Saturday, November 22, 2014
Sunday, November 16, 2014
NaNoWriMo: Day 16
Quite
frankly, I’m ready to be done with this NaNoWriMo business. I have 48,000
words, but so what? I spend from 20 minutes to two hours a day writing (the
two-hour days are rare). The excitement of meeting the challenge doesn’t appeal to me at
all anymore, but I know that without this push and the public exposure of this blog,
I would have given up by now. If I’d given up, I wouldn’t have this crazy
assemblage of thoughts and memories, which, potentially, contains all the
ingredients needed for a book.
On
the days I write for 20 minutes—a lick and a promise—I’m ready to give up.
Maybe when I get to 50,000 words I’ll just stop, I think. But on those days
when I take a little more time—not just writing a snatch but also scrolling
through the pages, skim-reading bits, seeing that portions do hang together—on
those days I’m pretty sure there’s a publishable book in here somewhere, many
months (or years) from now. But I can only shape a book out of this stuff if I
hang out in the manuscript, if I think on it and read through it and keep on
pushing myself. If I put it aside for a week, two weeks, six months, the work
will languish. I have so many drafts, so much of my mind recorded here and
there in drafts on my hard drive. When I immerse myself enough in the manuscript,
I know I must continue.
The
second week of November, I started a big, wonderful, copyediting project that
has immersed me in someone else’s manuscript. Four, five, six hours a day, I’m
transported back seventy years. When I’m not editing, I’m pulling World War II
titles off my bookshelves—even my “breaks” revolve around this editing project!
Today is Sunday, and I’m forcing myself to rest from the editing for one day—but
I’m eager to get back to the characters who even during the copyediting process are becoming so dear
to me.
It’s
weird to move between the vast, well-structured World War II compilation I’m editing
and my own snips and drafts, not even yet adequately stitched together. I’m
frankly a lot more interested in the editing project than in my own writing. If
I hadn’t made a public commitment to this cheater’s NaNoWriMo, I would gladly
tuck my own work away for a few weeks. Which would stretch into months. I know
myself. Daily I choose to honor the potential in my writing. I choose to have a
tiny bit of faith that slow and steady will take me to the finish line, that
some of these pages deserve a home in a book, that slow deliberate plodding
will bear more fruit than manic hypergraphia.
So, however reluctantly, I will keep on writing.
So, however reluctantly, I will keep on writing.
Monday, November 10, 2014
NaNoWriMo: Day 10
On the morning of Day 7, I
received news that my dear writing mentor, Judith Kitchen, had died. That day,
I had to teach a software training session—no way I could cancel. I had an
afternoon appointment with a student writer, and I couldn’t cancel that either.
Shouldn’t life stand still when we need to grieve?
But I know better. I don’t
expect life to stand still, and I also don’t expect myself to power numbly
through. I proceeded through my day with puffy eyes, a scratchy voice, distracted
and grieving. I wore black, though in our culture that’s no sign of anything in
particular. And when I wasn’t teaching, I read.
One of Judith’s most recent
works was The Circus Train, a
novella-length essay published as a book last winter but first appearing in The Georgia Review last year. I’ve had
that issue of GR on my dresser for a
full year now, but I never opened it up and started reading Judith’s long
essay. I was waiting, for some reason.
I opened Judith’s essay and
started to read. Judith took me once again under her wing and let me into her
thoughts as she remembered her life as a girl, a young mother, a middle-aged
woman full of health and love but already squarely facing her mortality. The
year after my mother-in-law died, Judith was diagnosed with breast cancer. Each
time I saw her—once or twice a year—I wondered if it would be the last time.
But she kept rallying, kept surprising her doctors. Just weeks ago she was
hospitalized and struggling to breathe and it seemed like the end. Then she sat
up in bed and started editing poetry.
Judith kept writing through
the chemo brain fog, through breathing struggles, through weakness and
prednisone puffiness and lymphedema.
And because she kept
writing, I have access to her mind as she considered a life lived, a life about
to end. And here I am in the middle of a writing challenge, wondering if I even
want to keep writing. I certainly want to quit writing for today and for
tomorrow, and I have struggled over the past weeks and months as well.
