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.

The Second Great Believing

Writing a story is the First Great Believing. That crappy first draft happens with no guarantee that it will ever get published or even that anyone will like it, including the author. Nothing in the world says that the story we are using time and soul to craft will do anything for us except sit there eyeing us with vague malevolence, like the cat that never wants to jump into your lap. It's an act of faith as much as creation. We make ourselves finish it (except when we don't), and we try not to think about whether it will ever make a difference while we're working.

Y'all might remember that when I started this blog I'd finished a story that got me accepted to Viable Paradise XIV. That was my First Great Believing, but of course it wasn't the end. I got a lot of good constructive criticism at VP, and that led to the first revision. Then I got some more, from my beta readers. Rinse and repeat. Then the first rejection note, making me understand a failing in my writing--here we go again.

So I've revised the damn thing around five or six times and every time I go to rip another chunk of its entrails out, it's like chewing nails--which is to say, when I open the file my teeth start to ache and my mouth tastes like pointy rust. Perhaps I'm imagining it.

The point of all this is that editing your story is the Second Great Believing, and for me it has been much harder. To write the story in the first place, you had to conquer earthquakes of fear, scale mountains of self-doubt and possibly even slay a dragon of disbelief or two. It felt so good to finally finish it. And then you found out there were aftershocks and tsunamis and volcanoes, and the dragon's big brother starts sending you rejection notices. And somehow, you must open that file, you must dredge up the gumption for a second (third? sixth? seventeenth?) act of faith, and you must take up your hammer and your tongs and stoke the furnace and attempt to refine this jagged blade of a story before you get too tempted to fall on it.

And this is harder because instead of blissfully traipsing across the page, I am required to assess word choices, and murder entire paragraphs, and to learn new things. There were many times I made the mistake of thinking I was doing well with my writing. Then I discovered that I simply didn't know enough about my craft to see what I was doing. It's like trying to write a story with only a fifth-grade vocabulary list because you didn't know any better and then finding a copy of Roget's Thesaurus.

As I go through this process of learning to be a better writer I find that I'm impatient. I shouldn't be, because I know it will take time, and stick-tuitiveness, and thought and study and practice. Becoming a really good wordsmith, like becoming a really good painter, does not happen overnight.

I can feel things shifting in my head when I come to the keyboard or the storyboard. I know that I'm internalizing the process because I reach for different and better tools--dialogue instead of exposition, for example. But it's like, when you're first learning to paint, you're learning your technique. And your "eye" can develop faster than your skill. So you paint the skin and you're thrilled, and then the hair and you like that too, and then you get to the dress and you knock it out of the park--but suddenly you see that the hair is actually quite dreadful. How did THAT happen?

So it's the same with writing. I think that I'm finally introducing good tension and I'm snipping away at the extra bits of prose that are just filler so my writing is leaner, and then, because I am learning so much, I take a look at my main character and OHMIGOD! There are holes. Horrible, gaping black holes with little signs posted that say "who IS your MC and why is she the best one for this story?" and "can't you think of a single word that just describes her personality and not her circumstances??"

So that's where I am. I am about to muster another ounce of gumption and scrape what's left of my faith off the bottom of my shoe to push through this revision so I can send this thing out to the next market on my list. Then I can stop looking at and thinking about it for a bit. Freshen up by working on something else.

At least until the dragons send me the next rejection.

Cheers!

AFB