Writerly Ways
Nov. 15th, 2009 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cornerofmadnessBefore i get that far though, here's my overweaning thought for the morning: I'm not sure what's worse. Waking up with a migraine and nausea, waking up with the earworm of Monthy Python's Sit on My Face or having one of my science major's bagging up my Hemp milk at the Kroger's. OOO I'm having coffee in Doc D's office!
Dear Characters (wow I haven't had one of these yet)
QUIT CHANGING YOUR NAMES
Howell Killingsworth, give it up. You insisted on Howell and you love your last name. What the hell else do you want?
Placid Longstaff - Yes your name is a joke. It's MEANT to be.
Melantha Honeycutt - You just wouldn't let me change your last name. Heck even the spellchecker kept turning Honeysett back to Honeycutt so I guess it's fate
Thomas Wakefield - You are not Irish. You can not have the first name Keegan. Live with it.
Ophelia Winter - Yes the Feel-ya Burns joke worked better but I am not having a Honeycutt-Burns joke going thru this. Besides Winter fits your personality
Violet McFarland - Yes your name is old-fashioned but you are the representation of femininity in this novel.
Julian Longstaff - Thank you for being so understanding and not complaining but that IS your nature.
Dear Placid
Why in the hell are you standing out in the yard wailing about how ugly your body is and crying that even the hookers didn't want to touch you? Don't you know Melantha's dad can hear you from there? Wasn't it bad enough you went wandering through the house in your boxers in front of your brother's girlfriend?
Dear Melantha
You're supposed to be the female main character. For god's sake stop letting Placid run away with the novel. DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING. You must become more interesting.
And here are the pep talks from nano. I have no idea who either of these people are but as someone who handwrites A LOT, I liked one of their pep talks. the other is just plain amusing (and yes the freaking middle of the book is always the damn hardest)
Dear writer,
I have a very good friend who is Australian. I've never been to Australia, so she is constantly selling me on the merits of her homeland and setting me straight on things. For example, I have always wanted hold a koala. She informs me that koalas smell and spread disease. What I want instead, she informs me, are flying foxes, sugar bananas, rainbow lorikeets, mangosteens, and Sydney sunrises.
One thing that always impresses me in her descriptions is just how large Australia is—and how empty in the middle. Australia is comparable in size to the continental United States, but almost everyone lives on the coast. So it would be like having Los Angles, and then New York, with almost nothing in between. Nothing except for monsters, that is. Because almost everything that lives out there in the middle of nowhere can kill you. 97% of the snakes in Australia are poisonous. The spiders are the size of washing machines, but it's the tiny ones you have to watch for. It's all teeth and venom out there. So just put a huge "here be dragons" in the middle of your mental map and you'll have a pretty good picture of Australia. The cities are said to be wonderful—paradises of culture and wine and song. It's just that middle 2,000 miles that you have to watch out for.
Perhaps this rings a bell right about now, smack in the middle of NaNoWriMo?
Those first few days with your idea... oh, how wonderful they are! How sweetly it goes! And you wander on, past the city limits, into the bush. The signposts disappear, and the creatures come out. You have wandered into The Middle. Thing is, writers spend something like 97% of their time in The Middle. Once you leave those first pages, those first days... you wander into strange land and you stay there for a long, long time.
It took me a little while, probably a few years of full-time writing, to fully accept that that middle bit was where I was going to be spending pretty much all of my time. This is the thing they don't tell you. When you see portrayals of writers on television or in movies, what are they normally doing? They're sipping coffee or cocktails, or jetting around to signings, or solving murders for fun. Lies! I mean, these things do happen*, but those are the coastal bits.
Most of the time we are deep inland—sitting at home, or at the office, or some shed or underground bunker. We eat what we find and slurp coffee from anything that is sturdier than coffee. Often, we are inappropriately dressed for any human interaction. This is because we are in the middle. And in the middle, things are rough. You make bargains with yourself like, "If I finish this chapter, I can have a shower!" Or, "If I just get this paragraph right, I can eat those stale Oreos!"
