A friend pointed out an interesting thing: I am my novels.
When I was writing about the singer who courted the dancer by creating music for her, I read it out loud incessantly, trying to get people to listen to it and love me. When I wrote about the woman who had been neglected and abused all her life and left her home to live with a man who would ultimately abandon her, I felt protective of my women friends and angry on their behalf for any mistreatment the world dealt them. When I wrote about the man who fell in love with himself and died trying to possess an illusion, I withdrew from everyone around me. Now I'm writing about a woman who is putting her present in jeopardy in order to fix her past, and my home life is suffering.
On this one, I don't have any advice. I'm lucky that I'm married to an understanding person who doesn't take it all to heart. Much.
But if I really want my characters to have life and meaning, I have to be them. I have to be inside their heads and live with them and move them around. Unfortunately, I'm not terribly good at switching it on and off.
And now for something completely different...
And, for my very first (and likely only) writing update: today is Tuesday, November 16, and I am 37,693 words into my 50,000. I'm 75% finished, having written an average of 2,513 words a day (with a day job and two children). At this rate, I will write 75,360 by November 30th. I actually have a plan for that too:
The novel I'm writing now, Mary Ferguson Offered, is probably not going to be much longer than 50,000 words. So, my plan is to go straight to novel #2, which is unnamed as of right now. I am not sure which of two novels I might do first (remember - always be planning your next project) but if you'd like to have a vote in it, you can take this poll at my other blog. I won't start writing the next one until I'm done with this one, but that could be very soon.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
What Does It Feel Like?
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2 comments:
I find it very hard to understand how you manage 2500 words per day - even if you do manage to type in your afternoon management meetings and make up on weekends. Even working full speed for a whole day I find it hard to get past 3000 words (without resorting to typing garbage). I'm stageered that you can do that with a day job, two children, maintain this blog and another blog which hads regular updates.
Perhaps you can share your secret of how you do it.
Also do you find that you can write quality stuff whilst pretending to be alert in meetings at work? Anyone not "on-the-ball" in my company meetings soon gets in trouble and as a result my attempts at multi-tasking are of pretty low quality.
Looking forward to finding out how you manage to do it, or are you in the words of Sir Robert Armstrong "being economical with the truth"
How she does it1. She has a super power that I cannot replicate. Whereas I have laserlike focus and can drill deeply on a complicated systems analysis and not notice the fire alarm hooting overhead, she can listen to audio books, carry on 3 simultaneous IM sessions, surf the web and still generate new content. She multitasks to a degree that looks like actual multithreading.
2. Discipline. Pure and simple. I was tempted to do NaNoWriMo this year to try validating her process for someone like me. The only thing that stopped me is my lack of having anything to say. Once upon a time, I had the equivalent of detention: I commuted 3 hours a day by train. This gave me a lot of time with my laptop, and I wrote a lot. If you get into the habit of sitting down and writing, writing comes easier. At about that time, I harbored this daydream of career shift into writing. When I stopped sitting down and writing every freakin' day, the words stopped coming and I abandoned the daydream. Bottom line: just sit down and write; don't look at Slashdot, don't play just one game of Jewel Quest, don't check your email, just write. A few days in and you'll be spewing.
3. Practice. This is like discipline, but it's the sustained part of the sustained effort. The first year she did NaNoWriMo, it sometimes took several hours to hit 2500 words. By now, she kicks out 1500 words an hour.
4. Don't edit while you write. Your question assumes that these are 2500 words you're gonna use in the final copy. Make no such assumption. Some days, I've seen her write 4000 words and at the end say, "I don't know what the hell I was writing. I just finished a whole chapter that I'm going to have to cut." But here's the thing: she doesn't edit during writing. She edits two months later. If you worry about how good the stuff you're writing is, then you're not going to write very fast. It is far easier to cut than to create, and you never know: maybe that extended riff that went nowhere doesn't make it into the final version, or maybe it does, but in a different place. Or something.
5. Rewards and punishments. You may not get up to pee, get a drink, eat, answer the phone, sharpen your pencil, or anything else until you get your words done. Once you get your words done, you should stop writing for the day. This enforces the discipline and it makes practice easier. Ultimately, when you've internalized all this stuff you will learn how to give yourself interstitial slack. The danger is that if you start giving yourself little breaks before you've owned the discipline then you're never going to get to the next level.
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