Writing Group

NaNoWriMo is over and has been for 13 days. Since then, my daily writing habits have wavered, coming and going in the face of holiday (which means Christmas, for me) activities. I met with my NaNo-buddy that lives near by, and we started talking about the old days when we felt compelled by the deadline to write and write. We did not write much, having had limited time to catch up on real life with each other. But, in the midst of talking about what we had been up to, the lament about not writing spurred me on to make the suggestion that we have a writing group. Which made me think that my friend and I might need a push in the right direction, namely, we might need an accountability group for writing.

Unlike AA, this group would hold people accountable for doing a behavior rather than not doing a behavior. Namely, I came up with a provisional idea.

The rule of my writing group: write five pages (or a chapter) a week and then let the group read it. Since there are two of us, that means we will be reading each other's work.

The second rule: each person is required to make the best criticism and the best compliment they can about the piece of writing.

Writing, Thinking, Walking

I thoroughly enjoy writing, but I have come to know that writing is hard work in a way that I have previously not known. When I am trying to write for fun and still write something well thought out, and additionally trying to live my life, I can get overwhelmed.

Going back through the archived Writing Excuses podcasts, I stumbled on the suggestion of one of the authors that taking a walk was how he cleared his mind and generated ideas.

This struck me as odd.

I have been making my mind work on the complications of writing my current story, have been thinking about principles of writing and how to do so. But I have not necessarily been allowing my mind to work on writing.

By "allowing my mind to work on writing," I mean that I have not given it downtime in which it can allow ideas to bounce around in a secondary space in my mind. Taking a walk sounded like a good idea.

I did not do it, because the sky grew overcast and flurries started falling, one by one. However, I feel that the free association is something that I could use.

While walking, I do not know if the author carried a pen and a notepad with. In my case, I believe I will. In case any stunning insight strikes.

The point here is that I have thought about how to write and have a sense of what the essential elements of fiction writing are. I have even written and seen these elements come together in some form.

While working on my second project, there is a time to plan and think through what is happening, who people are, and what I am going to do with the plot. There is also a time to let my mind wander in search of unrefined ideas that I can bring in and use.

Without a problem to solve, my mind will not be working on anything--hence the need for structure. But, with characters and a basic plot established, my mind has material to work with.

Part of what I need is time. Another part is variety of activity. Which is what I think the walk was supposed to accomplish.

Anyway, I guess I could better tend to this blog.

Perhaps I will make that one of my projects.

Tell Them What They've Won...

So, I got to validate my "win" on Nanowrimo. And I won my first Nanowrimo!
Aside from having the novel, I do feel a greater degree of comfort in knowing that I can write fiction and do a decent job of it, a job that "would not make someone vomit" to quote Nanowrimo creator Chris Baty. And then some. I think that the prose I have written would actually be salvageable in some form, if I chose to do so.

In the mean time, I am determined to not let the new-found confidence erode. If I keep writing, I should improve? Right?

I don't know. I think of writing in terms of jogging. When I had a healthy (5 miles, 4x/week) exercise routine, I felt brilliant. Never mind the 8-10 minute times I think I was putting up. I was no athlete compared to Olympic runners or even compared to the H.S. track kid I tutored (according to him). But I was doing it.

Persistence may never turn me into a Faulkner, but it will, I am confident, pay off. If I get better at writing and have fun doing it, I win. If I get published, I win bigger. If, by some slim chance, I evidence a degree of mastery, I win bigger still.

In any case, I am glad I participated. That will be enough for now.

The Next Thing

I have already started working. For this story--I intend it to be a short story--I will be outlining more, planning more. I want to know who the people are who have arrived on my frozen little world, and why. More importantly, I want to discover from this information what sort of conflict they will experience, and whether it will be of their own making or caused by something else. Anyway, while this completed novel cools, I find myself inspired to keep writing, in the vague hope that practice makes , if not perfect, then better.

The End

Today at around 4:30, if memory serves, I hit 50,020 words and wrote the last sentence of my first draft of "Nine-Pins."