Now, I realize in saying this that perhaps I am not selling you on the writing experience. I'm supposed to be cheering you on! You already know that the middle is a hard place to be. Perhaps right about now you are asking yourself, "What, precisely, is wrong with me? Why did I decide that the best way to spend the month of November would be indoors, strapped to a chair, writing thousands of words a day, alone, friendless, and insane? Why didn't I just agree to come to my desk every day, bang my head on it for a solid ten minutes, and be done with it? That would have been so much faster."**
Here’s the thing, though...if you're doing NaNoWriMo, you are a reader, because all writers are readers. Which means that you must admire many authors. Your shelves are lined with the works of your heroes and sheroes. Every single one of them has crossed the wild country where you are now. Every single one of them has been a resident of The Middle. The ground you're treading is full of the remains of their old campsites. And somewhere around you, just out of sight, current authors you admire are making their own way across The Middle. What's nice about NaNoWriMo is that you are traveling with a posse of thousands, all of you making your way over the mountains, through the valleys, across the creeks. You are fighting off the beasties.
And once you've crossed The Middle once or twice and you're lounging on the other side, you'll find you miss it. You'll realize you long to be out there again, under the sky and the stars. The weather changes a lot in the middle. Some days, the skies are dark and it's hard to find your way forward. Those days are long and little progress is made. Some days, it's strangely bright and clear, and suddenly you can see the horizon ahead, and dozens of possible paths present themselves to you. But every day is different, and every day there is a new way to go and a new thing to see.
You will be hooked.
And you will still want to hold a koala, even if you have been told sixteen times that they carry chlamydia.
-Maureen Johnson
* Well, usually not the solving murders part, though I would like to have a crack at that. If you have had any quirky unsolved murders in your town, preferably ones that involve Egyptian artifacts or unusual poisons, please get in touch with me at once.
** Unless you are one of those people who just sail along, cranking out 2,000, 2,500, maybe even 3,000 words every day without even breaking a sweat! If so... congratulations! But don't tell the others. They won't be happy with you. I fear bad things might start turning up on your doorstep.
Dear Writer,
Reconsider your hand. Reconsider writing by hand. There is a kind of story that comes from hand. Writing which is different from a tapping-on-a-keyboard-kind-of-story. For one thing, there is no delete button, making the experience more life like right away. You can't delete the things you feel unsure about and because of this, the things you feel unsure about have a much better chance of being able to exist long enough to reveal themselves. And the physical activity of writing by hand involves many parts of the brain which are used in story making such as time, place, action, characters, relationships, and moving forward across an entire connected gesture. And that's just what goes on when we write a single letter by hand.
Although word count goals may be harder to reach, your body will not feel as tired as it does after a day spent tapping buttons and staring at a lit screen, especially if you write a bit longer than you usually do.
Another thing to reconsider is reading over what you have written. If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written —either good or bad— you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters. The 24 hour period will give you time to create more of the things the writing needs. 48 hours is even better, and a week is ideal.
Can you keep your story going for a week without reading anything over? You'll find you can. You'll find that being able to rely on this ability will help you let one word follow the next without fussing as much as you do when you believe it's the thinking and planning part of your mind that is writing the story. There is another part of the mind which has an ability for stories, for holding all the parts and presenting them bit by bit, but it's not the same as the planning part of the mind. Nor is it the thing called 'unconscious '—it is without a doubt quite conscious when we are engaged in the physical activity which allows it to be active. This something is what deep playing contains when we are children and fully engaged by rolling a toy car and all who are inside of it toward the table edge. The word imagination isn't quite right for it either because it also leaves out the need for moving an object—a toy, a pen or pencil tip—across an area in the physical world. It's a very old, human thing, using physical activity along with thing 'thing' that is neither all the way inside of us nor all the way outside of us. Stories happen in that place between the two. The Image world isn't anywhere else. A computer can give you a neat looking page, higher word count and delete and copy and past abilities, but they are poor producers of the thing the hand brings about much more easily: Right here, right now, the pane of paper that the paper windows and walls require to give is the inside view, the vista.
You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.
Writing by hand is like walking instead of riding in a car. It's slower, to be sure, but you'll smell the smoke if you're near a house that is about to burst into flame. You'll hear the shouting from a fight about to break out in a back yard. You'll be able to help the dog who comes running by with his leash attached and dragging behind him, and be able to help the person who has lost him calling his name. This will make writing more like living and less like watching television.
When writing by hand, when the story dries up temporarily—as it always does, try keeping your pen in motion anyway by writing the alphabet a b c d e f g in the middle of the sentence a b c d e f g h i j k until the sentence rolls forward again on its own. Just keep your pen steadily rolling along through time, for a good time.
Best! Love!
