Embracing my dark side

Here’s a modern-day bad word in some circles: competition. 

Maybe the word shines where you live, but around here it’s tainted. When my oldest was little, he was in two beginner sports. Both had scheduled games, but the adults emphasized “we don’t keep score”. My family figured we could suffer through that, but then came T-ball. 

Imagine the point of view of a competitive 5-year-old who’s been watching ballgames since he was a baby. Finally he is no longer a spectator. Finally he gets to play. He’s in the infield. The batter makes contact. He fields the ball (!) and throws to first (!!). Before the batter makes it down the line, the first baseman catches it (!!!) and touches the bag (hallelujah!). Imagine the joy, and then the heartache. In this league, even if by some miracle you managed to get a kid out, he or she was not out. Every child batted every inning, and ran the base paths, regardless of the play of the other team.

Somehow this was going to protect kids from getting their feelings hurt, but all it did for my son was leave him confused and upset. This was six years ago, and look at how I can still foam about it. Sad, really, but by now you’ve guessed that my son got his spirit from at least one of his parents. It’s true, I am competitive. I’m a girl and one of them artsy types, but I like sports. I like to battle and I like to win. 

NaNoWriMo pushes participants toward their goal with two competitive elements. I discussed the line and bar graph in an earlier post, and they stir a little of the competitive fire. You see yourself up against time, up against a goal. This is good for the inner conqueror, but for your inner competitor, the website offers the word count of your buddies. I loved being able to peek in on their reported numbers. Sure, I felt happy for them, but seeing them race toward their goal made me want to reach mine even more. 

So thanks to all my NaNoWriMo buddies. Especially the one that called me a grabastic puke. Your trash talk (and success) was an extra push.

NaNoWriMo and Rewards

The National Novel Writing Month encourages people to attempt to write a first draft of a novel, 50,000 words or more, in the month of November. I made it, and I’ve taken some things with me. I’ll be posting them over the next few days.

When it comes to first draft writing, I’ve been shackled by the need for ongoing rightness. 

From Wikimedia, Bill Woodrow's 'Sitting On History', John McCullough

Every word, as it comes to my mind and goes forth from my fingertips, ought to be quality. This is poppycock, batfaced fantasy, but I embraced it. What I’ve learned and relearned is that striving for quality in a first draft means you never finish, and never finishing is the opposite of true quality. 

So I can’t force first-draft quality. What I can force is output. I can write a certain amount of words every day. It is hard, but not that hard. It is achievable, and make-upable: if you fail today, you can make the time tomorrow. You can write a lot in 30 days by working piece by piece, or, as Anne LaMott suggested, bird by bird. Some of those words may have life in them, and that life, along with the craft of rewriting, is the source of quality.

The NaNoWriMo experience reminded me of an article I read (and took with me, sorry about that to my doctor’s office) in Time magazine. It covered research on incentives in school. One of the things the researchers learned was that small rewards for things that a student can control are more effective that rewarding a student for grades, which are viewed as out of his or her control. 

NaNoWriMo’s website gave registered users small rewards toward the bigger goal. They provided a line and bar graph to chart individual progress; my commitment to it surprised me. I entered my ongoing word count more than once a day: almost every time I stopped writing, I would check my numbers and self-report. Watching the blue bars tick upward toward the purple line pushed me to continue. 

This became especially important on November 30^th. I had failed to hit my numbers over Thanksgiving, so I wrote for the entire day, entering my counts, driving toward the end. Just before dinnertime, it appeared that I had achieved my goal. It was time to upload my story for word count verification. I’d read that this could take some time; I’d read that sometimes the word bot didn’t agree with the software. My palms were sweating, and I was laughing at myself. What kind of a dork gets nervous uploading a story? My husband called in the middle of this, so he had the pleasure of laughing at me too. While we were agreeing on my lameness, it became official. The winner’s page came up on my screen. He congratulated me generously, much more so than I congratulate him when he has a successful hunt, and we said our good-byes. 

The NaNoWriMo organizers embedded a video on the winner’s page, and I clicked it. They were cheering, and I laughed some more, because what sort of person shakes her fists in the air as a bunch of strangers in Viking helmets celebrate? I do. 