I have realized a while ago that the title of my novel has grown increasingly inadequate, since the image of the game has nothing to do with the novel any longer. I have left it alone, for now, because it is the flag under which I set sail, and I would hate to change colors at the last minute.

I made a 9000 or so word push to the finish today. I felt the need to finish. I had an ending in mind, and the aftermath of that ending made the last 2000-3000 words of the book.

As to whether the experience has been satisfying, I have to answer 'yes.' Learning how to sustain a novel over ninety-one pages and remember to incorporate at least something of who the characters are, who they were, where they are physically (i.e. the setting) and internally, is a dynamic undertaking.

Some of this tale, I tried to plot out in advance. I have to confess I did not look much at that outline after writing the first few days. After the first week, I set the novel outline aside, and hit a second and third week where I had to figure out who these people really are. The mess of a situation that I had thought of for my characters only carried me through the first week.

That week was largely automatic, pre-programmed, and necessary to establish what had happened. When my characters had long dialogues about what they were doing, or long internal monologues about what to do next, I realized that I was discovery writing and that I would have to heavily edit the middle section of my book as a result.

I was listening to the characters, not in some odd way where I actually believed that my characters were real, but in the sense that I was listening to what I had to say about who they were, what they wanted, what they would and would not do.

My friend pointed out that the characters do whatever I want them to do. That, I believe, was the problem that occupied me for the better part of the first two and a half weeks. It helped me immensely to let the characters discuss with each other what they knew, what they thought about that information, and what they planned to do about it. Otherwise, the possibilities were literally endless. I had to decide who these people were.

A large part of that was making them do things, I suppose, but it was a balance between moving the plot and characters in a direction and letting them move around and try to figure out what they were doing.

In any case, some surprises came out of the writing process, but these surprises also fit the book well. Even the ending of the book, where one of the characters is celebrating a birthday caught me off-guard, but fit with the ending I had planned. Because I had devised an idea of where I wanted to end up, my writing did the rest. I found ways to arrive there, even though the ways were not the ways I had originally planned.

I had latitude within a bigger structure to move around and arrive where I needed to.

Yesterday, on the eve of finishing, I realized how I would miss the process of writing, and how I wanted to continue it. Now, after having written over 9000 words today, I think I will step away from the keyboard for a few days.

However, like with practicing a musical instrument, a sport, or any other skilled activity, I do not want to stay away too long for fear of losing touch, getting out of practice. I do not want to return to this current novel right away.

I think moving to something radically different will allow my mind to decompress, to invent different characters.

The dark side of finishing today was the concept of word wars. I did want to race my friends to the finish, but not in an ugly way. We declared a sort of understanding that the competition was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. I have a cool, if scattered, writing group.

Thanks to my two active friends. I would not have finished without a lot of encouragement and advice about what works for them.

I'll be back to this blog on a weekly basis, if anyone is reading it. It helps to think about what I did and am doing while writing.

This is a log of that.

Anyway, signing off. Thanks for reading.

Asking Intelligent Questions

I have read in numerous books about strategies for character behavior.

James Frey suggests making a list of possible behaviors that characters could take when faced with any given dilemma.

Noah Lukeman writes about writing down situations that would set a character up for a "peak" situation or a really negative experience.

The folks at "Writing Excuses" most recently discuss where authors get their ideas, proposing that asking the right questions about fiction.

As a teacher, I teach students strategies for reading, specifically what sort of questions they should be asking about what they are reading. I find that my questions as an experienced reader are fundamentally different than the questions my students ask.

Every author I have encountered who dispenses writing advice says to read voluminously.

I have heard from some NaNoWriMo friends that they do not know how to get their story where they want it to go or that the story has veered off in a direction different from what they expected, perhaps even different from what they had hoped. I am confident they will keep on track.

If I can play diagnostician of my NaNo experience so far, I have had trouble identifying exactly who my characters are. If I knew this more precisely, I would know what was within the characters' range of possible behaviors that they might to. Because I am still discovering who these people I have brought to the page are, I am not sure what they are capable of. Could she run a marathon, could he bring himself to quit his job, and so on.

