Early in the new Murakami novel, a young writer named Tengo edits/rewrites a novella, originally written by a teenage girl, to win a debut literary prize.  As the novel progresses, the world he lives in changes to resemble the world Tengo embellished/ created in his work.  Notably, he describes two moons in the novella, and lo and behold, eventually he notices there are two moons in his world, and the second moon looks exactly how he described it.

On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote.  Am I special person, like Tengo?  (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world?  I lean toward the latter.

I tried NaNoWriMo this year.  I failed.  I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words.  (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great)  I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work.  It’s not his fault.  The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.   Read more »

replace the Mac with a PC and the magazine with a Nora Roberts

I write to you from my Dell laptop surrounded by the dreck accumulated from a month of not cleaning my shotgun apartment. I have learned several important things this month; one being that my boyfriend is very supportive of my “writing process”. See, someone in my program had the brilliant idea to write a poem every day for the month of November, like a poet’s version of National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. Back in October this was a great idea for me, personally. The 40-some poems I’d turned in for thesis consideration had dwindled down to eight and I needed new material like I need to shower now (hey it’s winter).

I’d done the write-a-poem-a-day process before in April during National Poetry Month’s actual event and the results were several of the poems that my adviser had approved for inclusion in my thesis but kind of haphazardly and mostly to see if I could. But now I needed to do it. It seemed logical: Writing poems every day = material = marital bliss. Or something.  Instead I’ve become a paper-snatching, pen-hoarding crazed person who mumbles lines of poetry while dressing mannequins in the Sears at the Northtown Mall because worse-case scenario turned out to be when I thought of the next Great American poem and didn’t have a scrap of paper and a mini-pencil. Or at the very least my Blackberry. Read more »

Warning: Excess typing may cause finger cramps, tendinitis, qwerty syndrome, or spontaneous combustion.

Truman Capote famously said of Jack Kerouac’s writing style, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” and while my incessant attack of my keyboard through the month of November was really nothing like Kerouac’s fevered sessions of transforming his life experiences into novels, there were times when I thought, Gee, Truman would not approve of me now.

First, let me say that I was a NaNoWriMo cheater. I used a novel idea that I’ve had for years now, the first fifty-six pages of which I submitted to a novel workshop during my struggle to attain my MFA. This is, technically, against the rules. You are “allowed” to have outlined your novel, as detailed an outline as you want, but you are supposed to start fresh, not adding words to an existing project, because then you wouldn’t technically be writing a whole novel in a month. Me, I figure that 50,000 words is not really a novel, so even if you are a magically talented writer who can write a coherent, complete 50,000 words in a month, it’s going to be more of a novelette, or else it will be missing an ending. So my 50,000 words started around chapter four, and while I’d started it several times before (the workshop pages were not my first attempt), I had not managed any sort of outline of my novel, except for a detailed history of one character who ended up not feeling very important to the novel as a whole. Instead, I wrote my outline as I went–if you count those words, I probably wrote more like 60,000–and used the project as what I liked to call a very detailed brainstorm. My main goal was to find a solid shape for the finished product, which would (will) then be entirely rewritten, chapter by chapter, including very little of the actual text written during November. Read more »

Over at Slate, June Thomas discusses how to reach the magical 50,000 word minimum for NaNo success.  She cites Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, who gives the following techniques for padding the word count.

His strategies include giving a character a stutter (to expand “the girth of their dialogue”), temporary deafness(“necessitating that everything said to him or her be repeated”), and a fondness for quotation(“Give your protagonist a copy of Beowulf and an annoying habit of reading poetry out loud on their long commute to work”).

In addition, Thomas adds a few of her own.

I have some additional suggestions: amnesia (if one or more characters forgets everything that has happened in the narrative thus far, it’s only polite to remind them—at length), flashbacks (either to events before the action of the novel began or just a couple of chapters back), recollections (of a character’s earliest childhood memories or just about anything else apropos of nothing), lists (you don’t have to stick to a character’s favorite books, music, movies; why not list every friend they ever had?), and recipes (if someone is preparing a meal, don’t stint on the details—how hot should that oven be?).

I’ve got a few too: meta-fiction (after each sentence, write a paragraph explained what you are trying to accomplish and/or  include commentary on how you felt, as a novelist, writing the aforementioned sentence), spot the change (copy and paste each chapter, so there are two chapter ones, two chapter twos, etc, but make a few nominal changes and challenge the reader to spot the difference), language switch (have your main character learn another language and then include a translation (using google translator) of everything you’ve written).

Good Luck!

NoNoWriLess!

In college, we playwrights would get together and have what we called bake-offs. This was an idea we’d gotten from playwright Paula Vogel. We would gather on a Friday, set some arbitrary rules (all the plays, for example, would involve a pile of five-dollar bills, a literary allusion, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol), and then go to our respective corners. We’d write all weekend, get back together on Monday, and read each other’s plays. Then we’d choose our favorites and stage them. All the plays were 10-minutes long. This was great fun. We all felt inspired and glowed with stardust. I don’t remember any of the plays that came out of this exercise.

This and similar experiences defined my writing life for years. I wrote in fits of jubilant inspiration, despaired of any given piece within a revision or two, abandoned everything, quit writing for months at a time, eventually started thinking about writing again (in wholly unrealistic terms: fame, glory, girls, etc.), got inspired again, bought a new ostentatiously understated notebook. Rinse, repeat.

I mean no disrespect to the good and generous people who do/support/orchestrate NaNoWriMo every year at this time, but it’s not something I think is especially good for writers or writing. Read more »

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Lansing-area NaNoWriMo kickoff party. I wasn’t sure I was going to go—mostly I just wanted to spend my Sunday afternoon relaxing on the couch—but this is the group I started back in 2005 and ran for two years.

Okay. I’ll be honest for a second. There’s another reason I wasn’t sure I wanted to go: I think of myself as more advanced than these other writers. I’ve got an MFA, I’m published, and I’m well networked in the literary world. I’m presenting at AWP, for heaven’s sake!

I’m a little ashamed to admit these feelings—especially since I blog regularly about making the writing world more inclusive, about not turning one’s nose up at non-literary work. These two thoughts don’t really go together. Read more »

Last week my semi-NaNo-related question to you all dealt with how you measured a good day of writing. There I was, optimistically looking forward to another month of, as NaNoWriMo would have you believe, literary abandon. Never mind that my job leaves me feeling devoid of all writing desire when I come home right now. Never mind that, after more than nine weeks, I’m still sick with some crazy mystery illness and spending way more time in bed than is normal. And never mind that I knew November 2 involved a 850-page book release that I’ve been looking forward to for a year.

So coming into today, Day 7 of NaNo 2010, I had somewhere around 300 words. The helpful word count tool informed me that, at this pace, I’d have 50,000 words sometime around 2013. And clearly, for those of you that were aware of my self-proclaimed goal to worry less about the word count than about getting back into the habit of writing daily…well, clearly that wasn’t going too well either. This is the point where, in my first year, I dropped out, due to the Ridiculously Out of Reach Goal (hereafter to be known as RooRG).

But why is it that 50,000 words in 30 days is less of a RooRG than, say, 49,700 in 23 days? (Or, for my second-year pals in Spokane, 80 pages of publishable quality in a year, which, I promise you, though it may feel like a RooRG at times, you’ll get there.) When I sat down to write this morning I told myself to take it one word at a time, but after a few hours, I remembered that words have a funny way of not adding up all that quickly. (Oh, and that 12-double spaced pages feels like I accomplished a lot more than almost 2 days worth of NaNo output.)

Still, there were moments where, against all of my carefully honed NaNo instinct (but in perfect tune with my newly-crafted, MFA-honed, not-speed-racer writerly instinct), I found myself going back at times and take out extraneous language. Because I really didn’t need that that, or that adverb, or that dialogue tag.

So here’s my question for you for the beginning of week two: When your writing goal seems ridiculously out of reach do you tweak the goal to fit the writing or do you tweak your writing to fit the goal? This year I’m doing a bit of both.*

*Yes, I know I cheat and answer “both” to the question every week. I write the questions, I can do whatever I want.

So I’m NaNoWriMoing (or rather, NaMeWriMoing, since I’m nonfiction and all), waking up two hours earlier every morning for a month to barf into my laptop. While this may be a stupid waste of time, I’m really just mining for ideas, whacking the piñata for candy. I have no intention of submitting my finished product (should I finish), or even revising, except the parts I feel can be turned into personal essays. Hell, I didn’t even sign up on the website – I don’t need to be held accountable for anything. I’m taking part in this because I’m sick of writing memoir as a form, and I see NaNo as a sort of a final binge and purge, like when your dad makes you smoke the entire carton of cigarettes he finds under your bed all at once, so you’ll never want to do it again. Not that that ever actually happens, or anything, but you know. NaNoWriMo isn’t about writing a finished product, or even writing well – it’s about squeezing the pus out of the blackhead so it can heal, pouring out the bongwater, or gutting the pumpkin for seeds. There’s always mud and shit in the pan when you sift for gold. Anyone who submits their finished product on December 1st (or even January 1st, after revisions) with genuine optimism is, well, cute. And most likely in for disappointing news.

In the unrelated meantime, here is an incredibly uncomfortable and hilarious interview with Brian Eno, conducted by Dick Flash at Pork Magazine:

How do you measure a good day of writing? I imagine it varies by project, but generally speaking, what leaves you feeling like you accomplished something for the day? Does it come down to more quality, quantity, or a a balance of the two? What about the same questions for a day of rewriting?

For me, I think I measure both types of days with a balance of the two (and I imagine it’s the same for most writers, but I felt like I should ask anyway), with the balance shifting more toward quantity when I’m working on a rough draft and more toward quality during the rewriting and editing stages. It’s still interesting to me, though, because many of the writers that I follow on Twitter keep count of their net words for the day, whether they’re writing or rewriting, and that is the main way they seem to measure success.

I think that to keep some form of MFA-found writerly sanity (and Shivani can make of that what he will), I’m going to have to work some rewriting days into this next month of NaNoWriMo craziness. After all, it is the fall, and that means I’m overdue for sending out work for potential publication. Hitting 50K will be fun (if I make it), but not at the expense of the other skills I’ve developed. We’ll see if I’m singing a different tune next Monday.

Author/editor of The Rumpus Stephen Elliott recently published an essay, found here, that, for the last week or so, I’ve gone back and read at least 15 times. “Good on Paper,” found in San Francisco’s 7×7, explores professional writing not as a job, upon which money is relied, but as a love that Elliott happens to do seven days a week, for as long as eight hours, occasionally taking half-days on Sunday to watch football.
I keep coming back to the essay because, as a writer who has no intention of relying on my craft for money (as stupid as it may sound to say money doesn’t matter), it’s reassuring to know that yes, it is possible to live professionally as a writer, without measuring your worth to the amount of revenue you bring in. If this all sounds vague, it’s because Elliott says it much better than I could, and you should just read “Good on Paper” – it’s got lust, love, death, and a central argument buried in the middle, like any good contemporary personal essay ought to. The catch is, of course, that he’s written seven books, and lives off 25k of “royalties and such,” but he also sees himself as essentially retired. So yeah – NaNoWriMo begins in only four days. Time to start crackin’ on that pension, yeah?

Oh, and since this post is kind of becoming a link dump, here’s a hilarious power quote from Louis C.K., from HTMLGIANT.