Friday, November 7, 2014

some words on day seven


Nanowrimo, day seven.

 

The brilliant sheen of a clean page.  The crushing weight of it.

 

It is day number seven.  I load up nanowrimo.org and see the not so delicious curves of the zero – that starting point for each day – just staring back at me.  Today’s a tougher one for some reason.  My motivation seems to also be residing somewhere near a zero level of its own.

 

That said, I’ve done ok.  I’m nearing 11,000 words (and this blog post should take me past that point easily – yes, I’m cheating and writing my blog post in my nano document.  Like I said, no motivation.  I had to start somewhere to get those words flowing, right?).  That puts me at an average words per day somewhere right around where it needs to be for me to hit my goal.  I’m not one hundred percent positive, but I think that I may already be past the word count I hit in my tragically failed 2012 nano attempt.  That in and of itself is a big win for me.

 

The first four days were smooth, easy even.  I was absolutely shocked how well the words started flowing once I got over that first morning.  It’s why I love nanowrimo.  Somehow, it just *works* for me – worrying more about quantity than quality, trying not to allow myself to revise as I go, just push push push for that word count.  It makes me feel like a writer when most days I feel like all that I am is a “reviser.”  (And yes, I know how important revision is to the life of a writer.  Doesn’t mean that I have to love it unconditionally.)

 

My document is a barely contained entropic mess.  When I get stuck with one story, I move on to something else – to a completely different narrative, to a memory, to some poetry…  Yesterday morning, I started an exercise writing traditional 5-7-5 haiku and got a little out of control – now there’s a page and a half of haiku in the middle.  It’s the nice thing about “cheating” at nano – when I get tired of characters or get stuck into some crazy plot corner, I can move on to something else.  (I honestly have no idea how I did it in 2011 without cheating.  Even if the novel sucks, I’m secretly proud of myself for making it through that.)  I put three asterisks on the left margin of anything I would like to return to – first lines, mired plots, answers waiting for their questions…  Scrolling through the pages quickly this morning, there are at least ten spots in the left margin where I see asterisks.  It’s a good “problem” to have.  Anyone who reads this blog has a pretty good idea of how absolutely scattered I am.  Working this way seems to really work for me.

 

That said, I don’t think I have anything actually finished yet.  (as in first draft finished…)  The majority of my document so far is one story – maybe four thousand words?  It’s a story about friends in college at its most basic level.  But it quickly became about a lot more for me.  Loyalty and secrets…  It was just working and kept going.  I was ecstatic.  But when it stalled was when the motivation became harder.  I really want to push this story somewhere.  It was walking along with me so smoothly…   I feel a little betrayed by these characters right now.  Silly but true.

 

I have the beginnings to five or six stories, maybe more.  Some of them are only a sentence or two.  I have some really long stretches of prose in broken lines that may someday be poetry.  Some swatches of prose poetry.  A couple non-fictional recollections and musings…  In short, I have a whole lot of little bursts of somethings that I am hoping, hoping will become cohesive in the long term.  In the short term, I let them be whatever they are.  This month, all they have to be are numbers.

 

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