Writer-In-Progress

…but if you try sometimes you just might find…you get what you need…

Be glad I’m not really singing my Rolling Stone-pilfered lyrics. It sounds prettier in your head, trust me.

Two weeks ago, sitting at my desk while my middle school darlings watched the movie version of the book they’d just finished, I practically drooled with anticipation over the upcoming Christmas break. For two whole weeks, I’d not have to cram all my writing time into that glorious 4:30-6:15 am time slot. Instead, I’d have the chance to write–much more–at a more leisurely pace. Never mind the fact that I’d finishes Nano in November and managed an average of 1500 a day, the majority of those in the morning. I had an idea playing in my brain for a new writing project, one that I’d been thinking about for upwards of two years since the seed had been planted in my creativity during graduate school in 2006.

I had everything ready to go: notebooks, pen, laptop, coffee. Nothing could stop me.

Except the lack of words. For the first few days, I struggled to write at all. Struggled to even get myself into my chair in the mornings. I felt nothing where words should be bubbling, an emptiness where ideas had excited me before. After a few days, I forced myself into my seat and began writing not on my sparkly new project but on the reasons that I wasn’t writing.

Lo and behold, a new, more refined idea came out of this journaling. Nothing publishable but, after a few days, a real, solid, pink-bubbled outline to guide me through the project. At the end of the first week, I was pretty down about not having cranked out 3k words a day (that I’d planned) but very excited by the way the outline of the project had come together.

I wrote on that project for a few days, then realized something I’d forgotten in my push to win Nano: I work best when I have more than one project in the fire at a time. Again, I faced the empty page begging my muse for a spark of inspiration, another shimmery idea to immerse myself in while I worked on project #1. Nothing came out, so I did what I’d done before: journaled.

At first it seemed futile, that I don’t just get an idea on a whim and it just turns into something viable. But the more I typed, the more I started seeing the repetition of an idea that I have more than adequate background on (and so do you, but it’s my little secret ) and can probably write numerous books on. I thought..this was too easy…this idea was too simple, it can’t work. Through more writing/brainstorming on the page, I discovered this is, in fact, the PERFECT project for me at this point in my writing and in the year. My lament was that I didn’t think of it sooner to excite myself to the page over break.

So, as I wrap up 2009 and another Christmas break as well, I realize I didn’t get what I wanted for Christmas from my muse. She seriously failed to deliver on that promise of 3k/day in my work. But what she gave me instead–the knowledge that I could write my way through my block to discover what I needed at the time my creativity needed it was a much better present. I might not go back to school with 45K under my belt but I have the road maps for the next several months to get me way past that simplistic notion of success.

When has your muse failed to give you something you wanted but instead given you a gift of what you needed–even if you didn’t know you needed at the time?

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I’m not a fan of the New Year’s Resolution craze. As a kid, I think I was sucked in to the mystical glamor of thinking that the first day of a new year is somehow more special than the remaining 364, but after numerous “resolution” failures, I adopted my dad’s favorite holiday phrase:

It’s just another day.

Now, I know that might sound a bit pessimistic, even fatalistic, but if you cut the NY stuff down to the bare bones, you’ll see what I mean. January 1st has no inherent magical qualities, no special morning fairy dust to help you achieve your goals more than, say, March 22 or August 4. Think about it: how many times have you decided to do something (stop smoking, exercise more, spend more time with someone, keep your house clean, etc.) and there’s a magical day you’ve waited for to get yourself going–only to find your energy and enthusiasm wane in the first three weeks when reality (aka LIFE) gets in the way? There’s always something that sets us back, and in lots of cases, back far enough that we never fully recover.

That’s why I don’t set resolutions on NY. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying I don’t plan my projects, try to improve myself and my writing, or find small ways to tweak my behavior to get more results I desire. I just don’t buy into the whole January 1st thing. I prefer more of a quarterly reflection. By the end of three months, I know whether or not my goal for writing 3,000 words a day is too lofty during the school year (it is) or if my intention of finishing the second draft of my novel in six months is too lax (it isn’t).

