Author: Monda

Headgames for Editing

No Telling

What have I gotten myself into. That’s not a question, it’s what I continually say aloud to myself between sips of coffee and staring hopelessly at the computer screen.
I wrote over 50,000 words of my Chesaleen story and did it in 28 days. NaNoWriMo was an incredible writing experience for me that alternately ate up my brains and opened possibility. Wouldn’t trade those 28 days for anything. At the end of the ride, though, there’s this pile of words that needs serious revision. Serious. Re-vision.
Step One: Since I wrote the entire thing in unconnected, nonlinear pieces, the first order of business was order. Cutting and pasting the whole mess was interesting and I’m still not quite sure that’s how it should be. Doesn’t matter. The beginning is at the beginning and the end is somewhere near the last of it. In between are some Very Big Holes. Good enough for now. I also made some big cuts of scenes too dreadful to read and left notes to myself in the empty spaces.
I’ve honestly never revised anything longer than twenty or thirty double-spaced pages in my life. And those were papers written years ago for my MA in English. Scholarly business. My creative output tends toward the brief – poetry, flash fiction, short creative nonfiction, blog posts, that kind of thing. I know how to edit a moment, what I’m drowning in right now is editing/chopping/revising/developing a whole series of interconnected moments. It’s a “can’t see the forest for the trees” kind of thing, only more so.
The best advice I’ve found so far was on the National Novel Writing Month website itself. One piece of advice is to sit down and write a 5-7 page synopsis of the novel before doing anything else. The objective here is to nail down the plot tightly so there’s no wallowing in sentences (trees) without first finding the damn forest on the map. Good advice. No one can ache and writhe over a few words or a line quite like a poet, and that’s just wasted energy on a project like this. Plenty of time for that later, after the culling of superfluous scenes and plot confusions.
Step Two: What is the book about? That’s a loaded question and I had to answer it in the synopsis. I thought this would focus things a bit, but instead it amplified the size of Very Big Holes I’ve left willy-nilly all over the story. This is good and bad, I suspect, because I keep opening the synopsis and staring at it, zombie-like, drinking more coffee and hoping for lightning or brilliance or sixty muses dancing on the head of a pin to release what needs releasing onto the pages. That’s not going to happen, though. I’m making peace with that right now and it’s going to take some time.
Step Three: Find some music. I know this sounds like a great way to put off the whole rewrite just a little longer – and it is a delightful procrastination – but without all those dancing muses and electricity and such, I need a little something to put my head where it belongs. In other words, I want to make sure my forest is still filled with loblolly pines instead of wandering off and becoming redwoods. This is not a redwood story. It matters. So here is my playlist thus far. I have to say it helps me slide quickly into the deer woods. If it doesn’t show up like to should, just click on “pop-out player.”

That’s where I am right now. A map and some music and more early-morning hours. With Christmas Break, I’ve got a little free time. All I need now is absolution.

My God. It’s December.

No Telling

November is the cruelest month. Finally, the grades are turned in, National Novel Writing Month is over, the fabulous National Writing Project conference in San Antonio is history, and while I still feel a tad shell-shocked, I am back.
I’m entirely too old for this kind of pace. Really. Since November 1st I’ve been rising at 4:00 just to get my 1,700 or so words written for the NaNoWriMo madness – a joltingly delicious writing experience for me. Those early morning hours became extra grading time in December so I could wrap up those final essays pouring in just before exams, and then the exams themselves. At the end of this rainbow is a 50,000 word novel, five classes taught, graded, and put to bed, all punctuated by an impromptu ice storm.
Nothing quite like Arkansas weather. Shirtsleeves one day, two inches of ice the next. Although I’m a little confused by this morning’s warning:
Issued by The National Weather Service Little Rock, AR 3:51 am CST, Wed., Dec. 17, 2008

… FREEZING FOG ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 9 AM CST THIS MORNING…
A FREEZING FOG ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 9 AM CST THIS MORNING.
THE FOG WILL CREATE A THIN LAYER OF ICE ON AREA ROADWAYS… PARTICULARLY ON BRIDGES AND OVERPASSES. AREA ROADS AFFECTED BY WINTRY PRECIPITATION ON MONDAY NIGHT AND TUESDAY MORNING WILL REMAIN FROZEN INTO MID MORNING.
A FREEZING FOG ADVISORY MEANS FOG WILL DEVELOP WITH SUB FREEZING TEMPERATURES EXPECTED. VISIBILITIES WILL BE SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED. IF DRIVING… SLOW DOWN… USE YOUR HEADLIGHTS… AND LEAVE PLENTY OF DISTANCE AHEAD OF YOU. ALSO… BE ALERT FOR FROST ON BRIDGE DECKS CAUSING SLIPPERY ROADS.
Have you ever heard of such a thing? I swear they make these things up just for us.
Despite the weather – or because of it – I’ll have an opportunity to catch up on all things unfinished. Books to mail, decorations to flung about, shopping for presents if there’s anything left, rewrites for the book – I might even go a little crazy and dust something. I don’t know. I’d hate to kick up all that dust in the middle of a freezing fog advisory. There’s no telling what kind of mayhem could result.
Christmas Break. Ahhhhhh.

