Cynthetiq

I haven't even started writing. I've just not been able to get the quiet time to sit and just let my fingers translate over the diarrhea of thoughts I have.

I'm thinking I'm going to have less to write than I think.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Baraka_Guru

Cyn, that's exactly the same issue I had (thinking I have nothing to write about). And the not starting thing apparently is an issue with many participants. Several have been known to not really start until the second half, after which they write like demons to make the deadline.

The deadline is the thing. Publicly announcing your intentions helps too.

In my own experience, I've found that writing begets writing. The thing is to write. I've read about this before and it's difficult to conceive, but once you've experienced it, you have that "a-ha" moment. At least I did.

The thing is to just write.

What I've found that works is to have a double espresso; plug my headphones into my laptop; play either soundtrack music, jazz, or classical; turn off the Internet; and just write. At first it seems to come out like crap, but then sometimes you get surges of interesting bits. The more you try, the more you get the interesting bits.

You're going to write crap. We all do. But if you write enough, you just might like some of the things that come out.

The more I've written, the more I want to do it. The more I've written the better time I seem to have of it.

I say just go ahead and do it. Worry about what comes out later.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

i'd second everything bg just said.

a while ago i decided to take back my writing from academic-ese as part of my 12-step reforming program. i used the journals at tfp as a big part of that process because they were easier for me to write in than a paper journal was---never could get with that in part because i couldn't figure out who i was talking to---the idea that a few people might plausibly read what i was writing erased that bind.


learning how to write when you've got nothing to say is a good thing. it's part of building the routine.

my ex is a poet--a really good one no less----and from hanging around her and from my own experience with sound, i figured that what matters really is the doing more than the what is done, so that you write stuff more than what you write.

what i figured out is that (for me anyway) writing is mostly about a routine---setting one up and protecting it, keeping it going. over time, what you make inside that routine will change and things can start happening that never would have crossed your mind outside that space of routine doing.


so far as what you make is concerned, it's like anything else, yes? some things work better than others and some stuff sucks. the stuff that sucks i try to catch and squirrel away on my hard-drive for sometimes later when i remember it and do something else with it. very few things suck so completely that they can't be plundered. so that's the other thing: save everything.


o yeah---if you write in the morning it's easier to plunder your dreams i find. alot of what i'm playing with now comes out of sliding along these curious seams in your sense of the world that float about until the 2nd or 3rd cup of coffee hits.

i like editing, too. but that's another story.


and let yourself have fun with it. constraints are generative. having a deadline--particularly an arbitrary one---is really just a prompt to get you to crank something out. it doesn't have to be a Burden or an Ordeal. it can be playtime. you get to play with word-toys. you can make silly structures with them.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

roachboy

10 days.

wondering how everyone is doing who's undertaken this or thought about it.

my update: i have the bones of an interesting piece and i think---i think----i have a structure that's starting to take shape.

what i know is that i'm working a set of themes---forgetting/memory & permutations of the two---and that there are recurring images most of which seem linked to the change of season.

i have a character who appears to be ocd and who is, as best i can tell, stuck inside the front door of his apartment building unable to go outside because he's sure that if he leaves the building will burn down but that if he goes upstairs to check he'll just have to start his morning all over again, a loop that will end him up forgetting again whether he checked or not and so he'll just be unable to leave. maybe it's always been like that. i don't see quite how to save him from himself.

there are drifting other figures, geometrical problems, different people inhabiting he and she---none of them have names---they feel like different people, but it's hard to say whether that's the case for a reader.

and the past few days have turned more toward reprocessing memories, particular about radio.

my new idea is that the whole series is a kind of stamp collection.
i think there's alot that could be done with this.
interesting meta-games...

o yeah, my word count is embarrassingly small. but the pieces are tight. so there's a trade-off. i just am not gonna win the nanowrimo prize.

so how are you faring?

and any ideas about whether or how this space could help things along?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

I'm sitting at just over 7,100 words.

I'm going through a mix of things. Apparently Week Two of the contest is notorious because it's the week during which the lion's share of participants drop out.

I've found it especially the case that this is more so a psychological challenge more so than it is an artistic or creative challenge. I keep wanting to drop out. I keep telling myself I could be doing something else with my energy. Like getting a better job, like reading more, like writing a "real" novel and taking my time with it. You know, the grass is greener.

