Nuestra Aventura, Dia Uno
Original fiction project – week of 05/08/2011
I have been so distracted this week with being all anal about my upcoming trip and a health-related matter that I haven’t done much writing. I did start chapter 2, though, so that’s something. It’s going to be too long as well, la la la.
Original fiction project – week of 05/01/2011
The first draft of the first chapter is finished. And yes, it is terrible!! And it’s 4,199 words. Which is why word counts are bogus as a measure of progress when you’re me. If I keep this up, my new novel will be as long as the old one.
Original fiction project – week of 04/17/2011
988 words this week.
I don’t know if word counts are going to be a sign of progress going forward, since I started actually writing the full first chapter this week. Which so far seems to mostly involve piecing together already-written words. I smooth over the gaps with new words, but I really have no idea how many of my words are new or old. I think the fact that I am actually trying to write a full chapter and not random story snippets that could end up anywhere is Major Progress.
So, go me.
Where and when I write
I posted last week about a seminar I went to featuring an author who was speaking on her book about “discovering your true voice.”
Her angle on this much-tread topic is her background in yoga, and the basic premise is that, in order to discover your true voice–what you want to say with your writing and how you want to say it–you need to be in touch with your body and its habits and signals.
One of the first exercises in her book is to take a good look at your writing habits: how often you are able to write, where you write, what you write with, and how you use your body in writing. This was a little odd to me, since I conceive writing as primarily a mental activity, where the physical aspects are purely means to an end, but there’s a logic in the idea that your body is giving you signals about the content or manner of your writing, so I’m game to follow where she leads so far. So:
I live alone, which means I have the good fortune of spending my free time writing whenever and where ever it suits me. I am a creature of habit, though, so I tend to write in the same chair, in more or less the same physical position: legs up on the La-Z-Boy, lap top perched on one of those plastic-coated metal-rung kitchen shelves that fits over my hips with just enough clearance to ensure air is flowing between my lap and the bottom of the keyboard. This is a necessary thing, given the number of hours I often work, the heat of Arizona, and the heat of my middle-aged female lap.
Nowadays, I pretty much do all my writing tasks at the keyboard, rather than long hand. I used to write long hand all the time back in the pre-personal computer dinosaur days, and when I lived in San Francisco, I wrote on the bus or at bus stops, or at work. My writing at the present is confined to the lap top in that one same chair, where I sit for hours, eating, drinking, and watching television. I take breaks to run errands, go to the bathroom, or do a household chore or two, but that’s my Writing Way, for the most part.
Not sure what it says about me, or how it might effect my writing. I think sometimes I get “too comfortable” there, and it leads me to waste time on the internet, or “do anything-but-generating-new-words” because I can.
Original fiction project – week of 04/03/2011
1562 words this week. Yay me.
I’ve actually written a lot of words to this story, most of which I still feel will never end up in the actual first draft. I’m still unfocused, not sure what I really want to say. Aware of this frustration, I went to a writing workshop last night at Changing Hands bookstore. It was a spontaneous decision based on the description of the workshop, which was about “finding your voice.” I’ve taken workshops on that topic before, and I’m pretty aware of techniques for helping you determine what you really want to say in your writing, and express it in your own unique way. And yet I still struggle with it, so I thought I’d hear what some who wasn’t my old writer’s voice teacher had to say about it.
The speaker said something I already knew, which was you often won’t know what you’re trying to say until you’re done the first (or second or third) draft. Which I trust in, as it has happened to me before, but in the mean time, you have to find another motivation other than passion for your “point” to keep you returning to the story.
She didn’t delve a lot into techniques themselves since she was allowing the attendees to set the agenda, but she said enough that she sold me her book, which is, I suppose, what her purpose there was. I’ll see if the book has anything insightful to say.
In other writing news, I took anneth‘s suggestion and posted a “wanted” post on Etsy.com looking for illustrators. I got several replies, and since all of them made reasonable bids in the same ballpark, I am entertaining multiple preliminary sketches. It makes me feel like I’m “doing something already” with this old story, and that feels like a relief of something that’s been hanging over my head for a long time.
Finding an illustrator
I have pretty much decided to self-publish my old novel, just to get it out in the world and out of my hair. It’s completely (professionally) edited at this point, and now I need a book cover illustrator, and am not sure where to start to look for one.
