NaNoWriMo 2012

Well, I did it. With half an hour to spare, I finished my NaNoWriMo before Dec. 1. If you'd like to read it yourself, there's a link at the end of this post.

I just printed a copy of the first draft manuscript of the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo.  See:

It's been a long and crazy road. What started on a whim turned into a race against myself.

For those of you who don't know, I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year because my boyfriend said he would we should send each other pictures of ourselves as incentive to write. I lost track of how many pictures I sent him. I can count the number of pictures he sent me by counting the number of cheeks I can see on my face without looking at a mirror.

But that's okay, a non-enforced part of the agreement was that we would send the pics if we were on track with our writing. Except for three days in the middle of the month and the very end, I was playing catch up.

I started fairly slowly, completely missing the first day of writing because I had class and work all day, then as soon as the event was over I joined some friends for happy hour at the local Applebees. And then it took me a week and a half of writing before I actually caught up to the recommended word count by day.

Through this entire process, I had very little in the way of plot. I had decided three days before the start of the month that I would tell the story in the form of letters, but that's about it.

As I started writing, I used what I knew. I have a large collection of letters from pen pals that I have collected over the last seven years and I used these to give me small pieces to prompt writing: certain phrases, locations or scenarios. I found myself pulling from my bookshelf, quoting poets and nature guides.

Eventually I started a timeline of sticky notes and character maps on the wall above my desk.

I haven't taken them down yet.

After about the third day of writing, I decided I would give my story a four part structure with about each week of the month determining how long I would write each part. Given my epistolary form, I could change narrators with each new part. I continued writing.

This is the French press that was almost constantly filled with yerba mate or guayusa teas.

About halfway through the second week, I was feeling stuck. I wasn't sure where I was headed. In short, I didn't have anywhere to go. That worked for the first half, because I was still setting up the story in many ways and introducing the characters and their personalities, but I realized I had only given myself three protagonists to voice. What would I do with the fourth part?

Eventually it occurred to me that I could change the format of the fourth part a little bit. I could have letter and response, where in parts 1-3 you would only ever see the letter side. Parts 1-3 would each be told through a different protagonist's letters. Part 4 would be told through letters between the characters.

Great! That gave me a a direction to head toward, but I was still missing something to drive the story. I was still missing a climax, an ending, a goal. Unless I wanted to ramble myself into a postmodern stupor, I would need a reason.

And then it hit me. It was the form of the story that gave me the idea. What if Part 4 was only letters between two of my protagonists, potentially about the third? And if I'm showing them interacting, what could happen that would be big enough to make them talk about the third protagonist?

I had a cold feeling in my stomach.

I needed to kill one of my protagonists.

Obviously I didn't need to. I could very well have gone in a completely different direction and created some other kind of resolution, but this way just felt right. Whether I had intended to or not, I had already planted the seeds for my character's death. I had given him strong reasons to live and in taking those reasons away, I could push him to his death.

I didn't like it. In fact, as I was writing, I hated myself for it. I felt bad for this character I had created, knowing that everything he loved and cared about would be systematically removed until he felt like his only option was suicide. That's the worst part. I was making him take his own life.

But much as I hated it, it felt right. It felt like it needed to happen and I could still turn the story around in Part 4. His death wouldn't be completely in vain.

I felt consumed by this story, forcing myself to write as much as I could every night on top of all my day to day responsibilities.

And I'm sure there are plot holes, continuity issues and generally huge sections of just plain bad writing, because a lot of this process wasn't always about crafting perfect sentences. It was about laying the groundwork so I could edit and add enough that perfection that I could be happy with it. It was about winning the competition of me vs. the word count.

My boyfriend was the incentive I needed to start. The incentive I needed to finish was starting in the first place because I'm too damn stubborn to let myself give up.

Some of my favorite lines from Week 4 of writing:

At least once a week I get someone in here that calls it an “I-talian.” I’m like, no dumbass, do you call it “I-taly?” No, you don’t because you would look like an idiot, but the customer is always right so I just have to bite my tongue and ask if they’d like mayonnaise on it, all the time secretly hoping they tip me well and if they don’t tip at all, wish that the mayo gives them a heart attack.

Hafiz and Rumi? What is it with your aunt and naming pets after dead poets? Has she ever had a parrot named Poe? A hamster named Shakespeare? It’s cute and I guess at the very least it proves her to be well read.   

Jake is a crazy-ass motherfucker. He doesn’t know a thing, but thinks he’s right about everything. He’s stubborn as all hell. I think I’m in love.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me. To the people I know only through the internet sending me encouragement every time I posted about my word count. To the people working on their own NaNoWriMo projects at the same time. To all the friends curious about what NaNoWriMo even is. To my roommates for being understanding about me locking myself in my room every night for a month being up until 2am. To Ethan for giving me the push I needed to start. I might have been able to do this without you, but it would have sucked a whole hell of a lot more.

To any of my friends out there who might have wanted to read my NaNo Project, here's a link. This is the version I will be doing my primary editing on, so if you feel so inclined, use the comment feature to leave me feedback! Consider adding it to your winter break reading list.

Handwritten: A Novel in Letters

A Second NaNoWriMo update!

I fell behind in my writing last week and am struggling to catch up, but I'm past the halfway point. I have the long Thanksgiving break to get some work done, so I hope to get well ahead in the next few days.

Ethan has since dropped out, deciding that while the NaNoWriMo process is cool and definitely an amazing cultural and social experience, it's not his way of writing. I respect that and am still sending... encouragement from time to time. I on the other hand have reached the point of obstinate. Having started and made it past the halfway point I am more determined than ever to finish successfully. The process has become a challenge for me, and I will win, encouragement from other people or no.

