(Mis)Adventures in writing

We’re coming up on the end of the month, so it’s time for an honest check-in about NaNoWriMo, the good, the bad, and the ugly, in reverse order:

The ugly: I spent a lot of this month realizing what wasn’t working, setting aside what I’d written, and starting over, which means I’ve gone through five complete revisions of chapter one and written what probably amounts to 15,000 words in total without making a ton of “real” progress. Some highlights from this process include making an excel spreadsheet of every plot and character element in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” comparing it to my story, realizing several of my characters have no motivation for their actions in key scenes, and revising accordingly, gender-swapping my main character, fleshing out that character’s backstory, and realizing her story needs to start totally differently than her brother’s did, which also allows me to introduce the villain and the main plot threads in the first scene, and realizing that I had the wrong stakes for the story’s climax. That’s kind of a lot, and figuring it out was even messier and more piecemeal than it appears here. Not to mention, I’m probably not done figuring everything out yet.

The bad: I got sidetracked by helping other people with urgent projects. When my own creative work isn’t going well, it’s hard for me to take it seriously. It’s easier to help someone else and feel competent, even essential, rather than sit and stew in my own frustrated creativity, to respect my writing time and demand others respect it as well.

The good: I figured out some important storytelling techniques that will help me in the long run. I took a story I’ve been holding on to since I was 19 and figured out what bits are really essential to the story I need to tell and which are not. I haven’t written every day, I’ve maybe written a third of the days, but the writing days have often meant ten hours or more working on my story, and even the days that I wouldn’t count as writing days were days when my last thought before I went to bed and my first thought when I woke up were about how to make my story better.

So. NaNoWriMo was both a success and a failure: I got back to the page, I did a ton of work on my story, and I have almost no usable writing to show for it. Essentially I’m starting over from scratch and I’m going to try to write this as a full-length novel through August and September, recognizing that school and the High Holidays are probably going to complicate that timetable. I’m probably going to use Nanowrimo’s interface to keep track of my writing. Onward…

Where are we going in this handbasket?

My friend Betsy said something yesterday that blew my mind. (Content warning for people who really can’t handle depressing Covid scenarios right now.)

We know that the virus mutates quickly, and we’re already seeing regional strains. However, we don’t yet know whether previous exposure or vaccines to one type will protect against other types. This could mean that Covid pushes people to become more insular: we would interact with people in our local bubble but avoid outsiders. My writerly brain went instantly to the world-building implications: Communities would become more self-sufficient and inter-generational, with a resurgence of regional food, accents, arts, some people telecommuting, but a lot of needs taken care of within the local community. (Perhaps akin to the world of Marge Piercy’s “He, She and It.”) Cities would go back to their medieval roots: the place where people go to escape limitations and succeed beyond the possibilities of their home communities, but with a far higher death rate than the countryside.

Betsy, though, reminded me of the social justice implications: that if people become more suspicious of/distant from those outside their little bubbles, it will be harder to muster empathy for others or be willing to risk ourselves to stand up for those who are not in our own groups. The protests for black lives, the fight for indigenous rights, the need to protect refugees, to mitigate the damage we’ve done to the environment, we’ve seen in recent weeks how urgently needed these things are and how doable they are even in the age of Covid. We can’t let those muscles atrophy even if the new normal looks radically different from what came before.

Nanowrimo check-in

One week in, I’ve realized that I need to completely overhaul my main character and the arcs for the supporting characters as well, which means A, I’ve spent at least 12 hours of intense work on behind-the-scenes stuff which doesn’t actually add to my word count and B, most of what I’ve already written has to be tossed as I start over fresh. It’s incredibly frustrating, particularly during a month when I feel this external pressure to make forward progress at a particular clip. But I also think this will make the story work in ways it wasn’t coming together before. And I want to be honest with you guys about where I am instead of pretending everything’s going swimmingly.

So that’s where I am: working hard, feeling good about where I’m going, way behind on my word count but in it for the long haul, however long it takes. And feeling grateful to my friend Trai Cartwright for reminding me that a good manuscript requires a ton of writing that will never show up in the finished product, because that’s how you get to the good stuff.