I’ve been busy, busy, busy this semester, and I’ve just realized that it’s going to be Halloween any day now. It’s my favorite go-out-and-act-stupid holiday, and it sneaked up on me this year. I need to get to work because I haven’t chosen a costume yet, but I have some pretty good ideas:
On the zombie track, I could go as Sherwood Anderson, holding that last fatal martini in my hand. Or how about the coughing, sarcastic ghost of Dorothy Parker (in a great cloche hat)? Maybe I’ll go as Mrs. Burroughs, with a neat little bullet hole in my head, a big, shiny, intact apple on top of it.
Oh, well. Maybe I will escape from the dead writer theme this year, and just go as President Palin.
AAAAGH!
Yeah, that’s the scariest costume for sure.
It’s October, and we all know what that means: just a few weeks until National Novel Writing Month, or as I like to call it, “National One Month Out of the Year When Your Friends Are Actually Interested in Questions of Plot & Characterization & Setting & Wordcount & Care About The Progress You’re Making On Your Novel,” or “NaOnMoOuYeWheYoFriArAcInQuePloChaSetWorCaAbTheProYoMaOnYoNo.”
NaNoWriMo is easier to say.
National Novel Writing Month is based on the premise that everyone wants to be a novelist, but not, you know, all the time. Just sometimes. Being a novelist all the time is a total pain in the arse, especially given the eleven months out of the year when your friends are NOT actually interested in questions of plot & characterization & setting & wordcount & don’t actually care about the progress you’re making on your novel. It’s waaaaay more fun to be a novelist when all your friends are, too, and everyone has her own little page on the NaNoWriMo site that keeps track of wordcounts, where you can see how many words your best friend has written and make sure you write that many PLUS TEN for the day so that you can prove, once again, that you are better.
Writing a novel in a month is like running a marathon. (Or so I assume. You will never find this girl on a marathon course, I will tell you that much, unless it’s one of those hilarious romantic comedy moments where through a series of bizarre and unforseen hijinks I suddenly find myself in the middle of a sea of smelly runners, all of whom are conspiring to keep me from achieving whatever goal it is I’m after.) People probably run marathons to prove something to themselves, something about dedication and persistence and strength and achievement. They do it so they can say “I ran a marathon!” which is something that no one can ever take away from you. They do it for the sheer adrenaline and the camaraderie and the feeling of being a part of something bigger than themselves, something global and epic and amazing.
And that’s why we NaNo.
My best NaNoWriMo was 2005, when I had a bunch of 7th and 8th graders writing novels with me....
You could say I’m between projects these days. A few weeks ago, I finished a draft of a manuscript that consumed my life for months. I always thought I’d be one of those writers who immediately starts a new project, seconds after typing “the end.” I didn’t even have to start a new project; I’d been working on another story last fall, before the marathon novel rewrite started in January. I could just go back to that, I thought. No sweat.
What I hadn’t counted on was the intense emotional rollercoaster of the last few weeks of the rewrite. By the end of it I was kind of a disaster. I wasn’t sleeping well, couldn’t play nicely with others, found myself weeping for no reason… it was ugly. By the end of it, I’m fairly certain my loved ones thought about locking me up. And when I finally finished, I found that I couldn’t get my head out of the manuscript. Emotionally, I was still there, still with those characters, still mulling over their choices and characterization. Switching to a new project, I realized, was not going to be nearly as easy as closing out one document and opening another on my laptop.
I kept in mind the words of Virgina Woolf: “As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.” I wanted that too. I didn’t want to take to my next book like a laborer to a trying task; I didn’t want to be writing merely to have written. I wanted the new book – in the beginning, at least – to be as enticing as first love. There will be plenty of time in the middle to feel like a bricklayer. Still, I was impatient to get back to writing, simply because I need to be writing to be okay.
How could I get back into the heads of characters I abandoned almost a year ago?
At the tattoo festival I attended this weekend one of the seminars I went to concerned the differences of creating via different mediums. A vast majority of tattoo artists have degrees in the fine arts. And a huge new generation of them are creating portfolios that not only entail tattoo work, but also sculpture, commissioned murals and paintings. Though one of the most popular forms of artistic expression has been through collaborations with other artists, or “collaborative works.”
I have attempted in small measures collaborating with another artist. There are moments of tension and moments of revelation that are not experienced solo – I recommend this to anyone – but one thing I really took from this seminar was the issue of “rendering.”
As a writer I note my influences, note my muses, note my motivations. But how much time do I spend on “rendering? Not much.
So, I have challenged myself to create a collage of my next poem, a short story and perhaps a recipe translation of the poem for edible consumption. Then – after all these “projects” I will attempt to write the poem.
Who knows – maybe this sort of groundwork will present a new challenge of how to approach my writing of the poem.
If you have any experiences with collaborative work let us know! It would be great to share your stories! Send them to
How do you write about a character’s physicality? Vivid descriptions of a character’s facial expressions, posture, and movement can add a layer of depth to any scene, but (for me, at least!) it’s always a challenge to avoid uninteresting descriptions and clichés. My characters are constantly sighing heavily, smiling happily, staring intently, raising their eyebrows, rolling their eyes… and I’m rolling my own eyes in my edits, asking myself if this is really the best I can do. Trying to push through the layer of easy description, I spend a lot of time imagining exactly what my characters look like in any given moment, how they’re moving their arms and legs, how they carry their weight, where they keep their stress.
I love to write in cafes, but I have this habit of acting out a character’s facial expressions and posture so I can better describe what I think they look and feel like. As long as I’m alone, this is fine. I have a little button that says “I write books!” and I figure anyone who catches me making faces and slouching in front of my laptop screen will just assume I’m a crazy writer. BUT. Every now and again I go writing with someone, and when the person sitting across from me sees me making faces and muttering to myself, she’s likely to a) ask me what the heck I’m doing, b) ask me if I’m okay, and/or c) mock me. Heartily.
It’s hard.
For this reason, I am VERY excited about one of our short courses this summer. (Actually, I almost don’t want to tell people about it, so that I can have it all to myself!) The class is called Body Language, and it will focus on deepening written dialogue with “the elusive art of communication that happens ‘in the body.’” Doesn’t that sound great? The more I think about it, the more I realize how complex and elusive body language can be. Men and women tend to move in different ways, as do adults and teenagers, children and senior citizens. Business people move differently than artists, who move differently than politicians….
See, now I’ve gotten myself all inspired. I’m off to work on my novel… and if you see me tucked into the darkest corner of a café in Bucktown, frowning and smiling and whispering to myself, you’ll know exactly what I’m doing. Maybe I need a new button to wear, one that says, “I’m not crazy… I’m writing!”
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