One of my boys walked in during the hoopla, and he wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I explained the whole NaNoWriMo thing to him. He asked if 50k words in a month was good, and I told him that I thought so. He asked me what I’d won. I described the prize I was most interested in (50% off Scrivener, yay!), and explained that this was not the real value of the work. 

I shared that, in a way, the prize was like climbing a mountain. What’s waiting for you when you get to the top? I asked. He said, I don’t know, an ice cream sundae? 

After dinner, I emerged from my interior realm, breathed the last of the November night air, drove out to pavement and beyond. I went to the grocery store and bought ice cream, Coconut Macaroon for me, along with a carton of vanilla and Sander’s Bittersweet Chocolate Fudge sauce. A prize to be shared, the best sort of reward.

Goal Trouble

I've encountered two problems regarding my 50,000 word goal for NaNoWriMo:

1) I didn't feel like writing on Sunday. I think this will be a problem every Sunday. It's a packed day, always, happily revolving around church and family.
My solution: Screw my actual life priorities! Naww, that's not going to work. I'm going to up my daily word count target, and declare Sunday a day of the minimum. The goal will be 300 words, which I should be able to do in about 15 minutes.
2) I still poked around my files Sunday, and thought that reviewing what I've written so far would inspire me to write. At first, this held some promise. I read Saturday's block of writing and realized that I had not, in any way, fulfilled the title for the chapter. I retitled it, took the old title and created a blank page. But instead of writing, I decided to review a few other sections too. This was a mistake, a big mistake, but not in the way I expected. That inner editor is a tricky one.
I was ready for the "why are you wasting your time on such crap" argument. It didn't materialize. Instead, I was surprised to discover a couple of things I liked. Really liked. I started to think fondly of them, and then I knew I was in trouble.
The goal is a crappy first draft. Developing a crush on a scene between a Latvian mobster, his mother, an animal wrangler, and their Pomeranians can only lead to trouble. So my unsolicited advice to Wrimos? Limit your re-reading, and get writing.

November 5-9 report: Over 15,000 words so far. More importantly, my friends and family are still speaking to me.

Play

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. --Heraclitus, Greek philosopher

    November 3-4 report: Daily NaNoWriMo word count met both days, although it is challenging. Been thinking a lot about the value of this sort of effort. For me, it is a way to connect the act of writing to my more natural creative process.

    I come from a theatre background, and I love theatre. I feel at home there. I am able, in my small way, to craft a character and respond to the other people and things in the story with an unrestrained honesty. I feel light.

    This is not how I felt at the keyboard. Words have weight, words seem permanent, words do not advance on their own, and I freeze at the keyboard, desiring precision. In turn, precision, arriving so early to the process, buries creativity like a schoolyard bully. Writing in quantity pushes back at precision, and coaxes play out of the tunnels and onto the page.

Software Crush

Dear Scrivener 2.0,
    I have a total crush on you. 
    I know you are just flirting to get me to buy your software: you freely reveal your features and benefits, tease me with your easy NaNoWriMo templates, provide ways for me to collect my ideas, giving them the space they need to come together and grow. All this so that one day, maybe I'll put out the cash and you can have your way with me.

    I'm going to play hard to get this month, but whether I make my word count or not, whether I qualify for the 50% discount or not, I'm going to let you in on a secret. It's as if I've made a little cootie catcher, and I've penciled you into every spot. You're guaranteed, by the laws of future-predicting origami, to be my next software purchase. -LT


November 2 report: Daily NaNoWriMo word count met. Love filling out virtual index cards for each character and setting, and having a dedicated home for research.

The kids are alright

A winter or two ago, I decided to take a crack at a writing discipline of a thousand words a day. This is a rewritten excerpt from those days, appropriate, I thought, after the first day of NaNoWriMo. 

This is the goal, a goal of a thousand words. A day. So what do I really want to write about, what do I want to cover?

A thousand words. I need to hit a thousand words. 

What was that? It sounded like the dishwasher. Or an icicle piercing the skull of one of my kids. 

(I listen for screaming.)

Nothing. Not a sound. Probably the dishwasher. 

(I send the kids away from the house, and put on the headphones.)