I slipped on the weekend. I intended on doing a bunch of writing to keep on pace, but I didn't write a single word. I didn't do much of anything. I tried not to think of the book.

Silver lining: I've found that the last two or three thousand words were much easier to write than the first five or so. I think this is because I have the shell of a story now: I have characters, I have the makings of a setting, I have a plot, I have a plot trigger that can lead to a climax. I just need to keep going. Keep on keepin' on. I need to stop thinking about it too much. I need to just work on it.

I just restocked my coffee stores. I have a machine now that makes a quick single-serving cup of coffee—much less work than before, much less setup, much less cleanup. Fuel.

I really want to hit some kind of stride and do most of the work needed to still make the deadline with 50,000 words. Wow, 50,000, it seems so far away sitting at ~7,100 and 10 days in. The work will need to be backend-heavy. I see a pressing need for it, but that's what deadlines do to you.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that another stall for me was fighting off the flu over the past two nights. I hope to continue writing tonight now that I'm feeling better.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Cynthetiq

I've been so busy that it's not even funny. I'm at about 500 words.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

roachboy

i'm at something like 3200.
i thought i'd be able to just write out stuff, but apparently i've trained my edit function too well for that.
but i think it's ok.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

Word count: 13,703

It's now just past the halfway point in November. I just passed the quarter point in the word count goal of 50,000 (I'm sitting at 27.4% completion).

Some observations:

• I'm still doubtful and I still contemplate quitting (psychologically I'm still quitting, telling myself I'm done with it only to sit down to the story again).
• My hangups include: "The story's going nowhere." "There is no story." "It's not was I had in mind." "It's not the kind of story I want to tell." "It's not any good." etc.
• I find it increasingly difficult to sit down to write. I've missed entire days, especially weekends when I have the most time/energy to write.
• I find it increasingly easier to write when I do sit down.
• The more I write, the more ideas I get.
• An outline would have made writing this easier, but I don't know if I could have come up with the storyline I have thus far.
• A storyline is developing. I can feel it.
• I'm getting over the concerns with quality. I don't care if my descriptions are sparse/missing, my character actions are wooden, my dialogue is confusing, etc., there is something I'm building, and I can make more sense of it with future revisions if I want to.
• Much of what I've written is front-ended. So in sense I've been hammering out the "boring" stuff and still have the exciting stuff to write. Maybe this will make it easier to up my daily word count.
• I've built one hell of an awesome soundtrack library on my iPod for listening while writing this thing.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Cynthetiq

I've just not had time to sit down and write again. I've been writing report after report after report. Maybe I should just use those narratives as scenes.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

roachboy

so today is day 18. how are you faring with the project?

i've been putting mine up in my blog, but it's in reverse order so is hard to read as a project in that form. what's useful for me anyway is that i can read the parts as isolated bits and see if they work on their own.

i gave up on the word limit pretty early on, but i think the piece is much bigger than the number of words would have you think because it's so much about forgetting and erasure and blank spaces around and inside of what you remember.

it's moving in and out of memory and dream materials, mixing the two up, mapping one onto the other.

there are some abrupt direction shifts. not sure whether they're problematic or just part of the machinery.

i still have no plot or real characters. there's no actual story. i think it's fun to read though.

and your project?
and you with the project?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

roachboy

well, here we are. nano is a completed cycle. i have 32 new pieces, but only 8800 words. but that's ok.

i made a long cycle about forgetting.
i think there's good stuff in it---actually there's only one segment i have real questions about at this point. but it's time to put it away for a little while. maybe.

how have you made out over the this nano-month?
how far did you get?
are you pleased with the outcome?

what's the next step?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

I've been perusing your pieces, comrade, and you should be pleased. Although you fell quite short of "winning" the official NaNoWriMo, you did well to reinvent what the experience means to you. I think that's fantastic.

Whether this becomes a core for something you can expand on later, after it has fermented, or if you take away from the experience an insight in the writing process, it would seem to me that you had a good month.

I myself can say the latter. I learned a lot about the process of writing—the psychological and the physiological. I fell just shy of 17,000 words at the midpoint of the month before I hit a wall, which I think happened because I was writing without an outline. Without an outline, a plot-based story gets unwieldy and fast. I felt I wasn't making the story go anywhere productive, that I was wandering, and so I came to a halt.