For some of my characters, I know the answers to these questions.

So, to summarize, there is knowledge about my characters and then there is knowledge about technique.

Technical knowledge is something that can be gleaned from other reading. This is the sort of thing that it is too little too late to do a whole lot about during NaNoWriMo. Chris Batty has suggested watching a T.V. show or movie and taking note of the pacing, dialogue, and plot revelations during the show and seeing if you can apply this to your novel. I suppose this is as concise of a crash course in technique that you can get. Well, that and the earlier posts in this blog.

I am reading Lord of the Flies and Out of the Silent Planet currently during NaNoWriMo. So far my novel has not turned into either of those books, but it is a fascinating exercise to read a novel with the eyes of a novelist, specifically.

Anyway,

I have an hour to go during which I would like to shower and write about 1000 words. We'll see which wins the upper hand.

Sins of Ommission

Follower/Reader feedback session--particularly if you are currently novel-writing.

I confess to the following chronic problems that I discovered while speed-writing for NaNoWriMo:

I leave out the setting too much, especially during word-sprints.
Characters engage in routine actions, such as sipping coffee, to complement their conversations.
My understanding of characters is developing as I write, rather than the scenario where I already know who these people are.

Hazy settings, incomplete character sketches, uneven dialogue. I feel like Nietzsche's quote about poets is a good approximation of what I have (gleefully) done: "And which of us poets has not adulterated [rendered impure, bastardized] his wine? Some poisonous mishmash has gone on in our cellars."

Nietzsche continues:
"[Poets] are to me not pure enough. They cloud all their waters that these might appear deep."

I am learning how to make this work. It is exciting. I can see what will need to change and have some inkling of how my scenes and characters will need to be fleshed out before they actually have the depth I desire.

Nietzsche might approve of one thing, the fact that I am learning by trying: "trying and questioning has been all my progress [lit. 'going']:- and truly one must learn to answer to such questioning."

My trip to NaNo-land has been exploratory and the discoveries have been as giddy as the realizations about how much I must hone my craft have been sobering. I leave the honing for another time. Someone should start NaNoReMo (Revision Month). I wonder how many people could face their creation come January. For me, that has been the ultimate goal.

In November, I plan to have a blast making that poison mishmash in the basement of my mind. But eventually, I want to show others what I have done without being accused of simply muddying my waters to appear deep. NaNoReMo seems an important continuation of what I started in NaNoWriMo. Revising my creation says to me that I was not in it for the short sprint, just to say that I technically wrote a novel and tick it off a bucket list (though there is not a thing wrong with that).

Even if this novel is not salvageable, eventually, I hope to write one that is. When I do, I intend to salvage it, taking what I learned during the poisonous mishmash stage and applying it to creating a work of art. My little NaNo group keeps me going, and I hope that, when we arrive at 50,000, we'll coast for a month on our laurels, and then look at our writing with a critical eye. Whatever happens, I will come away from writing with a better appreciation of what goes into novel-writing.

Outlining: Actually Telling A Story

I know that NaNoWriMo is characteristically a fly-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants affair.

This has been a struggle for me from the first time I heard of it.

Oh, I do understand that the goal is not quality but quantity. However, my struggle is wondering if having little clue where I am headed will help me complete the novel in a month's time.

Today I broke down and started an outline, though it pained me to commit it to paper. All the possibilities that fell away the moment my plot began to take shape, all the ideas that would not work, all the requirements of characters and their situations--the outline quickly dictated the opening of my book and excluded some possibilities.

This is good.

It indicates to me that I have some sense of who my characters are and what they would or would not do. The outline is quite skeletal, only a page long, but there are between six and twelve scenes on that page, depending on how I divide them.

I wonder how many pages that will take up. I could imagine a novel developing out of another several scenes, and I wonder if all the characters I have will even play as large a role as I had expected.

The setting has already been shaken up, the ages of some characters lowered or raised based on who they have shown themselves to be in this scant outline.