Lynda Barry
both of them have websites but i was too headachy to play around coding them in for you all.
oh and Dear J &M next door. I sure as hell hope you like old jazz and swing music. I've been mainlining it to get the feel of my novel's time period. Just rock out to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, they're fun
ETA - forgot my word count last night and just now. duh... I did make my goal of 4K in a day
25931 / 50000 words. 52% done!
Half way there all
Dear Characters (wow I haven't had one of these yet)
QUIT CHANGING YOUR NAMES
Howell Killingsworth, give it up. You insisted on Howell and you love your last name. What the hell else do you want?
Placid Longstaff - Yes your name is a joke. It's MEANT to be.
Melantha Honeycutt - You just wouldn't let me change your last name. Heck even the spellchecker kept turning Honeysett back to Honeycutt so I guess it's fate
Thomas Wakefield - You are not Irish. You can not have the first name Keegan. Live with it.
Ophelia Winter - Yes the Feel-ya Burns joke worked better but I am not having a Honeycutt-Burns joke going thru this. Besides Winter fits your personality
Violet McFarland - Yes your name is old-fashioned but you are the representation of femininity in this novel.
Julian Longstaff - Thank you for being so understanding and not complaining but that IS your nature.
Dear Placid
Why in the hell are you standing out in the yard wailing about how ugly your body is and crying that even the hookers didn't want to touch you? Don't you know Melantha's dad can hear you from there? Wasn't it bad enough you went wandering through the house in your boxers in front of your brother's girlfriend?
Dear Melantha
You're supposed to be the female main character. For god's sake stop letting Placid run away with the novel. DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING. You must become more interesting.
And here are the pep talks from nano. I have no idea who either of these people are but as someone who handwrites A LOT, I liked one of their pep talks. the other is just plain amusing (and yes the freaking middle of the book is always the damn hardest)
Dear writer,
I have a very good friend who is Australian. I've never been to Australia, so she is constantly selling me on the merits of her homeland and setting me straight on things. For example, I have always wanted hold a koala. She informs me that koalas smell and spread disease. What I want instead, she informs me, are flying foxes, sugar bananas, rainbow lorikeets, mangosteens, and Sydney sunrises.
One thing that always impresses me in her descriptions is just how large Australia is—and how empty in the middle. Australia is comparable in size to the continental United States, but almost everyone lives on the coast. So it would be like having Los Angles, and then New York, with almost nothing in between. Nothing except for monsters, that is. Because almost everything that lives out there in the middle of nowhere can kill you. 97% of the snakes in Australia are poisonous. The spiders are the size of washing machines, but it's the tiny ones you have to watch for. It's all teeth and venom out there. So just put a huge "here be dragons" in the middle of your mental map and you'll have a pretty good picture of Australia. The cities are said to be wonderful—paradises of culture and wine and song. It's just that middle 2,000 miles that you have to watch out for.
Perhaps this rings a bell right about now, smack in the middle of NaNoWriMo?
Those first few days with your idea... oh, how wonderful they are! How sweetly it goes! And you wander on, past the city limits, into the bush. The signposts disappear, and the creatures come out. You have wandered into The Middle. Thing is, writers spend something like 97% of their time in The Middle. Once you leave those first pages, those first days... you wander into strange land and you stay there for a long, long time.
It took me a little while, probably a few years of full-time writing, to fully accept that that middle bit was where I was going to be spending pretty much all of my time. This is the thing they don't tell you. When you see portrayals of writers on television or in movies, what are they normally doing? They're sipping coffee or cocktails, or jetting around to signings, or solving murders for fun. Lies! I mean, these things do happen*, but those are the coastal bits.
Most of the time we are deep inland—sitting at home, or at the office, or some shed or underground bunker. We eat what we find and slurp coffee from anything that is sturdier than coffee. Often, we are inappropriately dressed for any human interaction. This is because we are in the middle. And in the middle, things are rough. You make bargains with yourself like, "If I finish this chapter, I can have a shower!" Or, "If I just get this paragraph right, I can eat those stale Oreos!"
Now, I realize in saying this that perhaps I am not selling you on the writing experience. I'm supposed to be cheering you on! You already know that the middle is a hard place to be. Perhaps right about now you are asking yourself, "What, precisely, is wrong with me? Why did I decide that the best way to spend the month of November would be indoors, strapped to a chair, writing thousands of words a day, alone, friendless, and insane? Why didn't I just agree to come to my desk every day, bang my head on it for a solid ten minutes, and be done with it? That would have been so much faster."**
Here’s the thing, though...if you're doing NaNoWriMo, you are a reader, because all writers are readers. Which means that you must admire many authors. Your shelves are lined with the works of your heroes and sheroes. Every single one of them has crossed the wild country where you are now. Every single one of them has been a resident of The Middle. The ground you're treading is full of the remains of their old campsites. And somewhere around you, just out of sight, current authors you admire are making their own way across The Middle. What's nice about NaNoWriMo is that you are traveling with a posse of thousands, all of you making your way over the mountains, through the valleys, across the creeks. You are fighting off the beasties.