I originally went on with the intention to work on outlining, but I seem to have lost interest in the story, at least for now. I'm not sure I want to continue it. I'm not sure this is the kind of writing I enjoy. But I do enjoy writing, but I need to find out how to make the process more naturalized—that is, inclined more towards my strongest and most heartfelt curiosities—and not so forced. It felt like I was pretending, like I was writing into a genre or towards an audience rather than for the sake of writing fiction itself. I'd like to think writing should be about what you want to create rather than what you think you should create.

That's what I've learned, and so now I'm reevaluating my approach to writing. I've been doing some soul searching. I've been thinking about weather I want to continue with fantasy and explore the genre more from a readerly and theoretical perspective to get a firmer grasp on it. I've been looking underneath the hood with regard to Tolkien's writings on fantasy (Faerie-stories) and the idea of myth-making. I'm not sure this is where I want to go. I do know want to avoid the trap of cliche and genre fodder, and so I want to steer clear of conventional fantasy, namely, epic and heroic fantasy trilogies and the like. I'm not even sure I want to write genre fiction at all, as I'm not sure I even fully enjoy it as a reader.

I'm learning a lot about my aesthetic sensitivities, and this, I think, is what it comes down to. My approach to writing fiction is more artistic than it is something that is merely fun. I don't want to write fiction that is merely entertaining; I want it to have some artistic merit as well. I'm not saying that fantasy or other genre writing is devoid of art; I'm saying that I must determine what form my approach to fiction will take. I'm doubtful it will be as fantasy or other mainstream genre writing. Magic realism, perhaps? I don't know.

Like I said, I have soul searching to do. I think this month essentially opened up a can of worms, which I think is a good thing. I've been sitting on the fence and waffling for a long time now. Jumping into something, even if I consider the output a "failure," was in itself a success, and I consider myself a victor of sorts, as I have vanquished (at least this once) one of the greatest enemies of the arts: fear.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

thanks, comrade.

it's been an interesting experience. i had initially considered trying to get closer to the 50k but found that i'd adapted my mode of writing around the time constraints that i work with tightly enough that it was really difficult to move away from them.

i have to split my working time up. i like to write in the morning but i only have an hour or a little more, depending on when i get up. so i generate material as i'm having the initial coffee. maybe that's why the writing is so dream-like in places: coffee doesn't chase them away immediately.

then i start moving things around...more often than not i don't know exactly where a piece is going to go. it comes together out of the rearranging and cutting process. sometimes it just requires moving a sentence in a sequence. other times it takes longer.

then i have to walk the wonder husky and move into work mode. i usually steal and hour or so when i first arrive to edit.

i found it really interesting to work with notions of forgetting. you can't talk about forgetting without talking about remembering, but trying to combine the two pushes you to pay attention to holes and gaps in what you remember and not fill them in. it also nudges toward the similarities between remembering and dreaming and seems to make it easier to let one drift into the other.

stuff that was happening in real time would show up warped through the thinking and dreaming.

since i didn't really have anything like a plotline, only a motif linked to a procedure, i decided that i would try when i could to work in repetitions and variations on smaller elements. that turned out to be easier than i thought because my brain doesn't move that fast and the things that occupied me at a detail level a month ago still do now. apparently.

there is an intertwining with a woman that always happens in exactly the same way. all that changes are the details of it.

there's a curious obsession with birds falling out of the sky because---i think----it's like flying except more irregular. maybe.

there's the creeping-in of fall. for example, i know the yellow dot clouds were leaves stuck on trees the branches of which were too far away for me to make out through the window of my apartment that looks out over the marsh. and there's the marsh. always the marsh, it seems.

i had an idea that fall and cold meant a slowing of movement within systems (bio-systems, but in general) and that an effect of slowing would be the opening up of gaps, which doubled the forgetting procedure.

so it turned into a pretty tight little game with some arbitrary bits that turned up now and then (seeing the woman in the leopard print dress; playing congas; etc.)

the bits from my past are all altered by these procedures.
my mother's quite offended about what i did to the uncle jim story for example. she claims it never happened. i'm not so sure.

i feel like i'm following a process at this point, one that's taking a pretty definite shape--by this i mean the writing thing as a whole, not just nano-space. it's taken a long time to get to this starting point. i'm getting more stuff published and am starting to get asked to make new things for publication by people i don't know personally. so something's going on.

my plan is to keep going.
i don't have a real plan beyond that.
we'll see, i suppose.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite