Tag: writing

For Those About to NaNoWriMo….

I never did the NaNoWriMo. It’s a terrific idea. It started in 1999 but I didn’t hear about it for a long time. By then, I’d established my writing habits, understood my preferences and was working full time for IBM and didn’t embrace the idea.For a long time, I believed there was one way to write and searched for the magic formula. The magic formula appeared to be research, plan, write, edit & revise, polish and publish. I’m being simple. The formula was much more complex.

So I worked hard on planning, researching, outlining. I created huge outlines, detailed drawings and maps, and entire histories of characters. After months and months of work, I’d have an enormous wealth of information, and nothing written. Discouraged, the next time I had an idea, I thought about it for a while. A scene came to me and I jumped in and started writing. I later discovered that others do that. As a process, it’s referred to organic writing, or being a pantser. I’m still refining my writing process but I’ve come a long, long, long way.

I admire those out there jumping into NaNoWriMo and salute you. Have fun.

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The Progress Reports

“How’s the writing going?” I’m asked after a session.

“Did you have a good writing session?” another asks later.

“How’s the book coming along?” a companion queries me when I meet.

And I want to respond with a lot of information. I’ve written sixty thousand plus words. The book excites me. The ideas, characters and settings are all lively, energizing me when I sit down with it. That’s how it is on most days.

But some days, my writing sessions aren’t about the laptop’s clicking keys. Some days, I sit and talk to myself, or I’m walk and talk to myself. (Walking is a great way to write.) “Why did this happen? Because that happened. What did he do? What did she do? So what happens next with her?”

On those days, I’m likely to do a lot of spot editing and polishing, re-reading what was written about one of the story lines to find the path and generate enough light to look ahead to ‘what’s next’. Paradoxically, these are often the most exciting and enjoyable sessions because I’m solving a problem, and I also see clear progress of the novel being written. It’s all coming together. I’m assembling the puzzle, I’m learning the fuller story, and gaining greater understanding of my characters and the setting. I’m fortunate to write another 800-1,000 words on those days.

These sort of days prove, it’s not about the word count.

On all writing days (which is about three hundred sixty-one days of the year), though, I answer the questions with the same non-committal, almost laconic manner, “It’s going good.” I know they’re being polite and supportive. It’s like asking, “How is your day?” A full report isn’t expected, just a general summary, brief, if you please. We’re all just being polite. I hold back for the blog posts to wax more enthusiastically, but even there, I restrain myself. I’m just one of seven hundred gazillion writers posting and writing, gluing my sanity back together and casting the tea leaves, trying to make something out of the voices in my head who urge, “Write this down.”

But sometimes, when I’m writing, I can’t help myself, and I laugh out loud at what I thought or wrote. Nobody looks up, because, you know, I may look harmless, but I might be crazy. You can never tell.

They don’t know that I’m just a writer. I leave my badge at home.

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My Problem

I’m naming names today: Jenn Moss and Alan Sorrentino.

Alan Sorrentino is in the news about his letter to the editor decrying women wearing yoga pants in public. I know what Alan is talking about. His yoga pants were my muffin tops.

A muffin top is the fleshy overspill above a waist band, developing and exposed when one is wearing a tight lower garment – pants, shorts, skirt – and a cropped top. They were most prevalent among girls and young women. Probably still are. I haven’t seen one for a while.

Muffin tops caused me problems. How could someone wear something so tight and not be appalled by the flesh spilling out? Do they know how they appear? That developed my second problem. I’ve always been irritated by America’s ideals of beauty and perfection, and how humans should look. And here I was, sucked right into it. Damn America.

So I wanted to praise these people for being indifferent about my problem and showing their body as it is, and without embarrassment. But, sigh, I was also disturbed, because these people looked obese and overweight. Shouldn’t they be taking better care of themselves? That led directly to self-confrontation: is that what you think about NFL players with their big bellies? 

No, Michael, it usually isn’t. I was all about the player and what they brought to the table.

Alan, of course, was writing about his problem in what the yoga pants revealed to him about his opinion of female curves. Just like me and my muffin tops, the yoga pants were not about the people wearing them: the problem is him and his perceptions.

Now let’s move on to Jenn Moss. She’s a writer who posts on roughandreadyfiction.com. On Meta Monday, she posted about seeing Richard III at STNJ. Dwelling on Derek Wilson and his awesome guns, she wrote about how this buff actor compared to people’s usual perception of Richard III. In her final paragraphs, she wrote:

Meanwhile, this whole muscle thing got me thinking: what kind of assumptions do we bring to a play or book that we know well? Have you ever rejected a portrayal of a beloved character because it just didn’t match the vision you had in your head? Did a remake or reboot ever leave you cold? I love the Star Trek reboot, for example. But the 2005 film version of Pride & Prejudice just doesn’t do it for me.

I’m going to keep asking myself this question whenever I see a revival or any other remake: How open am I to a different look or fresh interpretation of a favorite character?

Why yes, Jenn, I have thought about these questions. I mutter and rant quite often about what so many – like you, Guy Ritchie – do to Sherlock Holmes. I grimaced at the treatment endured when the television show, ‘Wild, Wild West’ was made into a movie. And then someone did it – gasp – to the ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’. Look what’s going on in the Marvels Universe movies. And ‘Star Trek’…grrr…. “What is the world coming to?” I bitterly huffed in best BitterBen fashion.

Of course, I was always talking about my problem. I didn’t realize it until I grasped that I do the same thing to the fiction I write. I take original ideas and torture them into something else. In my science fiction, I discard the intelligent scientific foundations from the likes of Asimov and Clarke. The science and technology just are, a big leap from here and now. Sure, internal logic to the novels is solid, but I make no effort to explain how we made advances in space travel, FTL, teleporters, compilers, terraforming, and colonizing other planets: they just are as part of the setting, much like televisions, cars, cell phones, malls and aircraft travel just are as part of a modern setting.

Reluctantly I concluded, it’s a good thing when a television show, movie, novel, song or idea is re-interpreted and presented in a new light. It is how art, science technology, and government in all their forms have worked since just about the first time a story was done, a ruler proclaimed, a tool was created, or a drawing was made on a wall. Someone saw it and thought, “Wouldn’t it be better this way?” Then they offered their interpretation – thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

We’re always doing this, imagining, re-imagining and re-interpreting all the art, technology, history and events of time.

Now leave me alone. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time. After all, that’s what all this is really about.

And that’s my problem.

 

4

Doya Ever…?

Writing like crazy….

Well, actually thinking like crazy and developing background information to help me advance my understanding of what the hell’s going on in ‘my’ novel. I don’t know if I claim it as much as it has claimed me.

But, as frequently happens with me, this noodling about background sprouts tangent ideas. Writing about another intelligent race (the Milennial) and their complexities (the Lavie (which are their elders) gain weight and lose their limbs, becoming a food source for the larvae), my writing brain comments, “Boy, there’s a terrific short story in that.” Naturally, an argument commences between the novel writer in residence in my brain and the short story writer.

Does this ever happen to you? You’re writing one piece but another suddenly calls and makes an inviting proposition?

Naturally, I said no. The short story writer in me has less traction. I enjoy short stories, love reading and writing them, but I enjoy the novel form more. I tilt toward the novel. So I tell the short story writer, “I appreciate the idea, but we need to stay focused.”

“Come on, it doesn’t need to be long, just twenty-five hundred, maybe five thousand words.”

“I said, no.”

“But it’ll be easy. You can knock it off in a couple days.”

I laugh. Writers are always making such promises. “No.”

Pouting, the short story writer sulks away. “You’ll be sorry someday,” I hear him muttering. “You’ll see.”

The novelist doesn’t let me dwell on that. “Excellent,” he enthuses. “You dispatched him with aplomb. Now, on to the Profemies and the heritage left behind their departure….”

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