The way I spend the quarters of my year is very different since I’m on a school schedule (as a teacher), so to decide in January that I’m going to finish a draft of a book or project in three months, during one of the busiest times of the year for me, is foolish. Those first three months of the year are about sustaining and convincing myself to come back to the page on a daily basis when the lack of sunlight combined with the stress my students face with the constant state testing create daily train-wrecks in my working life and depress me. Once spring comes, and with it, the advent of summer vacation, my output usually doubles since I have the time and mental focus back. Moving into fall and winter bring changes, too, to my work and approach, and give me a chance to wrap things up and move on to new ones.

So if you’ve discovered that resolutions aren’t cutting it for you, slow down and think of your year in a series of related chunks of time and how that works with your process. Saying you’ll write XX words a week starting January 1st doesn’t do you any good if you’ve not realized that’s not your most creative time. If anything, treat each quarter or even each month as a new chance to set meaningful goals based on what you’ve got coming up or know about your process (and if you don’t know about your process, this is the time to think about it…take notes…reflect…). You’ll accomplish more and be less frustrated when 2011 rolls around…which, really, should be everyone’s resolution

How do you set goals and face the New Year’s Resolution bandwagon?

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• Filed in BethWorld, Goal Setting, Your Writing Career

Just a note: I’d hoped to blog frequently during my NaNoWriMo experience, but, as anyone who’s done it successfully will tell you (wish I’d have known!), your brain sorta turns to mush as you write and logical thought processes often take a back seat to the actual creative writing. Over the next few days, I’ll be organizing and posting my thoughts & experiences with NaNoWriMo–a process I firmly believe has made me a much better writer.
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I know myself–and my writing process–well enough to know that when I undertake something new and something as massive as 50K words in 30 days or less, I’d better have a backup plan. I start new creative projects with a crazy, intense energy, and while it takes something big to get me off-track, once I’m off-track, I’m hopelessly lost.

For example, if I’d have picked up the cold my students were passing around or had some kind of disaster where I’d been away from my laptop for two or three days (I know that I’m a very disciplined writer who must meet or come close to daily word quotas on any project, so I work my writing schedule accordingly) and been several thousand words down, I’d pretty much give up.

So, in the planning stages, I decided that words were not my only goal. I’d already logically foregone the whole worrysome issue of publication (see yesterday’s post) and was OK with that, but I still needed alternative goals to meet along the line to feel my NaNoWriMo experience was a successful one.

My goals, in order of importance to me, were:
1. Write twice daily, once before school (4:30-6:15) and once in the evening (7:30-9:00)
2. Produce a minimum 1,000 words for each session
3. Reread NOTHING except the last paragraph written for each new session to get a grip on where my previous essay had been headed
4. COMPLETELY finish every 3 of 5 essays.
5. Mentally censor/pre-edit nothing.

Five small goals but they all added up to getting me to the finish line. One and two are self-evident. 1K words is at times a challenge, other times a breeze. I didn’t always get to write in the evening but, with the exception of weekends, I was typing at 4:30 each morning. My intention was to create a habit there–and since I’m typing this before anyone in their right mind is out of bed, I’d say it succeeded.

Number 3 was to keep my focus on the creative forward nature of NaNoWriMo. It’s not national write and edit month, write and sell or write and question. It’s writing. As a person who loves editing (I know, I’m weird. I don’t care!) I had to resist the urge to go back and fix. It’s not a source of procrastination for me but a fun activity I needed to put off til the writing was done.

Number 4–well, let’s just say that if you’re a writer, I know you’ve got far more novel beginnings than endings in your notebooks and Word files. I instated this rule within the first few days as I discovered I’d write to the climax or message of my essays but leave them dangling “for the editing process”. I forced myself to finish some and leave others. My reluctance to finish pieces is grounded in the fact that my endings suck. They’ve always been the worst part of my writing, even in academic writing. I have a hard time following through if the words aren’t perfect, and I used NaNo as the excuse to force the crappy words out.

Number 5 piggybacks on number 4, only in a broader sense. When you sign up to write fifty thou words, you soon realize that even with massive post-it chart papers full of ideas, a stack of index cards and a notebook of thoughts, it’s not enough. Eventually you have to write, write and keep writing, trusting in the process that writing forward will dredge up something from the sludge in your soul worth pursuing. In NaNo, there wasn’t time to get an idea, debate, outline, debate, toy, play…there was time to write and nothing else. Some of the tangents I went off on in the course of writing were sheer garbage. Others were entertaining but only for me, and others surprised me with the latent potential once fully drafted and edited. I liked this goal a lot because it let my muse have a say, and she’s only happy when she’s listened to.

