Turnaround

[pseydtonne]

It takes balls to start with an assumption, present your reasons, realize you're actually talking about your own fears, and conclude you were wrong.

I started the previous tirade against NaNoWriMo with a plan to finish the tirade at home. Once I'd gotten home, I cranked up my vitriol, wrote a lot more and started a separate outline of reasons.

Then metahacker replied to my existing post. He really laid it out. I understood that I was afraid to write a novel. I fear being mediocre so I stop midstream.

So I'm going to work on some shelved fiction. I have the start of a sci-fi novel with a working title "Skeer". A name like that won't sell a book, but it at least puts a handle on the task. I'm not going to follow the NaNoWriMo guidlines, even though I now have a greater respect for them.

NaNoWriMo, as I now understand its goal, could eventually do for writers what Dogme `95 did for movie-makers. This was a Danish crew's set of rules (the Vow of Chastity) about making a new kind of movie to get filmmakers out of a rut. Few people ever obeyed all of the rules (the only Dogme `95 flick you may have heard of is Italian for Beginners) but throwing down the gauntlet changed European cinema. Had they not excluded the video format, they'd have great rules for broke home movies.

Getting it out. I don't do enough of that.

I have all the equipment I need to write -- portable voice recorder, decent keyboard, a couple text editors with their backgrounds set to darker colors and text set to lighter but not bright colors, lots of music. Now I shall write.

I wanted to edit the fuck out of what I've written, make a polished case against NaNoWriMo. However, I'd rather y'all saw what I was thinking so that I can get on with my next writing projects (oh, and go to bed by 3 am).

Here is what I had completed:

I've checked out National November Write a book in a Month and decided against it because it doesn't teach the author anything. The theory is that you get it out of your system, 'it' being "that fear you'll never write the Great American Novel" or something like it.

You aren't supposed to edit. You aren't supposed to rethink, refine, re-anything (such as "read"). You just write. When you're done, you have a book you'll never want to touch again. You can't go back to edit it because it won't make enough sense for you to figure out the story. You can't make a good story because you're too busy grinding out needless words.

The organizer's web site claims "The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly." It also says not to edit, "to build without tearing down."

I hate NaNoWriMo. Can you tell? I would rather get someone to write 400 words each weekday of a month and spend one day of each weekend editing what got written. The sets of 400-odd words wouldn't need to be related. They'd just have to lead to one to 20 essays, each of which the author could say "that's something I think every mofo in the English-speaking world should read, whether I got paid or not."

So you should write 175 pages because everyone else is? How about National Starve Yourself to Look Like a Supermodel Month (NaStY SLiM)? Why contribute junk to the world? Write things you'd be proud to produce. National Have a Baby Cuz That's What the Bible Says Month (NaBaCuBiSm) is similarly misguided.

Shouldn't everyone create? Hells yeah! However, grinding out text is not the same as running a marathon. Writing down words is only a minor portion of learning to be a writer. Editing, cutting, tossing, criticizing one's own efforts, reworking and refining are what make real writers instead of Rod McKuens. What is the point of a 1500-page novel that opens with a dangling participle (Norman Mailor's "harlot's ghost")? What is the point of superfluous text? Why be Anne Rice when you could be Ray Bradbury? Why be David Foster Wallace when you could be George Orwell?

I don't like most modern novelists because they took "show don't tell" way too far. "Show don't tell" is a piece of advice every creative writing teacher gives beginning students: don't tell the reader what is going on explicitly. When done correctly, it lets the character interaction produce the story. You write character dialogue that reveals emotions instead of writing "Bob was sad."

No one explains to students how to show -- what's worth showing, how to accept cutting, how to handle removing. A writer may start a story based on one great line that, twenty pages later, is actually hurting the story.

Good fiction writers make a fake reality that blossoms in the reader's mind. This means it needs to leave certain aspects to the imagination or there is nothing to imagine. You fall into 1984 because there are things about Winston Smith and even O'Brien that attach to you, events with the writing pad or Victory Coffee that keep you thinking about them years later.

I did a lot of editing before I came up with this finished version of this screed. It took a lot of writing before I found the topics I actually needed. I couldn't talk about each issue I have with NaNoWriMo until I got the dogwater out.

Now I feel like writing.

-happy November, Dante

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

as long as you aren't "skeered" of writing it...

[epanastatis.livejournal.com]

nihilistic_kid, who as actually written a novel that got published (and is preparing to publish a second one soon, and currently writing a third) just posted his tips for how to go about it (http://www.livejournal.com/users/nihilistic_kid/315268.html). Needless to say it diverges from the NaNoWriMo method a bit. Read what he has to say, and act upon it.

Damn it, "Skeer" was why I begged and pleaded and nagged you for an LJ code in the first place, so get cracking.

[chaggalagirl.livejournal.com]

amn it, "Skeer" was why I begged and pleaded and nagged you for an LJ code in the first place, so get cracking.

seconded.