Well, actually, I take that back. I started with my gf, and she said she’d help hook me up with someone, but then never did, and at this point, I’m tired of nagging her about it. She’s sort of a flake that way.
I know LJ/DW is overflowing with artists, but I’m not sure where to go to get their attention. I have skimmed Craigslist for locals, but all that sort of makes me nervous.
I have the concept of the cover in my head, I just need someone with more talent than me to pull it off.
Original fiction project – week of 03/20/2011
1829 words this week. And given that I had to work two 12-hour days at work (8 hours the other days), I am trying to figure out how I did that without collapsing. I remind myself I clocked nearly that many words on a daily basis during NaNo, but I’m still kinda impressed with myself. Especially since my story has been less inspiring to me of late.
But see, last weekend, I took some time to try to figure out why.
The problem, I think, is that my story has gotten very prosaic in tone, like it’s hardly a fantasy story anymore and more a scientific take on fantastical concepts, like you might see on Star Trek. So this week, I’ve been brainstorming ways to bring the “sense of magic” back into the story.
It was time well spent, because even though it felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything poking around the internet reminding myself of the stories I found “magical”, or researching legends and fantastical creatures I felt had nothing to do with what I was writing about, voila, a week later, almost 2,000 words.
A lot of that, of course, is me just giving myself writing exercises that may not ever become part of the story, but that forced me to “write outside the box” I’ve shoved my story into.
And it gave me an interesting insight that is relevant to my story.
Much of the “prosaic” feel of it, I think, comes from me being conflicted about what point I’m trying to make in the story, and this goes back to a conflict in me as a person. I am one of those people who wishes every day that magic were real and that I could live a life where magic things happened. But I never see any evidence of the supernatural out in the world, and that frustrates me. I am not the sort of person who takes things on faith; it is in my nature to believe only in what can be proved, and withhold judgement on what can’t.
But more than that, there’s another part of me that doesn’t actually believe in the supernatural at all, and I guess that is the closest I get to an article of faith. I think there are plenty of things out there that cannot be explained by science, but that doesn’t mean they never will be; it just means they have a natural explanation that’s beyond our present level of scientific knowledge.
So on the one hand, I want magic to be real, and on the other hand, there is a real sense in which I don’t believe any magic could be real. And that’s where my story gets muddled. I can’t write about the supernatural and not have this urge to make it just “the natural that’s beyond our present understanding.” And that takes the “magic” out of the magic in my story.
I have no problem enjoying the supernatural in somebody else’s fiction: Buffy, Dresden Files, Harry Potter. But in my own?
I need to figure out a way to encapsulate my own conflict into my main character’s conflict, because I think that’s what I’m struggling to say in this story.
Original fiction project – week of 02/13/2011
I had this spontaneous proclamation last Saturday evening. Well, more a spontaneous thought that I had earlier in the afternoon that I then found myself actually proclaiming out loud, much to my surprise. Surprise because what I proclaimed really is anti-Me where writing is concerned.
I asked my GF to read the first draft of my new story as I wrote it.
Now, I am not anywhere near ready to write it, but it is SOOOO anti-Me to have anyone read a first draft. I need the freedom to screw up mightily, take shortcuts with promissory notes to come back and finish something later, ramble until I figure out what my point is, and write stuff out of sequence.
The thing is, after my experience writing The Destroyer, I also see the value of throwing out a story piece by piece, seeing peoples’ reactions, then slowly letting the story evolve as I develop each new chapter. The motivating thing about having (a) reader(s) is that you have this external motivation to give the first draft your best effort and get it done, and I sort of need that external motivation to really get this thing moving.
In the meantime, I am still working on figuring out what the story is going to be about, developing my characters, and doing my world-building and mythology-weaving. And I’m doing it by writing actual prose words. Still happily contradicting myself, writing out of sequence, and leaving many bits as promissory notes, just like I need to do. As soon as the Sculptor finishes reading TD, though, it will be time to start sending her this story.
Before anyone asks, though (assuming they would), I am only going to let her read this first draft. Because this is not about feedback/constructive criticism, it’s about lighting the fire under my ass to get the story written. And I know she will limit herself to questions if she has them, a minor comment here and there, and embarrasingly effusive praise.
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 