The farther I get into this, the more I'm realizing that the characters and the story have a life of their own to me. Sometime in the next week I'm going to write the suicide of one of my characters. It makes me terribly sad because I know it has to happen and I have to put him through painful hell to get him there. The groundwork is being laid and at this point there is no alternative. It hurts to write because he doesn't see it coming.

Anyway, some choice excerpts since my last update:

I squished a very pregnant spider today. Felt bad about it despite the utter hideousness of the thing. I tried to warn it and shoo it toward the window, but it wouldn’t listen to me, so it had to die. It was that or burn the building down and I rather like where I live.

Anyway, food. I made it. People love me and unanimously voted me queen of the dorm and are officially starting a petition to secede from the University so we can operate under a benign monarchy with me as its head. It’s good to be queen. Maybe as a queen I can have tea with Elizabeth II. That would be amazing.

As you can see, Myra has quite the voice. She's not bossy so much as occasionally demanding.

Adrian on the other hand seems a bit more subdued.

It started to snow last night and did not let up until early this morning. I awoke to the most amazingly tranquil and breathtaking scene outside my window. I wanted so badly to capture it with my pen, but as with many things that are this beautiful, it was fleeting. Like a spring butterfly it alighted upon my nose and was gone as I stood there blinking. Jonathan and Eleanor and a few of the neighbor kids were out the door and frolicking in the powder before I was properly awake. The curse of being a teenager, I suppose, our bodies are a war zone of biological weapons priming and immunizing us for adulthood, we need all the rest we can get and yet give ourselves very little.

 We'll see where this goes from here.

 

A NaNoWriMo Update

As some of you may know, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo this month because Ethan... convinced me to.
Since we're more than a week in and I'm still only behind by about a day's worth of writing, I thought I would give you some choice sentences and phrases:
These first two are from Part 1: Letters from Mitchell

After dinner, we played a rousing game of monopoly. I was wholly unprepared for how cutthroat a game of monopoly could be.

And two:

"Alright, Mitchy-boy time for us to get intimate."
I blinked as she took a step toward me and slowly placed her hand on my chest.
“Go on the other side of that tree and clean up, you stink!”
With a shove, she turned me around and pushed me toward a tree that grew right at the water’s edge.

This last one is from Part 2: Letters from Myra

[My roommate] was known as the Barbezonian on her roller derby team, a flailing whirlwind of pink death.

The more I write, the more I'm starting to wonder about Myra.

Check-in: Is this blog working?

Widdershin Writings, I wonder what's going on here sometimes, what traffic passes by when I don't have a window viewing this little e-ecosystem called my blog.

I paint a picture in my head of a little room full of trophies and thoughts, a storage space for my past. I look back at old posts and I'm tempted to edit, to revise and change, go antiquing with my words and restore everything, covering it in a layer of glossy paint so you can't tell it's even the same thing.

But that defeats the purpose, revision is erasure. I cannot deny my past and so will instead let myself stand in all my imperfections. This scar comes with a story. This post is a story. I will pull a Walt Whitman and let my multitudes contradict themselves. I don't have to like it, but the only change that makes is that I don't have to remain like that.

I started this blog two years ago. And the posts come in waves, peaking in the March through June period (though I wonder how much of that has been influenced by taking a class with Tony Prichard during these times).

So this is a check-in. An evaluation where we see if this is working or if the experiment called my blogging is a total fail.

But first:

This is one of many songs I received through mix CDs from friends over the past two years. It's by no means my favorite song off this particular mix, but on this blustery, dark, rainy evening in the middle of December with my arm covered in henna, it feels somehow appropriate. It's finals week and by any means I should probably be stressed out, worrying about studying. That's not my style.

Henna smells kind of funny. It's reminiscent of grass to me, only sweeter.

This blog as an ecosystem is adapting to the stimulus in my life. Mainly classes and stress if the content is any judge. But it's tracking my journey, taking snapshots of my life and putting out there for the public to see.

I like this, because it's exactly what Widdershin Writings is about. This blog is not about me. It's about my journey, winding and backwards and off in every direction imaginable. Stay with me for a bit and we'll see where the road takes us.

I want to write a letter

I want to write a letter to a friend of mine. He lives in Canada and I haven't seen him since we met: it's been almost two years. We met at a summer camp and while we've both returned to the camp, it's been different sessions so we haven't seen each other. Somehow though we're still in contact.

I've made plenty of other camp friends over the years of course, but I haven't consistently stayed in as close contact with pretty much anybody else except this one, crazy redhead I met on a bus to Leavenworth in July of 2007. I'm a pro-penpaller, but very few people have the same drive towards stamps and letters that I do, so it most always ends up being very one-sided conversations. Which, now that I think about it, has been the case here as well. I've only received one physical reply from Gabe, but where I send letters, he emails or Facebooks me so there's still the transmission of ideas.

The point I'm getting to is that we were talking about this the other night, and letters really are something that you treasure.

He said something that really made me think as well. It's mind boggling to think that someone's hand wrote the words you're reading and then traveled however many miles to get to you. Sure it's amazing that you can send the same amount of information in under 5 minutes, but the fact that the wrinkled piece of paper you hold in your hands traveled all that way to get to you makes it so much more special.

With how little we physically write anymore - I know plenty of college students who complain about cramped hands right after finals/midterms - taking the time to actually write a letter shows you care above and beyond. It conveys something about your personality by lacking the impersonal uniformity of type.

So the imperfections make us special and make the people we interact with feel better about it.

So then, what of perfection? Often, it takes so much more effort, but it lacks the personality, and it's the personality that enables us to connect. And like the hokey pokey, that's what it's all about.