I'm at that shoot-your-writing-device stage with NaNoWriMo, personally. It's not the month's fault, it's not the one making my brain take a dump. It's not my story's fault, it knows where it's going and what's happening. My grey matter has simply turned to mush. Putting one word in front of the other seems like something I can't cope with. Of course I have plenty of steam to write a post about how I have no steam, but whatever.
It's 1:37 AM and I didn't even do a thousand words today. One of my MCs had a cigarette, the other burned his draft card. That's all that's going on, folks, it's now the third week in February, they're still in Utah, and I'm at 23,665 words for the night.
It's been five days and I've only written 2,000 words. This is getting disconcerting, especially with only a week left in the month.
Tomorrow isn't looking much better, either; I have to finish filling out a job application and drop it off in RO and go to Michigan Works! so I can tell them that I've been looking for months and have filled out approximately one hundred job applications, why haven't I gotten some kind of employment yet. I'm sure I'll forget to do one or both and end up at the coffee shop cruising eBay for typewriters and sulking to myself how I'm never gonna finish this novel.
Today I did pretty much everything but write, including watching a 2-hour episode of Clean House with that chick from Reno 911! as the host...you know, she screams a lot. Then I got on the computer, wrote 140 words, complained to Brett, and he then ran about like a bull in a china shop flogging me to death with a dead fish that he thought was a hammer. And when you have a dead fish that you think is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Even if they're actually hex bolts, and a hammer (especially one that's actually a dead fish) isn't going to do any fucking good. Convoluted metaphor is convoluted. Sorry for all of you trying to follow along at home.
Anyway, the boy-unit was coughing up such pearls of wisdom as:
Hopefully I'll get enough of a groove going tomorrow to catch up or something. Even getting half of what I'm behind, caught up, would be a miracle. I'm not giving up yet, but my apathy is starting to get the better of me. I just want to sleep till December.
xo
julia
It's 1:37 AM and I didn't even do a thousand words today. One of my MCs had a cigarette, the other burned his draft card. That's all that's going on, folks, it's now the third week in February, they're still in Utah, and I'm at 23,665 words for the night.
It's been five days and I've only written 2,000 words. This is getting disconcerting, especially with only a week left in the month.
Tomorrow isn't looking much better, either; I have to finish filling out a job application and drop it off in RO and go to Michigan Works! so I can tell them that I've been looking for months and have filled out approximately one hundred job applications, why haven't I gotten some kind of employment yet. I'm sure I'll forget to do one or both and end up at the coffee shop cruising eBay for typewriters and sulking to myself how I'm never gonna finish this novel.
Today I did pretty much everything but write, including watching a 2-hour episode of Clean House with that chick from Reno 911! as the host...you know, she screams a lot. Then I got on the computer, wrote 140 words, complained to Brett, and he then ran about like a bull in a china shop flogging me to death with a dead fish that he thought was a hammer. And when you have a dead fish that you think is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Even if they're actually hex bolts, and a hammer (especially one that's actually a dead fish) isn't going to do any fucking good. Convoluted metaphor is convoluted. Sorry for all of you trying to follow along at home.
Anyway, the boy-unit was coughing up such pearls of wisdom as:
- "Let me cowrite your next novel!" (there's not going to BE a next novel at this rate, and I don't work well in teams even with my braintwins),
- "You've written yourself into a corner. You're trapping yourself in with your time period. Put them in an alternate timeline! YOU HAVE BOXED YOURSELF IN, YOU HAVE TO LET GO OF YOUR TIMELINE." (uhh, dear, you can't do that with historical fiction or god will kill a kitten. Besides, this is not the new Star Trek movie, I'm not going to destroy 40 years of IRL canon/history just so you can warp this into a scifi novel. Whose novel is it again? Oh yeah, mine),
- "You've Hancock'd yourself, then. You wrote your whole story in half your word count." (uhh, no, I've written maybe 1/16th of my story in half my word count, if you'd been listening you'd know that...don't compare me to Hancock, it makes me feel like shit),
- "You have to introduce another character and use their perspective to tell the story. It will help with continuity. OKAY. I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING, I PLAY VIDEO GAMES. YOU HAVE TO. FINE DON'T TAKE MY ADVICE. YOU'RE UNWILLING TO ADAPT." (I'm writing a very Ordinary People-, Catcher In The Rye-esque novel, pitching a NEW character in to TELL THE STORY would--simply put--MAKE ZERO FUCKING SENSE. Tell you what, next time you write 23,000 words of anything? You can tell me how to disrupt my narrative thread, you jackass. Rage rage rage)
- and then, my favorite, right before he signed off: "I'm going to go do something fun, maybe you should too."
Hopefully I'll get enough of a groove going tomorrow to catch up or something. Even getting half of what I'm behind, caught up, would be a miracle. I'm not giving up yet, but my apathy is starting to get the better of me. I just want to sleep till December.
xo
julia
5 comments:
I've written fewer than 2,000 words in the last three days myself.
Some things I'm trying in hopes of kick-starting my creativity take their cues from the old masters:
Arthur Conan Doyle: he had a way of cleverly changing the POV while maintaining his first-person narrative by having another character describe to the narrator (for pages) a scene that happened off-stage. The 2nd person effectively becomes the 1st-person narrator briefly. I tried this out for an off-stage scene and it worked really well.
Robert Altman: his movies were basically a bunch of vignettes strung together. Since I, too, am writing historical fiction and can't deviate too far from the facts, this may be the best way for me to assemble the last half of my somewhat disconnected story. Just get the big scenes down and don't worry so much about constructing awkward bridges from scene A to scene B.
The Arthur Conan Doyle thing is cool, but I'm writing in third person omniscent and my story is SO centered around my MCs and their little private existence that it would destroy everything to force a new narrative perspective. Imagine if suddenly Catcher In The Rye started being told from the perspective of one of the guys from Holden's school midway through the book. My bf is obviously bonkers.
The Altman thing is cool too, cuz that's what I'm doing anyway. What I'm struggling with is getting over my urge to account for every second of my characters' lives: hence, why I'm at 23K and it's now only February.
Just keep in mind that all quarter-million words of James Joyce's "Ulysses" encompass only one day (including 20 or 30 pages in the bathroom), and not one person on the face of the Earth has ever actually enjoyed reading it.
Oddly enough, pointing out what a big pile of drivel Ulysses in a quarter million words is not reassuring to my own epic saga I'm sure will be a quarter million words by the time I'm done with it. It's like OH GOD IT COULD END UP AS THE NEXT ULYSSES *dies*.
Try skipping ahead a couple days or a week...you don't have to keep it, but just give it a try.
If after 4 hours of writing, it is bugging the hell out of you so much you just can't continue, go back and fill in the time. But if it doesn't bug you that much, maybe you'll be able to skip ahead a little more often.
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