Word Counts and Plot Twists and Whiners…oh my

Fresh Ribbon

I put this graph in because it simultaneously irritates and encourages me. I can be proud of my NaNoWriMo word count, and at the same time completely aware that I’m a tad behind.

All word count aside, writing this novel at breakneck speed has been a fascinating writing experience. There are Those Who Scoff at all these furiously typing novelists as rank amateurs who have no right to call themselves anything but typists. As a creative writing professor I have very little to say to such people, because I know their pathology. When you’ve spent your life kneeling before the Gatekeepers of Academia and kissing their asses for a lousy publication in some university literary mag no one’s ever heard of, it can make you a little cranky. Fine.

I’m not including links to such unhappy writers for a couple of reasons. First, because they want us to. Throwing an elitist and edgy bomb out into the the blogosphere and then turning off the comments forces others to respond by writing on their own blogs and LINKING. It’s a nice way to manipulate the old Technorati count and fluff one’s overinflated ego. Second, these writers clearly haven’t been reading contemporary creative writing pedagogy. Separating the acts of invention and revision is standard operating procedure. And academia has been throwing cold water on the fiery hoops of The Graduate Workshop Model for years now. When Those Who Scoff do a little more research and turn their comments back on, I might consider linking. The blogosphere is not a fiefdom. If the serfs don’t want to fill your larder, they don’t have to.

In the interim, I’m having a very good time with this National Novel Writing Month business and so are my students. We are all learning a lot about how the creative process works under the stress of meeting word count deadlines and the pure magic of letting the story BE. I’m even looking forward to rewriting this bad-boy in December when there’s “world enough and time.”

I began with a character and nothing else. The story twists and blooms right in front of me every time I sit down to write. My students are blooming as well. They’re writing Shitty First Drafts. They’re woefully behind or stunningly ahead of everyone else. They’re sitting down every single day with the words.

They don’t have to write the Next Great American Novel. The NaNo provides writing community so there’s no need for the tortured-novelist-in-a-garret scenario. That’s just a myth anyway. I’m proud of their fortitude and epiphanies and what they’re learning about the work and craft of noveling. The real lessons in craft, of course, always come in rewrite anyway.

So those of you out there frantically slamming out your novels, keep writing. Those of you out there scoffing, keep on telling those damned kids to get out of your yard, I guess. I won’t be reading your crankiness or linking up so others can, but it’s a free blogosphere and you have every right to say what you want. Knock yourselves out.

I Have Not Run Away with the Circus…

No Telling

…Although it sure feels like I have. A lot going on here and very little time for posting. I’m ridiculously behind with the Ultimate Shelf-Cleaning Book Giveaway, and as soon as The Perfect Grandson wakes up we’ll be drawing a winner from his Halloween plastic pumpkin.
Weather-change illness all ’round, mountains of papers to grade, an election to follow and celebrate, a conference in Austin coming up, and National Novel Writing Month all have me a little overwhelmed.
Not to mention my lack of Christmas shopping. Let’s not go there.

NaNoWriMo Observations, Day One

Fresh Ribbon

1. I can write more in an hour than I thought I could.

2. Outlines are for other people.

3. Creation is my favorite part anyway.

4. The story writes itself and I should have done this years ago.

5. I couldn’t do this on a manual typewriter. I hate that.

6. I can tell the problem won’t be getting to 50,000 words by month’s end. The problem will be forcing myself to step away from the novel and back into my daily responsibilities.

7. It’s delicious telling my Inner Editor to go to hell.

Before the Landing

No Telling

The shooting on our university campus Sunday night left two young men dead and the rest of us stunned. I’ve spent the week talking to students about their feelings, reading their writings about the incident, and being hugged by those who can’t yet do the first two.

It’s been a long week for all of us.

It’s common for young people to believe themselves immortal. That’s just part of the teen-to-adult transition package. This makes it especially difficult for them to have their own mortality handed to them in plain view. Tough enough when the tragedy is a car accident or some other mishap, but more difficult when they meet violent, senseless, wrong-end-of-a-gun death on the sidewalk in front of the dorm they live in, on a university campus that normally looks like a vacation postcard.

I could write about the drama of the Sunday night lockdown, or the outpourings of prayer and remembrance since. Both are equally important. I could even stretch the truth and say that we are all healing, those boys will be in a better place, and very soon we’ll all be back to the routine of our lives. But I can’t do that right now. It rings too false and I don’t have the poker face for it yet.

There are two boys who can never again bask in the gaze of proud mamas, doting aunts, and sweet grandmas. All those women full of love and anger and no place to put it. There are four more boys who made a terrible, regrettable, heinous series of decisions, and whose mamas will soon be sentenced to a lifetime of gut-worry and penitentiary visitations.