And some challenges of my novel have become readily apparent. For most of my characters, I can imagine what they might be like. Others are more complicated and I feel the need to actually write them to discover their identity.

Already this endeavor seems to have taken on weight and form. It seems fun, but also like a lot of hard work.

I See You (But Not Like Those Giant, Blue Cat-People Mean)

That's right. I do not mean to welcome you to The People. Sorry. Unless by "The People" you mean persons who read my blog, in which case, welcome.

What I am struggling with is who will be the eyes, ears, nose, and other senses of my novel.

I could stick my reader in the head of one character via first or third person narration and let them experience the world of my novel via that one character. Or, I could bounce at will among heads. I am confident that you could find a discussion of viewpoint in any number of texts that I have mentioned, or even in the Writing Excuses podcast.

My point is more elementary than that. Who is the best person/ are the best people to tell the tale.

If your main character is insane, they might not be the best choice, unless you want your narrative to sound like a stream-of-consciousness nightmare:

I woke up and the walls floated and I floated in the walls and the bed was a bloated shadow floating below and everything floated the cat ate my eyes and the dog ran away with my tongue I cannot talk and I hear the ants in the walls and they singaboutmedyingandIhatemysocks--they itch so much.

I have seen narratives that read like this, only more skillfully polished and thus more convoluted and difficult. I would not want to write like that for 300 pages, let alone read about it for that same length.

Now, some mentally unbalanced or just plain evil characters are not so hard to read, but just as unsavory. If you had to live inside the mind of Jigsaw, Hannibal the Cannibal, or a Demon (like C.S. Lewis' Screwtape) for 300 pages, would you have a fun time or would you hate writing after about two days.

If you're writing aliens, do you do any service by relaying the directives of the hive mind as narrative:

Eat people. Plant alien spawn. Kill.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Would it not be more fun to see through the eyes of the hunted:

The clatter of scythe-claws echoed as my finger itched on the trigger. Ceiling, walls, or floor. No way to be sure. I flicked on my night-vision with the barest thought. That mouth and those teeth--no one told me hell existed on 3.2.20011, Periphery World.

Functionally, the aliens might be the focus of the whole narrative, but the story is better told by the humans.

Part of the fun of fiction is that readers get to live in the head of people or things that they never would, like a dog, an alien, a human-animal hybrid, provided they don't sparkle (Vampire, Werewolf, genetic mutation like Dren from that creepy movie I don't want to watch).

I am just suggesting that writer's need to be conscious of why they pick certain characters as viewpoint characters.

I always thought it would have been fascinating to get inside the head of Gandalf or Dumbledore, Sauron or Voldemort. To my recollection, it never happened.

Why?

If someone is very smart, wicked, good, or even otherworldly, the illusion of their otherworldiness, extreme wickedness, intelligence, or goodness is preserved for some authors by seldom seeing the world through their eyes.

The more alien the character (be he or she god or devil), better this character be known by actions and words through the eyes of someone else.

If your fascinating central character is an enigma in some way, picking a side character to observe them for much of the novel might be an appropriate choice.

What about picking among mere mortals. If you followed my previous post, you may have gleaned the impression that no fictional character in a main role is entirely unexceptional. Han Solo may have not had the force, but he was quick with words and his blaster and had the resilience to withstand torture. He exhibited a rather physical strength, while Luke's battle was rather metaphysical and somewhat mystical.

Three quick guidelines before I end:

1. Pick the people who are going to be around.

If someone is not there to see an event, they can't know that it happened. I want my viewpoint characters to actually have a life and be where the action is. Your toddler viewpoint character would not be at the board meeting.

2. Pick the people who would/would not get what's happening.

If you want your characters to understand, partially understand, or not understand events, then that will dictate who is narrating. A murderer might understand exactly why he killed his victim. A family member of the victim might be too distraught to care or too vengeful to see the facts for what they are. A detective would see the killer's point of entry into the room, the way the victim died, the possible motives for the killing, etc. Is it more important that the reader grasp the emotional impact of the scene? Then pick the bereaved family member. Is it more important that the reader understand the facts of the crime? Pick the detective. Is it more important that the reader understand the motive behind the crime? Pick the murderer. Everyone that is a viewpoint character should have a stake in what is happening, in my opinion.

