NaNoWriMo

I set my daily minimum to 1,666 words. I reached 1709.

I could probably write more, but I have Crippled Crossfit in 15 minutes. Maybe I'll write more later tonight.

 

ok so i put a new project into motion. i haven't decided which tumblr i'll use for it, but for the time being anyway it's here:

Adventures in Post-Reality

the working title is: All the remains of this story are shapes made of forgetting.






the frame is loose: forgetting. i'm interested in surveillance and video feeds, so forgetting will probably get linked to flattening, interference, etc. information holes.

the principle of variation is figure/ground reversal. i think. so the frame provides a general orientation and the principle of variation ways to work with material inside and across pieces.

i'll try to turn this onto itself as the game unfolds.

at the moment i'm still moving around, trying out options. i've got maybe 8 pieces done, but haven't figured out the order yet.


i work with flash fiction--very short pieces---and am trying to figure out ways to make longer sequences that takes advantage of the ways you can use flash to chop up and/or distort the sense of time. i think there's a particular way you have to read these things. they demand a bit of attention.... so the main trick is to find ways to make reading them interesting enough to keep you watching the little movies even though you're not being given the usual location devices that standard plottos give.

we'll see how it goes.

o yeah--i am not paying any attention to the word count. it is not important to me.

do other folk got projects up and running?
if you're making them online where are they?
any inclination to make of ourselves a community of readers for each other?

 

a little trick i've figured out by doing projects across consecutive days...

i'm interested in or preoccupied by similar things across a month, so i use that to build continuities at the level of details: if you can find ways to let the way you write come into contact with what you dream about (for example) it can do a considerable amount of work for you. the idea of having a principle of variation follows from that--it's a way of letting me use those continuities as material in a more conscious way than might be the case without such a thing.

o and let yourself have fun with the project. and don't worry so much if things don't always work.
that's the other thing i've learned.

 

2279

I have plans for the weekend to make up for my sad day of only 247

 

I like the idea of NaNoWriMo, but I'm too putzy. I've never been able to not revise as I write. Plus I'm taking a class on revision right now and that's kind of eating up my time. Plus plus, the story I really want to write at the moment needs about three or four more books' worth of research.

 

well, i'm up to 330 words. but the sentences are tight. according to the official nano timetable, i should reach the word count next summer.

 

I think we're on the same wavelength in terms of productivity. I wrote a short story for a class last summer. It took me about two weeks to manage 3500 words. It was probably 9 hours worth of actual writing, but given my hectic schedule, I can manage about 6 hours writing a week if I push it. I do most of my writing on my way to work. Ideas pop into my head and I when I get to work, I type them up and send them to myself in an e-mail.

 

i've trained myself into working in flash fiction, which is usually less than 250 words. i can work pretty fast in this form: when i'm up in the rhythm of it i can make a polished piece a day. they don't all work, but i can take them to the point of being what they are in a few hours. if they don't work, i put them away and, if i don't forget they exist, i'll go back and play with them later.

i've figured out lots of things that i can do with this minimalist form. most of them have to do with working the present tense. i think the pieces are like placing odd distorting glass things into a reader's experience on which these movies are projected that one doesn't necessarily want to watch: now you're here; now you're here. you don't need many of the usual narrative framing devices that working in other tenses require. and this form lets you play with duration and work with kinds of documentary material that i don't think is possible in other forms. by documentary material, i mean fragments of things that circulate in the social world, not elements picked from some repository and situated in a meta-frame and explained in terms of that frame. picking up debris more and using it to trigger certain responses. flash is mostly about triggering, i think. it's not a representational form. that's one of the things i like about it.

the thing with working in present tense is that the pieces need space. and the compression of the form means that the sentences have to pop. so they have to be precise. but there's not alot of space for adjectives.

transitions within pieces are matters of flow. but between pieces they seem unnecessary. memory fills in the gaps between pieces. so in that respect it's a bit closer to how subjective experience works than conventional fiction writing. that makes it an interesting conceptual game.

all this sets up the problem(s) of making sequences. it's about trying to figure out what triggers linger in someone's mind that's not yours and manipulating them. i have the idea that it's possible to make strange little novel-like sequences using this form. i'm just not quite sure how to do it yet. working on it.

so yeah. flash fiction. really fun to write.

 

1, 900

And an unexpected evening in Costa's coffee bar with two women. As I registered on Nanowrimo website, my user-account indicated a write-in about 50 minutes walk from where I live, so I went on a whim. We'll be doing six to eight on Thursday evenings throughout November.

This project reminds me of when, around 1979, I booked a venue and did publicity for a musical I was putting on in three weeks time, then started writing, composing, practising and rehearsing it to be ready to perform.

My computer is desktop, tied in with music and photo studio equipment, so I was at Costa's with pen and paper and intent to create a chart for structure. When I got home, my head was buzzing, and I got Kindle editions of No Plot, No Problem by chris Baty, The Anatomy of a Story by Chris Truby, The Plot Whisperer by Martha Anderson and Story Engineering by Larry Brooks. Plotto I will definitley look into - would have it already but it is not on Kindle.

So I've partly given myself a bank of resources, and partly given myself a bank of obstacles. I am commited to getting 50,000 words done, so I'll be very interested how I cope with 'studying' the art whilst at the same time producing it. I wish I could say that I was intuitively on the right track before I read Larry Brookes' book - I'm half way through it - but the reality is that I don't know what the feck I am doing. I've always kind of known that I am an unintelligent watcher of movies and TV. I confirmed this when I discovered IMDB and the kind of reviews that people write - they've all got this ability to ...er .. say Clever Stuff about what they see. Me ... I'd be coming out with stuff like "Oh and I was very upset when Judge Dredd nearly died."

AneeeeWaaaaay ... tea-break over, back on my head. Reading about the importance of Conflict in story.

 

roachboy,

I think the story I'm writing now is thus far just a bunch of flash fiction strung together. I've got an overarching idea, but I haven't filled it in all that much, except for a few short bits of material that have come to me while doing other things. I like writing flash fiction as a way of getting a phrase out of my head after it's been bouncing around for a while. For me, these pieces are more short, haste-based writing exercises, like "check out how nice this handful of sentences is when I put it together like this."

 

Only at 3206. I will need to write 3462 tomorrow for the daily total to get back on track.

 

Sneaks a peek at the outline:
Chapter 1: Bella and Edward have a major fight over their daughter's recent killing spree in Seattle
Chapter 2: Eward runs away to the city to think where he runs into Blade.....(the story really picks up here!)

 

Much better choice, that was a good film with solid characters.