I wrote for a couple of hours with cold hands and often shivering because I didn't bother to change out of flannel PJs or to turn on the heat. It must be colder outside today as it stayed about 59 degrees in here in spite of the gas fireplace. Maybe I was able to keep going because I was writing a scene with a campfire in it. Or maybe I lost myself in the continuous, fictional dream as I think John Gardner calls it. All I know is that now it's time for a banana smoothie and a hot shower. After that I'll decide if I want to crank further beyond today's 1900 words.
It is absolutely great to have the evil Inner Editor on vacation—and necessary for a crazy project like this novel-in-a-month. Otherwise I'd have to be worrying that I have at least three narrative threads going at once, all of them flailing about and nowhere near resolved. If I followed every one down it's primrose fictional path, I'd have a (most likely unreadable, uninteresting) novel the length of War and Peace. But all that is OK because this is a rough draft, it's impossible to write a finished novel in a month, and isn't it with revision that we truly figure out which story we are meant to tell?
It has evolved that it works better for me to dive in, almost helter skelter, into some writing every day and then figure out where it might fit after the fact. Crazy quilt. Necklace with differently-sized and colored beads. An olio, isn’t that the crossword puzzle word, the one that means a stew or cooking pot and thus a miscellaneous mélange of elements? Pick which metaphor for this project works. Of course this means, at least for now, there are many jarring jolts in the flow of the overall book. Big stuff like point-of-view shifts (whose story is this anyway?) and yet-unclarified timelines (just when is this particular scene, chapter, section taking place anyway? and did they really have mobile phones back then?)—that sort of thing. Egregious errors of basic writing craft let alone the requisite attention to detail, but what the hell? We're after word count and not anything that makes any sense, right?
I continue to be amazed at how much writing I've done over the years. I have been taking this writing life seriously for quite some time! I suppose I could be distressed that more of it didn't "go anywhere." I guess by that I mean getting something published, even though much of what gets published doesn't sell and isn't read by much of anyone and ends up on the remainder shelf. Of course, it may be simply that my fiction isn't good enough. Truth to tell, I find what I write a little boring at times but then I have no desire or inclination (as of yet) to change that.
So maybe I should head back into therapy to sort out why I seem to have had trouble bringing these projects to a satisying completion. Not that that would mean publication either. Assuming, again, that is the end game in all of why we sit here, typing away, trying to make new worlds with words. I have to resist feeling like a failure because I've accumulated all this material and it remains vague and shapeless, incoherent at times and likely full of cliche. If the only thing I get out of this November novel project is acknowledging how much hard work I've done to become a better writer over the years, then that will be a good thing.
Also, an insight that occurred to me yesterday: I couldn't be successfully writing poetry if I hadn't taken the time to apprentice myself all these to better learn how to be concrete and specific, how to self-edit, how to manage the flow and energy of lines and paragraphs in prose. I may not want to be a novelist, I may no longer care to write (let alone read) short stories but all of this hard work has not been for naught.
Later after more writing:
Maybe it's the shivering that makes a person stick with the words and do a yeowoman's extra word count duty on a blustery Wednesday morning. Or maybe it was the sex scene. The first graphic one I've let into the novel. I haven't sorted how much of a sexy, sexual sub-text I want this novel to have. That's one of the many narrative threads that, for now, is all clouded up. Just keep writing, right, and then when the shapeless blob reaches 50,000 words (which also, hopefully, means some kind of respectable end) then see what plot lines jump out and need further developing, see which characters you really want to spend more time with and learn more about, including all the secrets.
I have too many characters in the draft so far, too. Or at least too many differently named people to keep track of, and who may or may not matter to the advancement of the story. Today I did a party scene and that required a crowd of attendees. Or so I thought. I will be interesting to read this all through at the end and see what jumps out, what zings. And if, God forbid, I want to continue working with it.
Apparently, there is NaNoEdMo for editing and revision in March. Yikes!
One other item worth noting: a while back, I wrote the following in the "current projects" section on my website, about something I planned to do in 2007:
I've returned to my many writings-to-date about the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania—where I grew up—as springboard for maybe a new poetry chapbook, Meander.
In many ways, that's what this near-two weeks of NaNoWriMo has been for me, a revisiting of ideas and themes and fixations about home and exile, about the idea of returning and what repercussions that might have. It seems without meaning too, or even conciously, I've begun to work on mining my writing about the place where I grew up.