What will I write about? It’s tough when I don’t have an assignment. Left to my own devices, I don’t really know what I want to say, or to whom. The words just kind of lay in my mind, flat and lifeless, like my tongue when it’s really really dry. Like it is now. Dry as a bone, dry as the Sahara, but wait, those are clichés and clichés=badness. So, if I riff on it, it’s dry like chalk, or dry like, like the tongue of a writer who has to ignore a possible fatality in order to hit a thousand words a day...

November 1 report: Daily NaNoWriMo word count goal met. No children, pets, or family members were harmed, or seriously yelled at, as a result of this effort.

NaNoWriMo Preparation #5

Project Name: NaNoWriMo

Target Task List

A4       Buy small gifts to give to the children throughout the month, sort of like a NaNoWriMo Advent calendar. 

Include new underwear, paper plates and bowls, shelf-stable milk, 
and a family photo to remind them of how nice they look when properly groomed.

NanoWriMo Preparation #4

Project Name: NaNoWriMo

Target Task List

A3       Like Ricky, send a letter to yourself: only make yours more alpha and less numeric.

To outline, or not to outline, that is the question.

It would seem that fiction writers gravitate strongly toward one position or another. I've written a thing or two, and I tend to "write-talk" my way to the story. I free write, I get a concept, I write or talk the concept until I have some idea of a basic story arc, and then I get to the awkward, Frankenstein-ian process of giving the arc life.

This process has always been on such a small scale; it's hard to imagine applying it to the great lurching monster known as Novel. How much do I need to do right now in order to complete something as insane as a first draft of a 50,000 word novel in 30 days?

I snooped around and found this article at writersdigest.com. It's an interview with David Morrell and Ken Follett. Follett is an outliner, but Morrell does something a little different:

... when I write a book, I write a letter to myself. And I say, “It’s going to take you this amount of time, probably, to write the book—why is this project worth a year of your life?” And there has to be something about the material, the research, the excitement of the research, maybe the way the story is written, that would make me, when I was all done, hopefully fuller and better.

... it occurs to me that my letter to myself, which can go on as long as 24 single-spaced pages—this is a long document—and as I go in, why is this project so important that you would write about it for a year or more, why do you want to write it, where’d the idea come from, and what I begin doing is asking myself questions … and [in one instance in particular] it took me pages to work that out, and so in a way I was outlining, but I was just doing it a different way.

So I'm off to send a letter to myself. Why will this experience be worth lo these many hours?

NaNoWriMo Preparation #2

Project Name: NaNoWriMo

Target Task List

AA1          Renew vow to time management

On the day we came together over a cup of coffee and my first Franklin Planner, 

I pledged to spend the first moments of every day thinking of you.

I confess my failures:

the Sega Genesis Golf period, 

the AOL chat and forum phase, 

my wanton soft-tip dart throwing,

countless hours spent writing my own eulogy, 

my current facebookery and twittering. 

These trollops come and go, but you are a constant.

I will never again allow these tiny pleasures to eclipse your steady goodness.

 Dearest time management, to you I pledge my devotion. 

To keep me honest, I ask that you hold me accountable and  follow me on twitter.

What? No. It is not a rationalization. I can stop any time I want.

NaNoWriMo Preparation #1

Project Name: NaNoWriMo

Target Task List

A1          Learn to use a calculator 

Yesterday, in a wild moment of overconfidence, I was doing math in my head. I said it would take 1,334 words a day in the month of November to achieve my goal for National Novel Writing Month. This would have left me almost 10,000 words short. The correct figure is 1667. 

If only all of life's problems were as easy as a recalculation!

Gearing up for NaNoWriMo

I am not a novelist. I am not a fiction writer. What on earth am I doing signing up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)?

I'd like to claim peer pressure made me do it, but that's not it. It would be fun to say that I've always dreamed of writing the Lesser American Novel, but that's not it either. The concrete goal draws me: 50,000 words in 30 days. The marathon nature intrigues and challenges me. It's not 1334 words a day, it's 1334 linked words, connected words, words disciplined and directed to tell a story that might engage or delight. Being forced to keep going with one idea appeals to me, because I flit about so easily.

Ultimately, I love a good story, and I like to explore ways of telling a story, so why not a novel? 

Come November (the Mo in question), I will be devoting this space to brief thoughts about writing. In these days prior to the race, I plan to get some things in order to prepare for what I predict will be a wild ride. Planning and preparing are not the same as doing, of course, so we shall see and we shall see.