Thoughts from a Binge-Writing Hangover

I'm back!  November's over, so I don't have my NaNo writing anymore as an excuse not to post here.  (Not that I wasn't finding plenty of excuses before that---this place has been a ghost town over the past few months)  I'm actually happy to be back to writing these entries: I started to miss writing as soon as I finished National Novel Writing Month (NaNo) this year, oddly enough.

Not that I wrote a story so amazing that it inspired me to have tons of confidence in my abilities, mind you.  I finally got all of Songs from Town (my NaNo novel for this year) that I could think of squeezed out of my system, and it had its moments, but I really had to push myself some days.  I ended up on surprisingly few rants, and there was only one major break from reality, so that's a good sign.  Writing did come easier to me this year, I must admit.  I even managed to get ahead of pace on Thanksgiving, which led to a rare lack of panic going into the home stretch.  It certainly helped that my novel this year was disjointed by design, going off to join new groups of characters at will.  I hardly found any characters that I wanted to stick with for more than a single chapter, though, which is unusual for me.  Normally it's the characters that drive my writing, but here they were often just cocktail napkin sketches in comparison to what I'm used to.  And many of them were horrible, horrible people.  I did, surprisingly, manage to tie up quite a few hanging plot strands in the last few chapters, albeit not in very organic or satisfying ways.  To expect that kind of result given how little I'd planned though, would be like betting on a miracle.

My wife was neck and neck with me all through this month, and for the first time I actually managed to validate ahead of her!  I ended up having to write an extra thousand words though, since a whole bunch of the ones I did write were stolen away from me by the validator.  I think it was my predilection for em-dashes that did me in---the words that they connected were counted as separate words in NeoOffice, as they should have been, but in the validator the fact that I didn't put spaces in there came back to bite me in the ass.  Still, I cranked those extra words out without too much trouble.  (I think I'll go back to Scrivener next year though: trying to find older scenes for reference in a ninety-some-page document was a major headache)

It's always a painful process for me to get back into writing after a long time away.  I always vow that I'm going to not take as long before I start again each year, but each year I end up losing track of that vow in the same doldrums that eat up a whole bunch of New Year's resolutions.  At least this past year I got a whole bunch of revising done (though I'm still only halfway through Suckers, the novel I was doing it for), and I started a promising new novel called Delta OUTSIDE of NaNo, which is unheard of for me.  Songs from Town was actually supposed to be a prequel to Delta (which still only has a few chapters to it after I got hung up on where to go next), but it ended up becoming its own creature, with only a hasty, eye-rolling tie-in at the end.  The bits of it that I had before November started were with me long before Delta came around though, so that makes sense.

Now I need to get back to revising.  The holidays are going to distract me all over the place, but I've got a good story with real potential, and I'm not going to let it flounder just because there are so many new and exciting things I could be doing otherwise.  The NaNo folks say that getting that Shitty First Draft (SFD) out of the way is the hardest part, and on some level it might be, but going back through that draft with a fine-toothed comb and taking out the shitty parts can be nearly as difficult, if not more so.  When you actually have to look at your own work with a critical eye again it can be deflating, and I think that in many ways I'm my own worst critic.  That's a good thing to be in the long run, I think, but there can be times of despairing, of thinking that I'll never be more than a talentless hack doomed to obscurity, can be hard to take sometimes.  (Granted, I may at least be doomed to obscurity anyways, but I'm never going to get anywhere unless I at least make peace with that eventuality)  Thank god I have such an amazing wife to get me through all this.  Her confidence in me begins where my own confidence in myself ends, and I always strive to be just as supportive to her.  And she's actually getting results!  The anthology that accepted her short story is supposed to finally be coming out sometime this month, and I'm over the moon for her success.  She's my inspiration and my rock, and together we'll at least get one or two of all our crazy dreams realized.

