NaNoWriMo update #5

Something about this last NaNoWriMo update twists my stomach. I've always found it hard to talk about work in progress. Do I tell you about the plot? No... I hate summaries. Do I tell you my objectives? How gauche. Do I tell you how pretty I think my book will turn out? My arrogance will jinx me; I'll burn the cake for sure.

I didn't win. There's that. That's easy to say.

But what from there? I wrote this entry twice already and didn't like it the first time or the second. Both attempts were dull and analytical. And defensive. And I kept talking up my work up and then catching myself talking it up and not wanting to, and doing it again. I erased them. Truthfully, I can't care right now about NaNoWriMo 2012 or what I could do better the next hypothetical time I attempt the contest. I can't make myself care even a tiny bit. And I want to keep my half-done project clutched close to my chest. So I will ramble rather than deconstruct my experience in any methodical way.

At one point, early in November, I read an article by a famous author who says that he just sits down and writes manuscripts from beginning to end, without visualizing or writing down any ideas, outlines, or characters beforehand. He just goes. Like a rabbit down a race track. Straight as an arrow, all in chronological order. That killed me.

Wouldn't I like to be the kind of genius who just wakes up one day, walks the dogs (I have no dogs), and sits down to write a completely coherent novel?

I thought so. I spent the first week and a half of November finding out that I am not that guy.

Naw, I lied again. I probably kind of knew already. But I was not okay with it. Maybe still not. It's inconvenient.

How it works for me is this: I imagine up some people, one by one. I study them until I know them better than I know anybody. I set them a stage and invite them on board. Then I draw back the curtain and wait to hear the whispers of their goings on. If what happens doesn't move me, I fiddle with some elements and let it go again. I write nothing. I dream, think, play, work with my hands, listen to music, live life with my family, wait for the fire. And then I record whatever demands to be recorded.

It's not something I ever want to try to squeeze into a month's time again. Or any timeline at all. It cost me a lot to do so.

But... it was good for me. I cannot touch it again yet, but I have a strong feeling that I will finish this novel in the not-too-distant future and that I will be sickeningly proud of it when I am done.

Around the end of the month I was reading some Philip K. Dick:

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind. Not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality.

I think I'll yield to reality a little more than he did. But, still. Yes. I want to write about people I love. Hopefully people you love, too. There is too damn much in this world of everything else.