In Which Sarah Refuses Orthodoxies of Several Kinds

[dr_pretentious]

Nine longhand pages, most produced after 1am by candlelight. Why candlelight? Because I'm out of lamp oil, of course.
600some words straight into laptop, most produced during write-in.

I understand the benefits of privileging quantity over quality in an exercise like Nanowrimo. And yes, the 1st draft must be shitty, no matter how it gets produced. But a lot of the standard word count boosting strategies that are in common use by my fellow Nanowrimo cultists just freeze my brain up, even though I know there are other people who feel unlocked by them. I'm quite content to fail, even to fail laughably, on the first pass, but I don't have it in me to try things I know take the story in the wrong direction. There is a difference between writing a rough draft and, on the other hand, writing badly on purpose. Thinking that I would have to write badly on purpose in order to make 50K by 30 November has been intermittently paralyzing over the past couple of days.

The story got unstuck again the moment I said to myself, well, I'd still like to hit the 50K mark by the end of the month, and I'm still aiming for that, but I'll do it my way or not at all. Practice, failure, and play are acceptable. Acting in bad faith is not.

I think I just blew it as a Nanowrimo cultist.

Comments

[newroticgirl.livejournal.com]

I have to agree, I'm not crushed if I don't hit 50K... no matter what my word count is on November 30th, I've still written more in this one month than I have in a while. So it's good.

Plus, talking with everybody last night really helped me see and make some new choices about my story. :)

[annathepiper]

I'm right there with you, hon! I'm not really a proper Nanowrimo cultist either, not when I went and deleted 1,700 words because they just felt WRONG. :)

[annathepiper]

Does that frustrate you when it happens? :) I would be better able to handle it if I didn't have it happen more and more as I trundle through my work in progress. It feels like going through a minefield--and if I trigger one of the mines, I send adjectives and verbs and nouns and subordinate clauses flying all over my landscape.

But I did come up with another way to handle those 1,700 words. :)

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

write it anyhow and keep it...it may become the seed for a breakout story.

you're much better than me...I can't even do NaNo...I'm too phobic about being caught up in a cult! I mean, the people I know personally who are participants seem okay, at least on the surface, but...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The story's sound. Promising the story that it was more important than the word count has made a huge difference, just in the past 24 hours.

I don't know that I'd do Nanowrimo again, but I'm glad to have tried it once.

Orson Scott Card says that writing 100,000 words will teach you more than any MFA program can. MFA programs are an easy target, and I think he overstates the case, but the guy's got a point.

And I think if Nanowrimo had been around when I was in high school and I'd done it a couple of times back then, I might not have been sucked into the far more pernicious cult of academia.

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

yeah, well... if it's any consolation, OSC's editor and I had a chat the other night in which I mentioned his disdain of MFAs and she dismissed his opinions quite readily. We talked about your work, too, as a matter of fact - the teaching, the learning to write fiction after years in academia, the struggles entailed in getting manuscripts to a manageable size...she was quite sympathetic.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Why, yes, that would be significant consolation!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'm right there with you about Ender's Game. I liked the short story, but the novel Card expanded it into, not so much. I haven't read any of the others in the series. Mostly, I like OSC as a writer of short fiction. Back when I was a teenager and dinosaurs roamed the earth, Card's short stories were among my big influences, though not as important to me as Harlan Ellison's.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

i'm insanely pleased you washed out as a nanowrimo cultist. :)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

There's the vague possibility I might still cross the finish line, but I'm failing to maintain a proper cultist attitude. What's anyone to do with me?

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

What!? Finish, but not in the approved cultist manner?! Heresy! Blasphemy! Burn her! She's a witch!!

Oh, wait...

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

Nah, it is really tough to intentionally write badly.
Don't get me wrong; most of my current word count is pretty crappy.
But I don't care how much fun the cult is (and for me, it's a lot of fun) there are simply some things that I must take my time over.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

I shudder to think what some of those word count booster strategies could be. But if ALL that was important was word count, then, hell, I could get 1700 a day by turning off my brain and free associating for a couple of hours. But I doubt anyone would want to read it as anything other than the biggest pile of ... notes ever assembled. (Thought I was going to say something else there, din'tcha?) It certainly wouldn't be a novel.

I wonder, how many Nanowrimo works have actually been published?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

There are dares, which people exchange on the forums (e.g. "I dare you to put a dragon named Cuddly into your book!). I have heard the dares praised as a way to get unstuck if you have no idea what to do with your characters. One woman declared that the dragons she'd only put into her book to brave that dare had actually enriched her worldbuilding.

There's going to a public place, closing your eyes for a count of ten, and then writing into your story the first stranger you see.

There are elaborate descriptions of objects, regardless of plot importance. Quick! Pick an object you've mentioned in this chapter. Now find a thousand wordsto say about it. Go! (I do too much elaborate description of objects as it is. This would, for me, be a disastrous strategy in the long run.)

There's the Bartlett's Quotations manoeuver, whereby one flips Bartlett's open to a random page and chooses a random quote, which then gets to occur as the epigraph to a randomly selected chapter of your novel.

There's the song lyrics gambit, whereby the song the character hears on the radio, or sings in the bar, or whatever, can be included, verbatim and complete, in your ms. Heck, you're not trying to sell it as is, so it's hardly a violation of copyright. (It's a day's work for me to generate a song if I want my characters to sing. Hazards of fantasy worldbuilding.)

A few of them have been published, and one of them won a very prestigious (in the industry, anyway) award from the Romance Writers of America. Scoff not! She who wins the Rita sells her next book.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'm a real writer with a real story? Wow. I think so, too, but it's always a surprise when someone else agrees with me. Thank you.

The ghosts do seem to be good for word count. Yesterday one of them decided to amuse himself chasing his daughter's ship. He was bouncing from wave to wave like some demented skipping stone, or something like that. I threw some dolphins into the scene. Advanced the plot not at all, and it may all go in the revision phase, but the by the end of the day, I had a couple of vivid pictures.

Definitely Not Wayne Newton.

Not allowed to bail, huh?

[citabria]

This isn't exactly a response to your post -- it's a reminder that Monday is Delicious Orchards/good produce day! I'm going to try to remember to call you tomorrow, to find out what you want/need, but if I don't (or if it's easier) you can email me at citabria2 at aol dot com.

Yummy food!