The Unbearable Awkwardness of Being

Listening to Dan Harmon's Harmontown podcast today really got me thinking about the nature of creative minds, and how to care for them.  He was reading from the old journals he kept as a teenager on the show, and they had a certain pretention in them that he openly acknowledged, and which I immediately recognized from my own past writings, which I've often winced at (and still do with some of my recent stuff).  There was also a segment near the end where he was talking to a guy in the audience who'd deferred his creative dreams in order to pursue a more practical line of work, and again I saw echoes of my own life choices.

The most important advice Harmon had to give was to keep writing, and that you're probably going to write a whole ton of shitty words to get to the good ones.  That's advice I keep reminding myself about, and it's advice that I've tried to put into practice with my daily entries on 750 Words.  I've written nearly 150,000 words there so far, which is the equivalent of nearly three years of National Novel Writing Month.  Granted, the vast majority of what I've written there hasn't been fiction, but there's a certain level at which it's all just expository writing, and I feel that we could all stand to develop a solid narrative voice even when describing our own lives.  I think that voice is still a work in progress for me, and maybe it'll always be that, but I know that I'm not wincing now as much as I once did.

I've also noticed that creativity, my case included, often runs hand in hand with obsessive behavior.  Sometimes I can use this obsessive behavior for good, like when I apply it to running, or writing, or cleaning.  Other times it drags me down, like when I become obsessed with a video game, or checking social media for updates.  I can't always control where my obsessions head (especially when I'm feeling tired and/or depressed), but I think I'm finally starting to understand this behavior better.  I think it's what makes creative people so prone to addiction.  Thank god I haven't had to deal with that in my own life, but it's something I keep at the back of my mind.

I think having other people in my life to support me---especially my wife, whom I can never thank enough for that---has really helped me keep my obsessions on the positive side.  That's not to say I don't still slip up every now and then, but the cycles are shorter and less frequent now.  I even feel that I'm being more productive at work, although it helps to have a job where I finally feel like I'm part of a highly capable team on that front.

It's funny---I was always somewhat of a loner growing up.  I always thought I was better off on my own, and that other people didn't understand me well enough to be my friends.  I was focusing, though, on the things that I couldn't change (i.e. other people's reactions to me) instead of the things that I could (my behavior).  Granted, when I finally did learn how to be a fully functioning social creature, there was a lot of trial and error.  That's what often scared me off from it when I was younger---I was an incredibly easily embarrassed boy, and kids my own age could be especially cruel when dealing with my weirdness.  Through it all though, I always regretted the times I didn't try reaching out to people more than the times I did.  I even managed to get over my all-time most awkward moments eventually (though perhaps that may have something to do with the passage of time making them less vivid).

There was one particular event that haunted me for ages.  Tim Robbins went to the same high school as me, and while I was there he came in to give a speech at the auditorium.  There was a Q & A session afterwards, and I got it into my head that this was my big chance to ask a celebrity a question.  The only question I managed to come up with, however, when I raised my hand and the kid with the microphone came over, was whether the veteran actor/director had heard any good dirty jokes from Walter Matthau on the set of I.Q.  The response he gave was a polite demurral, which is probably what I would have done in the same situation, but good lord did it ever take me a long time to live that down---and nobody had even made fun of me for it!  Even that, though, is finally something I can look back on and... well maybe not laugh about yet, but I'm getting there.

Thoughts on an Impending NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo keeps getting closer, and I still haven't decided on a story.  I know it's going to be slow going if I just start writing off the top of my head without planning scenes ahead of time, so I'd better decide which story I'm going to go with over this weekend.  It's not that I have to have all my scenes planned out, but I need enough to at least get me through the current day's writing, so that I can take a breather and plan further scenes after it.  I think my issue is that I haven't particularly latched on to any of the characters I've been thinking of for my stories yet, so there isn't a particular story that jumps out at me.  Every so often I'll be seized by the notion to jump off and write something completely different---a prospect both dangerous and exciting.  I'm less worried about getting to 50,000 words this year than I ever have been before, but I have to be careful not to get cocky and just take it for granted that I'll finish on time.  I think in my fourth year I ended up going about ten thousand words over (and was still only about two-thirds of the way through the story, which I STILL haven't finished), but all the other years it came pretty close to the wire, and the story started to run out just as the 50,000 word mark became tantalizingly close.