3. Pick someone who would actually be there.

If your female lead is crying in front of a mirror in a work restroom, her male boss will not likely walk in and ask what's wrong unless he wants a lawsuit. Grandma likely won't be at the Soundgarden concert. An avowed atheist will not enter a church under most circumstances. If a scene is happening somewhere, make sure your viewpoint character has a believable reason/excuse for being there. Anyway, there are a few days left to pick the person whose head I will start in. Whoever it is, I better know them well.

Writing in a Nutshell (The Info-Dump)

An information dump is basically a lot of info that the author thinks the reader needs to know quickly in order to advance the novel. In this case, I have compiled a lot of information that I hope will be useful to me as a writer and to others. In this instance, I am an archivist-meets-commentator. Info-dumps, when handled poorly, stall and ruin one's writing. I will try to handle this one well.

Writing Excuses is a podcast I have come to late, but it meshes well with all the writing advice I have heard or read, and these people are actually published. Its advantages are that most of us are better at digesting speech in small quantities than 300 page books on writing. This entry of my blog attempts to make a digestible chunk of advice to us all on writing by summarizing content from various sources.

How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James Frey is a book about writing what Frey terms the Dramatic Novel (as opposed to a literary novel, which in Frey's mind does not necessarily follow conventions of snappy, engaging prose). Frey is a novelist who covers characterization, dialogue, and escalating conflict manifested in various areas of novel writing.

Noah Lukeman is a literary agent. I have read The First Five Pages, A Dash of Style, and The Plot Thickens. Some of them more than once. I have certainly skimmed all of them repeatedly for information.

Out of this brew and my own experience as a reader, I hope to distill advice. The reason I bring myself into this mix is that I feel that to do anything less is plagiarism. If I have no take on the material, I am simply stealing intellectual property without processing any of it.

In short, this represents what academia and wikipedia alike refer to as independent research, the connotation of which is that such research is suspect until scrutinized by a jury of peers. Since I have an aggregate of one reader so far, I suppose the jury of my peers is rather small. Nonetheless, I persist. Scrutiny for this material means trying it out. Trying it out means National Novel Writing Month, in this case.

First off, characterization.

Characterization

Characters are what form the foundation of a novel. Most writers, readers, and critics agree that if characters in a work of fiction are compelling, they reward the reader and the author with compelling actions. Such characters are like the friend one always wants at the party because the person lends a flow and flash to just sitting around the living room.

Such characters do not go quietly into the night when faced with a problem. They may explode or implode brilliantly, or persist. Readers do not care about characters folding laundry (as I am going to go do).

...

Now, as tempting as it is (after folding laundry, calling about a job prospect, writing a cover letter and revising a resume, contemplating lunch, and remembering that I still have more laundry to fold) to wax eloquent about how that ellipsis contained all the events of the last hour and a half, and how I would not use this piece of punctuation to represent such a break in a formal novel, I will continue to discuss characterization (after another laundry-folding interlude).

Readers do not care about characters folding laundry unless it advances the plot, I should say. If a person in on the brink of madness because of the monotony of folding laundry, then each pair of underwear, each bed sheet and towel put in the machine under the watchful eye of a hated manager is riveting because the reader has access to the inner life of the character, not because the act of washing and drying laundry is riveting.

Frey points out that details about a character should relate to how the character will deal with the central conflicts of the novel. If the character is going to snap at his boss, terrorize his family, or perhaps find a sympathetic love interest from a rival laundry service as a result of his work, the reader may care about what the character's job reveals about him.

Frey applies this idea to flashbacks. Readers, in his opinion, care about your interesting characters as they are, not as they were when they liked Barbie or toy soldiers at age 4. If they are going to pick up a gun because they played with soldiers and you can make this connection explicit in their thinking, then toy soldiers are relevant. If she will never marry unless she finds a shallow, handsome Ken, then all those hours spent playing Barbie are meaningful. If you think a serious novel would never have a toy representative of its theme and conflict, look no further than Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.