Judith kept writing, and
because she did, I have her mind on the page. She still keeps me company, and
her words continue to speak.
Judith would have rolled
her eyes at my wimpy attitude. When I found a small publisher for my first book
and worried that I was settling for something too small, Judith shrugged. “You will
write many more books,” she said. “Publish, then write another.”
So I did. And Judith helped
me, though she was sick and weak and probably should have focused on herself
instead. She made sure I had the best second book possible—and I know many,
many other writers who are this week remembering Judith for all she was and all
we are because we had her.
I wrote a little on Day 7,
though my heart wasn’t in it at all. A few hundred words. And a few hundred
more on Day 8. Yesterday I felt just as weary, just as sad. Today is Monday and
I started a big editing job and conducted another software training and turned
in grades for my online class.
But what about the writing?
I’ve decided to make my
NaNoWriMo project into an even bigger mess. Take a couple of those essays I was
reserving for another book. Break them up and plug them into this one. If they
don’t work, fine. Nothing else is clicking, and I’m not going to throw in the
towel (until December 1).
Judith would have told me
not to reserve my best stuff for some later project. “What the hell are you
waiting for?” she would have said. So I won’t wait. I have no faith that any of
this will come together, but I won’t quit yet.
A lifetime of writing,
Judith, and it wasn’t enough. Thank you for leaving us with so much of
yourself.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
NaNoWriMo: Day 5
A word of advice
The NaNoWriMo website gets jammed in the evening when everyone
is posting a word count. I tend to write in the morning, and I go ahead and
enter my word count as I go, even if I plan to write more later in the day. You
can update your word count as many times a day as you’d like. If I do write in
the evening, I enter that word count the next day.
What I’m learning
Keep in mind that I did not start from scratch. On Day 1 of NaNoWriMo I was already halfway to my goal. This means my daily goal is
already less than half that of a true, non-cheating NaNoWriMo participant. I’ve
been spending no more than two hours a day writing—sometimes just an hour, and
yet I’m making progress and I see the shape of the manuscript emerging in ways
I wouldn’t have if I’d just read through drafts without adding any new writing.
I can see that I need to set up a quest or Big Concern early on
and shape the book to explore that quest or concern. And I’m already getting a
good idea of what that Big Concern is for me—not something I ever considered
writing about until this month, although I see my quest there under the surface
in much of my writing to date. This is the fun part of writing—discovery!
Much (if not all) of this material will need to be rewritten
once I know better where the manuscript is headed. Creating a book out of discrete
pieces (whether stand-alone drafts, blogs, or essays) can happen in two ways (probably more than two): as a collection of discrete meditations or
essays, or as narrative nonfiction.
This writing wants to be narrative. What a surprise! When I fantasized about converting blog posts into a book, I imagined a minimum of revision. I thought I would just plunk the pieces together and voila! I love the essay, but I think I might love the
challenge of book-length narrative even more—holding the structure of years and multiple themes and threads
together and cinching them tighter in each round of revision.
I’m not yet doing the cinching, but this NaNo cheating forces me
into the manuscript each day for at least an hour or two. I skim eight or ten pages of what’s already
written, then find an access point to dip in and write. I surface again, skim,
then write some more. It’s that writing time, inside the manuscript, that helps me think, that helps me to see
the narrative threads and motifs in my life.
But the time when I’m not writing is just as valuable—maybe even
more so. Because I’m physically “into” the manuscript every day to get my word
count, I find that I’m also mentally into the manuscript while I’m going about
the rest of my day. More than once I’ve opened the file again hours after
completing my word count in order to add another thought, another paragraph,
another few hundred words.
Reading list
To help keep my head in the manuscript even when I’m not immersed in it, I’ve started a reading list, along the lines of what I see as my Big Concern in the work.
Why Place Matters: Geography, identity, and Civic Life in Modern
Times, eds. Wilfred M. McClay, Ted V. McAllister
The Body Geographic, Barrie Jean Borich
Leaving the Pink House, Ladette Randolph
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
Word count: 35,382
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
Word count: 35,382
Sunday, November 2, 2014
NaNoWriMo: Day 2
Yesterday:
Day 1
The
throat tickle I’ve had all week dripped and scratched itself deep yesterday.