Let me go over again what I've got so far: there's my coming of age story of a New York kid transplanted to Iowa, my fictional dystopian city anthology, my one about the struggles about an oddball Staten Island family, and (running a distant fourth) the tale of the world's last moviegoer, whose largesse supports the entire remaining industry.  They're all premises that I feel I could write at least a few chapters of at this point, but I don't know whether they'll peter out after that or inspire me to keep going.  I guess I could always start with one and switch to another if the situation becomes truly dire, but finding the momentum to start up an entirely different plot after the first one fails can be difficult given how fraught with discouragement that predicament is.

At the very least I'll have the opportunity to write with my friends again, and I'm looking forward to that in and of itself.  There's so much more creative energy in a room full of other writers than there is when I'm just alone with the blank page.  Granted the blank page doesn't terrify me like it used to, but other people's determination working towards the same goal is like a drug that there's just no substitute for.  Even after five years of NaNoWriMo I hardly ever write new work outside of November.  If I can find the time for my marathon training I'm sure I could find the time for writing, but then there's that question of momentum again...

At least I've been doing my daily writing pretty consistently (even if I only rarely work up the nerve to post it to the public).  I can write 750 words in 20 minutes pretty consistently now, which is something I never thought I'd be able to do before.  I'm sure it'd take me considerably longer if I was writing this all down longhand.  My penmanship was never the greatest, and I fear it's gone downhill significantly since the days I used to regularly practice it while taking notes in college.  I think I still have those notebooks somewhere in my parents' house, but lord knows what I'd ever do with them...  I just hope that I can keep this kind of speed (or anything resembling it) when I switch over from fact to fiction next week.

On Writing

I'm thinking of becoming a writer.

"But dude," you might ask, if 'dude' is a term that you favor, "how can you hope to make a career out of the written word when you haven't update your blog in a year and a half?  Surely this does not bode well."

That is quite an astute observation!  Rest assured, I'm making no plans whatsoever to leave my day job behind and spend my days concocting vast reams of prose.  I'm going to stay a programmer just as long as they'll let me, because I'm not an irresponsible idiot.  (Although there are persuasive arguments against that... (Um, not the part about me being an irresponsible idiot))  When they stop letting me program for my current company, though---and god knows that's not unheard of, given these uncertain economic times, my company's history in particular, and my experience with my last job---all bets are off (except for the whole "needing money to live" part).

Good lord, just looking at all the parentheticals in that last paragraph makes me cringe; am I really cut out to be a storyteller?  In a way, writing's always been my job, since I already spend my days in front of a computer, creating worlds of the words, not-quite-words, numbers, and odd punctuation that constitute my Java code.  I'd argue that every program is a story, though usually not a linear one, and often not an interesting one.  The world of code has its good writers and its bad writers; I'd like to think that I'm one of the better ones, although I don't think that fact particularly qualifies me to write anything else.

No, I got into writing through NaNoWriMo, and as a result I now have over two hundred thousand words of (mostly rushed, non-publishable) fiction to my name.  I recently finished workshopping about a quarter of those words (heavily revised from their original form) with some of my best and most critical friends, and the results of the experience were encouraging enough to make me believe that I can turn the words into something resembling a book.  It's a tale of vampires versus zombies, so no, I certainly don't have any lofty artistic pretensions here, but it may actually be something that a good chunk of people will enjoy reading, even given how played-out both those races of creatures have become at this point.

Now the question is how quickly I can muster up the energy to revise the story at least one more time, fix a few awkward elements, and find a way to make it about 50% longer.  No big deal, right?  Now please excuse me while I go hyperventilate in that corner over there...

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.