The world tilted a little on its axis Sunday night and we’re all trying to find new footing. It’s not going to feel like a safe place for a while, and maybe it shouldn’t. All the security mechanisms are in place, the counselors are working double-time, and the phones ring – parent to child – more often than they did before the shooting.

When the talking and the writing and the hugging is done, maybe I’ll have space to make sense of what happened. I can’t right now, though. As a mama and an aunt and a grandma I ache for women left to weather what comes after. As a teacher I have to assign and grade and keep talking like the world will go on, like it already has.

But it hasn’t, and this limbo between the tragedy and the healing is a long stretch of time.

The Moleskine Quest Continues

No Telling

My new Moleskine is in! After having an emotional moment or two over the discontinuation of my favorite Moleskine extra-large ruled black cahiers, I went on a serious quest and finally found a few. In the UK. For a lot of money. Damn the expense, though, because I ordered the next best and even more expensive thing – an extra-large soft cover Moleskine from The Journal Shop on Ebay. About $30 and a week later, I’ve got her sitting right next to me, ready for scribbling.
These soft-cover Moleskines are just larger versions of the ones everyone else carries around – 192 pages with a proper back pocket and workable elastic band protecting the most luscious ivory paper ever made. The cahiers are lighter, but you pay for that lightness with a cardboardy covers and a sad little back pocket that tears easily. I tell you, I’m in heaven.
I realize I’m just putting off the inevitable, though. When The Journal Shop runs out of these they’ll be gone forever and I can’t bear to be stuck without a proper notebook again. Enter Black Cover, a blog in search of the Perfect Moleskine Alternative. It was nice to find someone out there more obsessive than I am about such things, but even nicer to find so many reviews on notebooks. Finally, someone else gets do do the dirty work.
A review there of Piccadilly Notebooks has me ready to take a chance. They’re close enough to Moleskine to make me happy, it seems, and while there’s not an extra-large notebook, the large is mighty close. Price? I could’ve bought two Piccadillys for the cost of my one Moleskine. Availability? These can be had online at Piccadilly’s site, but rumor has it these notebooks are also available at Borders. That will just have to be a rumor, though, since I’m miles and miles from Borders and their website is on the fritz. Luckily, Black Cover is having a little contest, and I could win some samples. Wish me luck with this, because otherwise I’ll whine about notebooks forever.
No one wants that.

Are These Shoes Too Much for a Blogiversary?

No Telling

I’m not really sure how to celebrate a blogiversary. It’s a little like emailing the office that it’s your birthday – something I’m sure Emily Post finds a little tacky. There’s also no cake unless you make it yourself. I’m really better with traditional celebrations, and much better if the party is for someone else. Ultimately, that may be the whole point of the blogiversary, patting yourself on the back for keeping up with it, and thanking all the guests who stumbled in to eat ice cream.

I started this blog to make myself write something every single day for a real audience. My little black notebook just wasn’t making much headway, and since I loathe sending my writing out for publication (lists, envelopes, records, bleh) it looked like instant publication was infinitely more relaxing.

Now, there’s publishing and there’s Publishing – Capital P Publishing is becoming a tad old school, what with all the academic fiery hoops and Gate Keepers and the year or so lag time while editors are busy filling up their own envelopes and their own record-keeping system for what they’ve sent out and what’s not made it back. It’s a lot like those dressing-room mirrors at Dillard’s – if you stand in just the right place you can see yourself posing at yourself, a thousand times over. And they all make you feel fat.

My lower-case ‘p’ publishing on this blog has been a lot more fun. I scribble out a little something, hit the ‘post’ button, and there it is – Out There. The blog world is completely democratic and wholly Ben Franklinesque. We are all of us self-made. The blogging process occasionally spits in the eye of academia, and I find that entertaining as well.

Examples? Well, how about Stuff White People Like. That guy is traveling all over working the book circuit now after his bulls-eye hit. Nothing like a book deal six months after goofing around on a free blog. And how about Wide Lawns and Narrow Minds? She’s got between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors a month. She’s also working on her MFA so she can be a writer – HA! I suspect that gal will be staring down the barrel of much more than a few pubs in obscure literary magazines. And soon.

Bless their gifted hearts. I love stories where talent and technology win.

So I thank the handful of you who check this thing every once in a while. It’s been a blast writing for you and a even more fun to find a new comment or two. I love ‘meeting’ everyone on here and it’s always like Christmas when I check the blogs for your latest scribbling. It’s the equivalent of those afternoon backyard get-togethers my mother and her friends used to have in the sixties. We trade stories, wipe jelly off of the kids, play a hand of bridge, and we’re all still home for dinner. Just the thought of it makes me want to wear clam-diggers and tease my hair.

Let’s keep doing this. It’s free, it’s fun, and we all seem to live in the same neighborhood.