Full-on cold symptoms. Awesome. But I figured if I didn’t get started on
November 1, I wouldn’t get started.
So
I sat down at my desk, opened my computer, and started cutting and pasting. I
started with blog posts from the time period I have in mind to write about. The
blog posts added up to something just under 10,000 words. I didn’t read them as
I cut and pasted. No evaluation or censoring—well, not much. The point of
NaNoWriMo is to produce raw material, isn’t it? I might not be truly producing
yet, but I’m certainly not going to start editing, either.
After
I’d harvested all I could from the blog, I went through my very messy hard
drive, searching through drafts, cutting and pasting in between blog posts as I
tried to keep things roughly in chronological order. I have so many drafts,
mostly unsorted, all over the place. It’s hard to find what I want by keyword
search any more. I didn’t take loads of time to organize, but as I searched I
also made some attempt at leaving my files tidier than I found them (thanks,
Mom). Even though I wasn’t reading the drafts, I could still see certain
friendships and places appearing and reappearing in those drafts. I resisted
the impulse to chart or measure or plan. Not yet. My only plan right now is not
having a plan.
Here’s
why. I’m afraid if I take the time to develop a plan, I’ll talk myself out of
trying to end the month with a 50,000-word manuscript. It would be so easy to
decide this stuff is boring and no one will be interested. That may well be
true, but I’m not going to make that assessment until at least December!
Day
2
I would have liked to use the extra hour from setting back our clocks to sleep,
but my cold woke me up at six—I mean five o’clock. I remembered a couple of
journal entries that might fit with my manuscript, so I added those fragments
(1,500 words) to my work-in-progress before I even got started writing for the day. And from the moment I laid fingers to keyboard, I had to banish thoughts about
how lame this exercise is and how messy the manuscript. I promised myself: no
indulging in self doubt until December. Power on through.
I started on page one of the 30,000 or so words I’d patched
together from drafts. As I read, I added some narrative and reflection and made
notes for threads to weave into later parts of the manuscript. In fits and
starts, I wrote 1,138 words—my first new writing of the month. I only got to
page 18. Tomorrow I intend to pick up there and continue reading and augmenting
my way through until I’ve got another thousand words.
Here’s my advice to myself today, starting as I am with a pretty
good chunk of manuscript already before me:
Resist deleting. When you notice repetition, leave it stand for
now. Don’t worry about tense inconsistencies or any craft decisions. Keep slapping on
more words here and there and filling out the pages with material. Just write.
Day 2
Starting word count: 31,786
Ending word count: 32,924
Words written: 1,138
Words remaining: 17,078
Words per day to finish on time: 589
Saturday, November 1, 2014
NaNoWriMo (a Nonfiction Cheater's Confession)
No, I am not writing a novel. Truth be told, all I’m doing is using the challenge (and word-count software) of NaNoWriMo as motivation to assemble a new manuscript. I’m not writing from scratch, at least not yet, but I am pulling from rough drafts, blog posts, and journal entries to see if I can put together something cohesive. What a cheater’s path to 50,000 words, right? Cutting and pasting to meet your word count. Really?
The
thing is, I’ve got all this material on my hard drive, sorted into various
nooks and crannies. Why not patch it all together and write what needs to be
written and see what happens?
Writing
is discovery, I tell my thesis students. Don’t worry about where the writing
might go or whether the project is publishable. There are no rules about how to
draft, whether in chapters or essays or one long stream-of-consciousness
paragraph. Write to figure out what you think. Write to find the meaning in the
events in your life. Write because writing feels good and because God has
gifted you. Write because it’s fun. If it’s not fun any more, then stop. But if
you talk yourself out of writing before you sit down to the keyboard, you’ll
never know if what’s inside you might become a book that will connect you to
others, that will contribute to culture, to conversation, to community.
Uh,
somewhere in the middle of the last paragraph I stopped talking to my students
and started talking to myself. So,
yeah. I’m going to do this. And by blogging my intention, I’m making it public.
I am taking a cheater’s path through NaNoWriMo by starting with a body of
work—all nonfiction.
NaNoWriMo
it is. I’m all in.
Day 1
Words written: 29,481
Words remaining: 20,519
Words per day to finish on time: 684
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)