willy waggled his finger and his face broke into a leering sneer.  "She's enormous, isn't she?  How much?  Two bills?  Three?"  Willy drew his fact into a mask of disbelief.  "Four?!  You gonna have tons of fun this weekend, Ollie?"


The scene goes on in much this same vein until Oliver blows up and gets in trouble for cussing within earshot of a customer. 

Nanowrimo - Crushed Momentum

I had what I felt was a great writing day.  It was so good in fact that I was going to leave after dinner and everyone was settled in bed, but this didn't work out.  The priorities of the other parts of my life intruded.  I realized that I had to review some student papers for a lesson plan, read a manuscript for my senior thesis student, and be available for my family.  I have a wife who was exhausted (woken twice in the night by a screaming child with nightmares) and a sick child (who coughed so much she actually threw up twice this evening). 

Sometimes the energy simply dissipates a little.  As you can see by the time of the blog post, the hour is slipping into the late evening and energy is slipping fast.  I'll simply have to recapture the flow tomorrow.

Starting Manuscript Word Count: 15,985
Daily Word Count: 2005
Ending Manuscript Word Count:17,987
Favorite Sentence/Sentences (Not sure if the joke works, but I'll try it out here):
“It really was a nice party,” Carol said and peered at a photo of Sarah’s cake smeared face. “You did a nice job, Cassie.”

“You did most of it,” Cassie said, redirecting the compliment.

“I’m sorry I missed it,” Oliver said, repeating his earlier apology. Dillon didn’t even try to mask his snort. “I am,” Oliver insisted.

“Whatever, man,” Dillon said, “if you wanted to be here, you would have been here.”

“You’re right. Why wouldn’t I want to come home to this? It’s so much fun.”

“It’s not about fun. It’s your niece’s birthday party.”

Cassie snorted at this and Dillon glared at her until he realized his mistake.

Nanowrimo - Writing Past the Censor

I've been having problems writing past my censor lately.  Something about constantly being on editor mode makes me hyper-critical about my own writing, so I've had to find creative ways to get the juice flowing again.  Most of the time it's as simple as stepping away from the computer and writing by hand. 

When I apply the pen to paper, it doesn't seem as "finished" as when I work on the computer.  I don't have autocorrect trying to tell me where my errors are.  I don't have the quick backspace key calling for me to fix this or that.

The page is a little friendlier to the creative process for me, and I've been trying to take advantage of that.  For instance, I sat down tonight feeling a little uninspired, but I knew I had to get something down.  So, I sat in front of the computer and typed out about three lines.  Then, it stopped.  Nothing more came.  After a couple of minutes of staring at the screen, I grabbed a pad, a drink, and went to the living room. 

I spread myself out on the floor with a couch cushion under my chest and I set to work.  The dog even came down and sniffed at my ear, wondering what I was doing.  I wrote a full page for a scene that is causing me problems.  It didn't unlock the scene, and it wasn't very much writing, but it was more than three lines.  Sometimes I need to shake it up to shake something loose.

Since I wrote by hand, I don't have the statistics broken down for today, but here's today's sentence:

"Children's birthday parties disrupt a veteran's calm more than any other civilian endeavor, and Oliver Thompson knew this before he stepped inside his mother's house.  If any doubt existed before he arrived, it retreated the moment Oliver saw eleven children, from toddler to tween, crammed into his mother's living room."

Nanowrimo - False Start

I've decided to do National Novel Writing Month again.  Last year saw me produce 150 pages in 30 days.  It was a momentous and thrilling month that taught me a lot about production and craftsmanship.  While I will not be pursuing the novel I wrote as a long-term project, it unlocked a related project that has been stewing for years.

Since last year I have written something like 72 pages on the new novel.  I am rededicating myself to National Novel Writing Month in a limited capacity this year.  While, yes, I want to do as much writing as possible, I need to have a more nuanced approach to a novel in the works.  I don't want to simply throw words at the project; I want to work in more calculated ways.

What this means is that I am cutting the Nanowrimo goals in half.  I will be working to complete 25,000 words in the month of November.  This will lead me to another 75 or so pages, which will leave me back at 150 pages of solid manuscript to work with.

I have the first act of the novel already worked out, but I'm a little less clear about the second or third acts of the novel.  This month should see me finishing out the first act and then diving into the unexplored territory of the second.

Wish me luck and here we go!!!

Novel's Starting Word Count: 15,159
Word Count for the morning: 898
Ending Word Count: 16,057
Favorite Sentence/Sentences:

The boys grew up under the whine of a skill saw and the compact bursts of the nail gun. Their father roofed the house, his first. He spent an entire summer peeling the old shingles, re-papering the roof and tacking new ones down. Although it might have come from the picture Carol snapped of a shirtless Michael standing on the roof in his tool belt and cutoff jean shorts, Oliver and Dillon both swore they remembered that summer in vivid detail. Weekend afternoons spent in the yards around the house, Carol elbow deep in the flower beds, Michael on the roof with the pneumatic, and Dillon and Oliver free to entertain themselves within the bounds of the property.

The image of that summer spent as a family sustained them for years. It is how they saw themselves as a family up until the moment Michael died. Like all car accidents, Michael’s slapped them in the face and left them whirling.