The 1,667 Project

It's nothing short of a ridiculous resolution. Right after making it I'm already in danger of not sticking to it. (Not to the strictest letter at least: I've always been a late night writer)

So here's the deal: for two years now I've participated in National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo for short, or just plain NaNo for shorter), and each time I began the month feeling as though I was just beginning to exercise a muscle that had atrophied from severe lack of use. Granted, the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days is no small undertaking, but it seemed as though it'd be simple enough to get myself to write just 1,667 words a day: that was the average I needed to maintain in order to finish up and “win” by the end of November, and of course I ended up failing miserably at first.

Part of the reason for this was that I'd chosen a premise that I didn't realize I wouldn't enjoy fleshing out until it was too late. It was a science fiction story (which should have been my first clue that there'd be trouble) about a man who wakes up in an empty apartment with memories of having been a space marine, with no idea how he ended up in his present location. The story was told in first person present tense for the apartment scenes, which were broken up by past tense chapters describing his space marine exploits as his base on a distant planet was gradually overrun by a zombifying virus.

Almost as soon as I began talking in this man's voice I started to hate him. He was whiny, and wasted far too much time bemoaning the improbability of his ending up in the bare apartment (though such delaying tactics in truth existed mainly to pad my word count: a common tactic for NaNo). He even started to develop superpowers after a while, and he STILL continued to complain!

During the course of the story I introduced a secondary character: a peppy young woman named Joy, who had an abusive boyfriend. She immediately became more interesting than my so-called hero. In fact, I even made an abrupt change to turn HER into the space marine, eliminating my main character entirely and explaining away the situation by framing it as the act of a displeased god taking the form of a seven year old.

But I still faced the larger problem that all of my situations seemed to be devolving into cliches, no matter how seemingly interesting they were when they started out. So, more than halfway through the month and still only 15,000 words in, I took a deep breath and I started from scratch. Suddenly I was telling a relatively conventional story about a lifetime loser who ships off to join the space marines and make something of himself.

Of course it wasn't quite as plain as that. The space marines in my story (all versions of it) weren't exactly the most venerable branch of the military, and had acceptance standards so low that they started to become outright suspicious. Plus, it was all framed in a world where a totalitarian government had decreed that everyone needed to thoroughly document every single day of their lives. My main character had opted to do this by writing blogs of no less than 5,000 words per day, which meant that I could reach my 50,000-word goal if I managed to get through describing a week in his shoes. Right away the story got easier to write, and I found ways to incorporate everything from flying monkeys to cat churches to giant aliens to coffee sandwiches into a narrative that became gradually more deranged as it went along. I even managed to work in references to the earlier drafts, including an extended conversation that my main character had with Joy when she appeared to him as a possibly space madness-induced vision.

Even with that sped-up pace I still found myself having to climb an almost impossible hill of words over the Thanksgiving weekend as I traveled to visit family. When all was said and done I ended up writing 7,000 words on that fateful Sunday of the 30th (up from 5,000 the year before), and 1,667 started to look like the easiest thing in the world. If only I'd been able to keep that up from the start...

So that's what brings me here right now, writing this blog entry: I decided that my new year's resolution would be to write those 1,667 words a day every day of the year. I'm allowed to write about anything that strikes my fancy, just as long as I'm putting thoughts together into the kinds of descriptive sentences that seemed to elude me at the beginning of this past November. I have no idea who's going to read it, and I can't possibly expect them to enjoy something that by design will no doubt be rambling, random, and have very little bearing on anyone's life besides my own. But at least I'll be writing, which is more than I was doing before.

Hmm... Only 861 words so far? I was hoping that story would take longer to tell... I guess 1,667 isn't such a breeze after all, especially now that I'm worried about whether what I'm writing will be interesting enough for other people to read all the way through, even though I just pretty much stated that I don't care whether anyone else reads this. Funny how that works out, isn't it? Still, I'm past the halfway point, so I might as well barrel the rest of the way downhill from here.

One thing I noticed about my writing during NaNo was that the words go by a lot faster when I'm writing dialog than they do when I'm trying to describe situations and move the plot along. Heck, even monologues can eat up a lot of words, especially if they're being given by psychopaths in a pure stream of consciousness fashion. But then again plot is usually the hardest part, especially if you want that plot to have a satisfying narrative arc by the time you're through.

In that respect I've been lucky: both of my NaNo plots so far have managed to end almost exactly at the 50,000 mark, even if they've had to do it by veering into incongruously bizarre and/or dramatically unnecessary territory. I know a number of other people who usually end up never finishing their stories, neither during NaNo nor long after the month is over. Granted, I still don't have a satisfying draft of my novel from 2007, but it's a story with a beginning, middle and end, which is an accomplishment in itself.

It occurs to me now that I'm not a person who enjoys talking about himself all that much, and that may be another reason why cranking out all these words right now is so hard. I usually try to be humble in everything that I do, because I fear verging into insufferable egotism if I ever start believing myself to be inherently interesting or eloquent. I'm a know-it-all by nature, but life has a way of punishing me for being too assertive about it. The second I open my mouth with too much pride I end up putting my foot in it, though it seems no matter what I do I end up having trouble relating to people a lot of the time.

But that's what this is all about, right? Improving communication, expressing my ideas in a way that other people can at least attempt to understand, instead of hoping that they can somehow psychically read the emotional waves I try to send them silently. Maybe print isn't my ideal medium, but I'm willing to give it a shot. At least it's active, not passive, and I could use some more activity in my life right now, on several fronts. Will I look back fondly on writing stuff like this? The odds are certainly better than doing the same on the time I spent playing Word Twist on Facebook.

Here's where things start spiraling into “crazy dream” territory: what if what I'm writing, or at least the fact that I'm writing, inspires somebody else to write? Somebody with a unique voice, who has a story to tell that would otherwise go unheard? Again, this isn't an expectation. It's just a wild, improbable hope I have, combined with a continuing belief that doing something, as long as it's not destructive, is better than doing nothing. At the very least I may cure myself from writing too many run-on, comma-strewn sentences in everything that I type, which would be a benefit to people who have to read my stuff for other reasons in the future.

Unfortunately, I can't expect to both write this much and edit it to the point I'd usually be happy with. As a result the flow of all these words may end up being hopelessly jumbled, occasionally to the point where they make sense only to me, and perhaps not even that once I go back and read it later (IF I ever go back and read it later).

I can at least promise that I won't be writing about writing every day: I think I've already exhausted a lot of what I wanted to say about the subject already anyways. There'll probably be plenty of pop culture references and dime store philosophy to come, and I guess there's a chance that it'll end up being seen as more internet pollution by the literati who wish only the best and most relevant work out there showed up in search results (which I must confess would put me among their numbers more often than not).

Maybe I'll cut out some stuff sometimes too, if I end up going places too personal or dull while I'm writing. In that case I may not end up posting a full 1,667 words, but at least they'll exist somewhere. As it stands, it looks like I've finally reached my goal for the day, so I guess I'll sign off now before I waste any material that I might need later.