Not all characters should be as complex as your main characters. Like the people that appear driving, delivering mail, and inhabiting the world of The Truman Show, some characters only need appear in your work. No depth necessary to the man who is going to hold the door for your main character to walk through into the bank. Now, this character may have an interesting trait, say a quick tongue (i.e. Run, Lola Run), but that's it. He is fairly one-sided. And that's o.k..

Many authors of books/podcasts on writing refer with derision to the "scream." The (usually) female character in a horror movie who is too dumb to turn around and run like h-e-double-hockey-sticks (and is about as cliche as "h-e-double-hockey-sticks"). Even the Most Interesting Man in the World commercial for Halloween makes fun of this character.

Why. Because this character is unbelievably stupid. The moment a normal person hears creaking from the attic accompanied by screams and groans, they may call the police or the priest (depending on what they believe is going on upstairs), but they won't walk in unarmed and unaccompanied without sufficient cause or motivation.

If I put the woman's husband in the room with a killer monster and the nearest police station 25 miles down the road, she might call the police first, then enter the room to face her potential death and try to prevent that of her beloved husband.

I just complicated her motivation, though. Something is actually at stake for her. She won't walk away. If she is merely curious, then nothing is compelling her to enter the attic, while everything else about the situation would compel her to run away.

The modified scream is in conflict with the desire of the monster to eat her husband. She wants to save her husband from bloody dismemberment and being eaten.

Now, conflicts can occur between more serious characters. Say several friends are applying for the same job. They all enjoy hanging out, have been best friends like their parents before them. All the sudden, they want the same thing and compete.

Or, imagine two dating people that want different things: he wants no kids and is happy dating, but she wants 7 kids and marriage. All their friends tell them they are the perfect couple and their families are hinting strongly that they aren't getting any younger. You have lots of conflict and reasons why at least one of the characters won't walk away from it all. She needs him to marry; he wants to be with her because she is a fun person to be with. Life would be boring without her. Is that enough to drive him to marry, or not?

Characters that want the same or different things can compete and conflict.

Conflict

What does conflict look like. As a departure point, I lean again on Frey, who claims that conflict is escalating tension played out in the attack-counterattack interactions of characters.

Conflict reveals what characters are like. If Dorothy and company hadn't gone up against the Wicked Witch, Scarecrow would not have found his brains, nor the Cowardly Lion his courage, nor the Tin Man his heart, nor Dorothy her home, nor Toto his faithfulness to Dorothy. What, after all, are courage, intelligence, heart, and faithfulness without concrete circumstances in which to they are demonstrated. They are nonsense words. But, when we see them in action, we see what makes up the abstraction "home" for Dorothy. The fact that the characters in Oz have real-world equivalents that Dorothy identifies on and around her family farm indicates that in real life, courage, intelligence, faithfulness, and heart are hidden in ordinary people. Lukeman and Frey both reference the concept that a story should have an identifiable premise. For the Wizard of Oz, I believe the premise is the following: leaving home leads to a better understanding of what the virtues of home are.

Lukeman expands this idea and claims that characters have a premise or journey. Dorothy, in my example, moves from naivete to understanding, as do some of the characters around her. Parallel or inverted journeys add depth to a work when used well, according to Lukeman.

Dorothy's transformation (journey) as a character both mirrors the journeys of her friends and contrasts with them. In order for Dorothy to find home, she must leave Oz, leave her friends. In order for her friends to find themselves and what they desire most, they must reunite with Dorothy by rescuing her from the Wicked Witch. All the characters seek to find their hearts' desires and so they travel together to see the Wizard of Oz. Apparently, they have a united purpose. Ultimately, however, there is no such thing as a Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz. There are only Witches, good or bad, that influence the characters' journeys. The characters journeys lead to the (potentially) moving conclusion where Dorothy has journeyed as far as she can with her friends.