At the end of NaNoWriMo, I did end up with a manuscript. A hefty, chunky one I’ve already printed off and hole-punched into a binder. I haven’t read it yet, haven’t pulled out the wheat from the chaff or sifted the dirt from the gold. It needs to simmer first. But more importantly than the winner’s certificate, I won by adding new, positive habits to my writing repertoire that will serve me well with any writing I do in the future.

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Just a note: I’d hoped to blog frequently during my NaNoWriMo experience, but, as anyone who’s done it successfully will tell you (wish I’d have known!), your brain sorta turns to mush as you write and logical thought processes often take a back seat to the actual creative writing. Over the next few days, I’ll be organizing and posting my thoughts & experiences with NaNoWriMo–a process I firmly believe has made me a much better writer.
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I’ve wanted to undertake NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, an November tradition for writers the world over, for several years now. How do I know this? I originally registered at the site in 2006 (it says so…) but didn’t have the courage (or the idea for a novel-length work) to actually dive in. As the years have passed, I’ve grown further from fiction writing and closer to essay and non-fiction writing, so when an idea struck last year–right about this time–for a book of essays on cooking and food, something in my mind triggered the thought of NaNo, and I decided this would be the year and that book of essays would be my “project”.

When you tell a non-writer you’re planning to do 50,000 in a month, they have one of two reactions: complete indifference or complete disbelief. There’s no happy medium, no chatting about what it will entail. Non-writers already don’t understand how we can spend so much time loving on words and phrases, and they think we’re a bit quacked to say the least–either way.

Tell a writer you’ve signed up for NaNo and you get one of two reactions: “Oh, wow, I could never do that!” or, “Oh, wow! That sounds like fun! Good luck!” Fortunately for me, about 98% of my writing friends were in the latter group.

For some writers, however, the notion of conquering the hill of 50K is too much to contemplate. Mixed reactions dot the landscape of the doubters. Maybe they don’t have that much of a story to tell, or maybe they are perfectionists and can’t lay down a sentence without it being sparkling. Maybe they can’t write in the face of potential failure (though, I believe, getting down even a thousand words is a win–those are a thousand words you didn’t have before). And some writers find any and every excuse to sit out and watch from the sidelines because it would compromise the purity of their process, the sanctity of their story.

I’m here to tell you–NaNoWriMo is not about the story. It’s about the writing. Messy, ugly, painful at times…and that’s only in the first week. It only gets worse as you continue on the path. NaNo isn’t about creating a novel that will sell (though, evidently, according the their site, a few have), it’s about one thing and one thing only: writing. Not editing, though some use the excuse of editing to drop out. Not creating vivid, lovable characters with a fatal flaw, but writing 1,667 words a day (on average) to keep yourself going toward that finish line. Not working through the delicate strands of your multi-layered plot, but forcing yourself to believe, in the middle of week 2, that all these unrelated words and off-topic tangents are really helping you be a better writer in the long run even if they make no sense now.

NaNo is about writing, pure and simple. It’s about hitting a wall and chipping through that wall with an ice pick because you can’t leap it in a single bound. Nano is meant to prove that you can go from zero to 50K words in 25 days and live to tell about it (in your blog). Nano makes it OK to stumble on grammar, end sentences with prepositions and abandon spell check. (Or, in my case, when I’d made too many spelling errors due to inept typing and got a box that said “You’ve made too many errors and spell check will now stop correcting”, spell check abandons YOU). Nano gets you writing and keeps you writing until the bitter end, forcing you to forget your dreams of perfection and NYT best-sellerdom. It forces you to write for the sake of writing.

And that’s why I loved it. I hesitate to say “loved it every second” because that’d be a definite lie. But I loved what it did, what it forced me to do and how I learned, from the start line and my dreams of a pretty little draft to the end line with a wildly divergent set of essays, to do what I loved most:

Write. Wildly, passionately, without worry or fear or theme. And isn’t that why we pick up a pen in the first place?

How about my other WriMos out there? What lessons did NaNoWriMo teach you?

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