Seeking Obligation (and a Healthy Helping of Shame)

I've decided not to write the title for this post until I've finished it, because for once I can't settle on one. But if, dear probably-fictional reader, you perused my previous post, you know already that I want to talk about NaNoWriMo tonight.

NaNo's been vilified by some and praised to the skies by others. If you honestly have no idea what it's about, here's the website:

National Novel Writing Month (and they run Camp NaNo during the summer, too!)

So, the essence of the argument...does NaNo demean the novel form? Does it not take writing a novel seriously enough? It doesn't really talk about anything like plot structure or convincing dialogue (though these things do get discussed in the community forums, by participants, and certainly in private writing groups like the one I have with my writing buddies). Certainly NaNo does encourage every underhanded trick in the book to inflate your word count (everything from typing pages out of the dictionary to repeating the sentence you just wrote infinitely until you think of a new one!). Word count is king. Not tension or structure or dialogue or believable characters. You dive in and even if you hit your head on a rock you keep going.

I will admit that in many ways I can understand the arguments leveled by the anti-NaNo crowd. After all, is it really laudable to teach people not to just write fiction--but to write mounds and mountains of possibly BAD fiction?? Not like there's a shortage. There's certainly enough of that already floating around. It's like one of those gigantic trash islands meandering around in the Pacific. And I'm sure that I've contributed my share in past NaNoWriMos (dare I recall the horrible plotting in my attempted Urban Fantasy? Though that's less of a sin in that genre than no sex scenes, these days).

NaNo lovers counter that argument by pointing out that because of their beloved Month of Writing Dangerously, more and more kids are getting into writing early. People all over the world converge in November...to write, and to share their experiences writing. People are embracing writing. They are expressing their love of the word and gaining a new appreciation for the books they are reading. So WHAT if the majority of it stinks?? Anne LaMott would remind us that everyone writes shitty first drafts (except for the people that we really, really hate). And, if we do it right, it sets us up with an obligation to succeed.

And it is for this latter reason that I love NaNo, attempt to succeed at NaNo every year, and--in two of those years--even "won" NaNo--which is to say I managed to write 50,000 words or more in 30 days. And now I finally have my title--because it is why NaNo works for me that keeps pulling me back to it.

It's the sense of obligation. It's hard to sustain that, writing purely for me. It's even hard to sustain it when I try to make goals with my local writing buddy Jarrad. But dammit, introduce a community of zillions of people (some of whom actually know me and, I am filled with paranoid certainty, are tracking my progress on the page every day even as I am tracking theirs and swearing under my breath), give me a cute little word-count widget that tracks my progress on a graph, and send me pep talks and give me a website to waste time on, and by all that's holy I'll write. I'll write every day. And if I DON'T write every day then I will bust my ass making up words on the days when I come back to it. Much as I, in fact, am doing on this blog, having missed two days due to puppy-shipping shenanigans.

NaNo doesn't care about my shenanigans. It does not care if I have little puppies chewing my toes off right at this minute. It is still going to point the Mighty Gauss Rifle of Shame at my head, smile, and politely suggest that I am going to look downright pathetic if I don't get my butt in that chair--THIS MINUTE, MISSY--and write.

And I love the dang thing for it. I love the fact that it browbeats me into ignoring my disappointment in myself. ("Woe is me, for I have not written any words for the last three days and am indeed a poor specimen of humanity," I say. "Shut up and catch up," says NaNo.) It short-circuits, for me, the subconscious danger of wallowing in my small failures. And because it is so very effective at that, I end up being more productive than I would have dreamed during the average month of November.

So this past November I used NaNo to get 50K words in on East of the Sun and now in four days I will use it again to start on West of the Moon. I will be counting on the dang thing to shame me into not just 50K, but 100K words this year. With dogs, husband, work, hobbies, friends, art, and video games, that's a helluva lot of shame, folks. And maybe it's the masochist in me. Or the failed Catholic.

But I suspect I'll be enjoying every damn minute.

Words On Paper: Never a Waste of Time.

It's all Jarrad's fault.

Well, okay, really it's all Gwen's fault, but Jarrad has contributed to that fault by asking me to use our Weekly Writing Night to blog instead of working on actual stories or novels. I probably shouldn't have told him that I'd committed to doing this. Drat.

Jarrad's blog, for those interested (shortly to be updated!): Jarrad, my writing buddy and a guy with a great turn of idea.

So I've got a bone to chew tonight, much like this entry's Mood Kyrie above. That bone to chew is with people who apparently believe that any writing you're doing as a beginning writer has any possibility of being a Waste of Your Time.

I haven't had anyone come out directly and say this, mind you. But when you mention to someone that you have almost finished your first real novel and they are enthused until you mention it's the first of a series--and they get That Look in their eye, and then they open their mouth--then you know what's coming. In this particular circumstance I brightly interposed, "But I'm learning so much!" That seemed to work. But wait. Why should I have had to say that at all?

I shouldn't, is the answer. Let's face it. A crapton of people think about writing. Some decent proportion of those actually talk about writing. Fewer actually attempt writing, be it fan fic, articles, endless blogging (ouch) or starting a short story or, gods forbid, a novel.

Then fewer still actually FINISH the short story...and a fraction smaller still finish the novel.

So what makes another writer or aspiring writer or person who thinks they know all about writing even though they never have taken the muse by the balls (well, aren't I permitted to have a male muse?!?) think they can walk up to me and insinuate that I'm wasting my time not working on something "marketable"??