In order to understand the attack-counterattack of characters, read Frey's book. I will not discuss it here since he does a much better job of illuminating what he meant by conflict, particularly in dialogue. My main ambition here was to clarify what I feel is an important technique that stems from Frey's and Lukeman's observations, that of characters showing the reader/viewer who they are and who they are becoming by what they do.

I had intended to discuss dialogue, suspense, and viewpoint in this post, but I feel I have taxed myself in writing this and thus my readers will probably need to digest this.

For writing purposes, I apply the principle to writing advice that I do to the rules of language or the rules of a board game: I learn them and review them until they are internalized.

Think of any type of game (card, video, board, strategy, sport) that you know how to play well. If you thought about it, you could probably explain how to play the game. But knowing is different than explaining. When you know how to play the game, you have the rules inside you. Similar to knowing how to speak your native language. You know how to speak it without hauling out a grammar book and diagramming the sentence you are about to say.

You speak your native language all the time. So what.

Exactly. Your mind was geared toward learning the rules of speaking and the formation of sounds of your native language and did so almost automatically, barring certain language learning difficulties. Writing and spelling, however are not automatically learned. Soon, however, a person can internalize the basics of writing and spelling in their native language with appropriate training.

Learning a skill and becoming masterful at it takes time. I will not enter into the debate about whether genius is created or born. I told my English students that writing well can be learned, and I guess I will end with that. Practice writing, learn about how to write well, and spend time actually writing and you will learn how to write. Writing can be learned. If you remove one of these components, I believe your writing will suffer.

By all means, fulfill your obligations. Do not risk your livelihood and happiness, no matter how many zany, depressed-yet-successful, impoverished authors your friends cite as role models. I will say that every writing book I have read, without fail, has claimed that every human being has some time to pursue the activities that are important to them. Lukeman cites a person who wrote on toilet paper in prison. Listen to the Writing Excuses podcast to hear them address excuses.

I'm done for now. Spent. If you want inspiration or advice, read the books, listen to the podcasts.

The Labyrinthine Ways

A mostly accurate account of the labyrinthine ways of my own mind when coming up with my idea:

I set out to write a novel--or, rather my friend did.

Though I do not follow him into every pursuit, he has been my friend for a long time, and I generally assume that if he is into something, it's worth a good, long look.

We brainstormed out loud about his novel, which of course led to making fun of the ill-fated My Generation. I now have survivor guilt about this--mocking a doomed TV show, it turns out, is like poking fun at the Crocodile Hunter's animal antics only to have him die within days of one doing so (not that I actually did that, or anything. Afterward, I simply noted the sheer weirdness of being killed by a freak incident tangentially related to one's line of work. What a way to go. Rest well, Mr. Irwin.).

If I believed in ill-omens, a doomed T.V. show, even in mockery, being the beginning of two novel ideas would be one such omen.

In any case, I decided later that I would pick an idea that interested me, as my friend had done. His guiding question: would making a different life choice result in a different outcome, or is his main character hopelessly determined.

I took the only logical course of action: I dug deep through the permafrost layer that separates my adulthood from my childhood and unearthed some things that freaked me out as a child. Margaret Hamilton, as one columnist in a Chicago newspaper noted, has a creepy power, and starred in my most memorable childhood nightmare. But, Witches, Wizards, and Sparkly Vampires (Oh my!) have well outlived their welcome on the recent literary scene.

Then I thought of Rip Van Winkle and the odd mountain spirits playing nine-pins and creating thunder in the valley. As a child, I always imagined, sacrilegiously and apocryphally, God and the angels and possibly St. Peter having a round of bowling in the clouds. Sometimes it was Zeus and the occupants of Olympus. Zeus has this habit of smiting people, in my mind, and thus, the bowling in the mountains would be bowling for people-- gods "kill us for their sport," I reasoned.

Muttering about Percy Jackson and Riordan's corner on the Olympic gods, casting a baleful glance at American Gods, and wishing vaguely I was Dan Simmons, I soldiered on.