And once you've crossed The Middle once or twice and you're lounging on the other side, you'll find you miss it. You'll realize you long to be out there again, under the sky and the stars. The weather changes a lot in the middle. Some days, the skies are dark and it's hard to find your way forward. Those days are long and little progress is made. Some days, it's strangely bright and clear, and suddenly you can see the horizon ahead, and dozens of possible paths present themselves to you. But every day is different, and every day there is a new way to go and a new thing to see.
You will be hooked.
And you will still want to hold a koala, even if you have been told sixteen times that they carry chlamydia.
-Maureen Johnson
* Well, usually not the solving murders part, though I would like to have a crack at that. If you have had any quirky unsolved murders in your town, preferably ones that involve Egyptian artifacts or unusual poisons, please get in touch with me at once.
** Unless you are one of those people who just sail along, cranking out 2,000, 2,500, maybe even 3,000 words every day without even breaking a sweat! If so... congratulations! But don't tell the others. They won't be happy with you. I fear bad things might start turning up on your doorstep.
Dear Writer,
Reconsider your hand. Reconsider writing by hand. There is a kind of story that comes from hand. Writing which is different from a tapping-on-a-keyboard-kind-of-story. For one thing, there is no delete button, making the experience more life like right away. You can't delete the things you feel unsure about and because of this, the things you feel unsure about have a much better chance of being able to exist long enough to reveal themselves. And the physical activity of writing by hand involves many parts of the brain which are used in story making such as time, place, action, characters, relationships, and moving forward across an entire connected gesture. And that's just what goes on when we write a single letter by hand.
Although word count goals may be harder to reach, your body will not feel as tired as it does after a day spent tapping buttons and staring at a lit screen, especially if you write a bit longer than you usually do.
Another thing to reconsider is reading over what you have written. If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written —either good or bad— you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters. The 24 hour period will give you time to create more of the things the writing needs. 48 hours is even better, and a week is ideal.
Can you keep your story going for a week without reading anything over? You'll find you can. You'll find that being able to rely on this ability will help you let one word follow the next without fussing as much as you do when you believe it's the thinking and planning part of your mind that is writing the story. There is another part of the mind which has an ability for stories, for holding all the parts and presenting them bit by bit, but it's not the same as the planning part of the mind. Nor is it the thing called 'unconscious '—it is without a doubt quite conscious when we are engaged in the physical activity which allows it to be active. This something is what deep playing contains when we are children and fully engaged by rolling a toy car and all who are inside of it toward the table edge. The word imagination isn't quite right for it either because it also leaves out the need for moving an object—a toy, a pen or pencil tip—across an area in the physical world. It's a very old, human thing, using physical activity along with thing 'thing' that is neither all the way inside of us nor all the way outside of us. Stories happen in that place between the two. The Image world isn't anywhere else. A computer can give you a neat looking page, higher word count and delete and copy and past abilities, but they are poor producers of the thing the hand brings about much more easily: Right here, right now, the pane of paper that the paper windows and walls require to give is the inside view, the vista.
You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.
Writing by hand is like walking instead of riding in a car. It's slower, to be sure, but you'll smell the smoke if you're near a house that is about to burst into flame. You'll hear the shouting from a fight about to break out in a back yard. You'll be able to help the dog who comes running by with his leash attached and dragging behind him, and be able to help the person who has lost him calling his name. This will make writing more like living and less like watching television.
When writing by hand, when the story dries up temporarily—as it always does, try keeping your pen in motion anyway by writing the alphabet a b c d e f g in the middle of the sentence a b c d e f g h i j k until the sentence rolls forward again on its own. Just keep your pen steadily rolling along through time, for a good time.
Best! Love!
Lynda Barry
both of them have websites but i was too headachy to play around coding them in for you all.
oh and Dear J &M next door. I sure as hell hope you like old jazz and swing music. I've been mainlining it to get the feel of my novel's time period. Just rock out to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, they're fun
ETA - forgot my word count last night and just now. duh... I did make my goal of 4K in a day
Half way there all
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