So that has led me to this blog entry, wherein we will examine the Top Ten Reasons Why Writing Anything You Feel Like Isn't A Waste of Your Time.

10. Words on the page is words on the page.

9. If you're not cat-waxing, you're making progress.

8. The writer is probably the worst judge of whether what they're working on is worthwhile.

7. Did you learn something from typing this? There you go.

6. Even the worst piece of drivel coming out of my keyboard teaches me what NOT to do!

5. I'm establishing the habit of writing something, anything, every day.

4. Writing anything reduces the fear factor tied to coming to the blank page every day. Or the end of the paragraph where you're not sure what comes next.

3. How are you ever going to get published anyhow unless you try things and fail or succeed?

2. No matter what you are writing...you are WRITING. Do not question. Do not double-think yourself. Just DO it. And let the putting of words on the page make you happy. You are doing what you've dreamed of. Let go of the anxiety and let yourself believe that your words are worth something!

And the number one reason why writing what you feel like writing, "marketable" or not, is worthwhile:

1. Because George R.R. Martin told me so. So unless one of the other writers who I really admire--like maybe Neil Gaiman, Neil Stephenson, or William Gibson (and I would include Ray Bradbury and Anne McCaffrey except that, /sad, they would now have to do so from beyond the grave)--get on this blog and tell me George is full of it, I'm going to stick to that, thanks.

Actually I can thank George for Numbers Eight and Seven. He and his wife Parris where nice enough to treat me to breakfast when I was traveling through Santa Fe earlier this year, and he tolerated a writing question from me--because I WAS worried. I was working on East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and realizing that it was actually two books. "Is this a waste of my time?" I asked him. "It's probably not salable. I'm a nobody."

George told me that--though in his opinion short stories are still the way to break into the writing game--the important thing was to finish the project I was working on. No writing is wasted. You are developing your craft, seeing what works, what doesn't work. You are learning. And he told me that some of the things he wrote that he thought weren't all that or were too weird were some of the things that magazines or publishers turned out to be interested in.

So there you go. And really it all comes back to something I wrote in my journal as I was just starting East of the Sun : DON'T JUDGE THE WORK.

It isn't for you, the writer, to judge the worth of anything you're working on. It's your job to communicate, to regale the reader with the best prose you're capable of writing, to catch the passion you feel for the subject and tie that into the prose. Beyond that--don't worry about it.

Just keep writing.

Tomorrow: Why NaNoWriMo keeps drawing me back to it. Stay tuned!

Of Novels and Small Puppies

Well my good friend Gwen (who was my roomie at Viable Paradise XIV) called me out recently on the fact that I haven't posted here in ages, and I PROMISED her that I would make a post today for all my faithful, probably fictional readers. That's not to insult any of you who might be non-fictional readers, it's just that I prefer to go ahead with the assumption that I am shouting words into the void. Less pressure. On occasion, yes, I do find it relaxing to imagine that I'm also just a brain in a jar. But I digress.

The truth is, though I have not been blogging, I have been writing. I have been submitting short stories--very irregularly, and I hope to improve on that. But more than that, I have been raising a litter of puppies, one of whom you can see above in all her rampant adorability (which I seriously did not believe was an actual word when I typed it, but m-w.com assures me that I'm within my rights on that one). The puppies are now all going to new homes save for one, and I feel like I actually have my brain cells back enough to expound.

So, yes, stories. And raising puppies. And finishing my first full-length (over 100K words) novel, actually.

I'm a big fan of NaNoWriMo and nine months ago in November 2011 I decided to try a project that has been dogging my creative brain for many years now. It's a fantasy reboot of the classic Norwegian fairy tale "East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon". The story is quite classical, in fact, since part of it appears to have been inspired directly by the myth of Cupid and Psyche. So I'm re-writing it in the tradition of Robin McKinley's "Deerskin", taking the rough particulars of that tale and placing it into its own fantasy world. A lot of other fairy tales make cameos. A couple of them are not entirely Norwegian, but if they can steal Cupid and Psyche, I can steal a favorite Germanic fairy tale or two. Yes?

Suffice to say that in the grand and colorful tradition of the Norwegian folk tales there are Bear Kings and troll-hags and clever foxes and cunning young women and a young man who gets in over his head. Said young man is a bit of a storyteller and so there are interwoven in the story internal stories in the tradition of Watership Down (one of my top five all-time favorite fantasy novels), that expand upon the mythology of the world and may enlighten the reader or hint at certain story elements.

That's cool, but what's the point, you all ask? Okay, so the point is, since this IS a blog about writing and learning things, I did actually learn a lot in writing this book, both about myself and my methods of working (or not doing so...cat waxing, anyone?) and about writing a novel. I am proposing a project for myself for the next week. Every day I will sit down here at this blog and write about something I learned writing this book.

Why only a week? Because in a week or so, the August session of Camp NaNoWriMo kicks off, and I will be launching myself into the second book, because I couldn't tell all of the story in just one book. So Book One is East of the Sun, Book Two is West of the Moon. There may also be a third book, cautiously entitled The Bear King's Daughter, which will deal with things similar and yet outside of the scope of that particular fairy tale.

Now, I have friends who will lecture me that as a starting writer with no short story credits to my name, I am a fool to be writing a three-book series. I will issue my rebuttal to this tomorrow, in Day One of my Week of Write-Blogging. Stay tuned!