No one has the corner on murder. Sure Agatha Christie is the "Queen of Crime" and all, but I never liked how her novels were impossible to guess the conclusion of, simply because of a piece of data the detective had that the reader was never privy to. Or, at least that's how I remember things. I read her and Sherlock Holmes mysteries when I was a kid. I also recalled the first time I noticed a gaping hole in the reasoning of an Encyclopedia Brown mystery, where the outcome was not proven by the lack of something for a key to jingle against in the perpetrator's pocket.

Murder mystery I could write. "Nine-pins" from "Rip Van Winkle" stuck in my head. I had a working title and a couple bones of a plot after some brief internet research about the game of nine-pins.

Then, I listened to Writing Excuses' podcast about creating suspense, and I realized how I was on to something potentially good.

Next, I hauled out all my writing books ans started combing them for content. I had already read No Plot? No Problem! to the point where I was forbidden to read further, and so I picked up How to Write a Damn Good Novel and almost everything Noah Lukeman wrote about writing.

I have a character list and the daunting task of coming up with a believable murderer. He's a secret, for now, even to me.

Metafiction and Other Big Words

"Fiction is always about fiction"--so says John Barth, an author who highlighted the artifice of his writing by being self aware of its nature as fiction. For my novel, this seems to be true in ways that I will detail in the next blog. For now, this quote is here because this blog is about fiction, specifically my attempt to write a novel in one month.

(Although I did link wikipedia on Barth, I have done my own independent research about Barth, so fear not, loyal reader.)

Enough about Barth. This is about me, after all--idiosyncratic tendencies on display as I portray the descent into novel writing and wonder idly whether it mirrors the descent into a temporary madness.

When Stephen King wrote, "Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not," I cannot help but feel that this is an indictment of activities like National Novel Writing Month.

The first guiding observation this blog: I already am a writer. I do not need NaNoWriMo to make me a writer.

I have written seminar papers, a thesis, a capstone project, journals, and a hopelessly flawed manuscript that was my first attempt at a novel.

So, why do it?

The second guiding observation of this blog: Having a deadline helps.

Chris Baty says it in No Plot? No Problem!.

It is true. I had a year to finish my thesis; I did it. I had a semester to write almost every other paper in undergraduate, and I completed them.

The third guiding observation of this blog: Writing rewards the hard-worker.

That thesis nearly killed me. Semester papers had me wringing my hands and pulling my hair, and my ruined novel depressed the daylights out of me. Its corpse is sitting in a box in my living room, and I am slowly getting the heart to throw it out page by painful page. Every once in a while, I see a page I like something about, and I keep that.

The fourth guiding observation of this blog: Writing rewards the reader.

Don't know what it's like to be a murderer--neither do I. (If you do, it's best you keep that to yourself and the requisite authorities.) But I bet some hundred thousand authors (and more) have written books about it--all kinds of books: fiction, nonfiction, plays, (auto-)biography, psychology textbooks, and more.

Not only do I gain a wealth of info from reading books, but I also subconsciously imbibe good writing habits (and a few bad ones that made it to press).

The fifth guiding observation of this blog: Having a group helps.

Writing in a group or even with blog followers (shameless plug) makes for some accountability to someone. If I have people waiting for me to finish, even if they do not read the outcome of my work of one month, I will more likely finish.

About the blog title:

A glance at the title may cause you to write this blog off as a depressing slog through four weeks of drudgery that produce a manuscript that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (with deep-felt apologies to Thomas Hobbes, whom I also knew of prior and external to Wikipedia).

You would be wrong.

I am widely (some have even gone so far as to say "well") read about the craft, theory, and criticism of writing.

My writing teacher compared my writing style to that of William Faulkner (which I am not so vain to think that he meant that I was anywhere nearly so talented as Faulkner; rather, I believer he meant that I write dense descriptive prose). However, he did praise my writing. Having written and been published himself, I suppose that means something.

I named this blog "Foolish Ambition" because I believe writing a novel in a month is a foolish ambition. Yet, I also believe that it is one ambition that I will succeed at. And that is that.