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.