the whinge stops here

In an effort to steamroll through my novel-block, I pledge to write 5000 words a day for thirty days. On the thirty-first day I'll be flying back to Canada, at which point I'll at least have... something, if not a finished draft. I will apply out-of-order scenes and scene rewrites toward the word count as long as work is done. Hopefully a pace like that will prompt me to just get the crud out instead of fretting over every word choice, but we'll see.

whinge

Last week I finished a book titled Watch Your Mouth, which is... I wouldn't call it experimental per se, but it adopts the conceit of being an opera told in book form. I found this both charming and irritating at various points in the telling (I do not need to be told what the instrumentals are every time a character exits the room, thanks). It was really just a charming and irritating book in general. Anyway, the thing ends with all the major characters getting messily slaughtered by a giant golem, and I thought, man--I would love to do that to all the characters in my thesis. Not at the end of the book, but right now. Eat clay and die, and never trouble me again.

I really hate novels.

Yes, I've spent all summer in an air conditioned house eating pâté from a silver spoon and fretting about words on a page no one's ever going to see. My life is so hard.

in solitary

Interesting post on Strictly Writing this morning about writing commercially versus writing personally:

http://strictlywriting.blogspot.com/2009/06/dont-tell-me-to-write-for-fun.html

What stood out to me was this bit --

For me, things are better if shared. When my husband is out I find I cannot watch a film. I cannot cook a meal. It’s channel-surfing and snacks on the sofa – alone. And that’s how satisfying I would find it to write a story and never show it to the world.

Whoa, that is so not me. All my hobbies are solitary. I actually get uncomfortable watching movies and TV with other people; I usually hoard all the DVDs in my room for privacy or wait for my roommates/family to take a vacation before I venture out to use the good stuff in the living room. And I'm rarely happier than when I'm holed up doing something by myself. I wonder if that's related to my avoidance of submitting things. Hmm, writing as a social activity... who knew?

Internet is different, of course, for whatever reason. Also sporting events. Happy to gang up for those. Weird.

scattershot

A few weeks ago, I heard an interesting story from the new staff of PRISM, which is the literary magazine run out of my grad program. Every year, the magazine runs contests in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. This one dude, when notified that his entry had won second place in the poetry contest, huffily wrote back declining second place--the runner-up award wasn't enough money and he wanted to be free to shop the poem elsewhere. Apparently this guy bases his entire submission process around contests and maximizing the returns he gets from them. Pretty mercenary (if not dick) of him, but it also makes a bit of sense. And it made room for someone further down the list, so... good?

In any case, this tale inserted the idea of contests into my head. While I don't plan to go around balking at anyone who doesn't leap at the chance to throw money at me, I think it might be an interesting place to start my foray into literary rags. I do keep hearing how the majority of magazine contest submissions are unpublishable garbage, so odds of making the shortlist are high for anyone with a modicum of objective self-judgment. I think I have that...

So I've identified and vetted eight content-appropriate contests with deadlines in June, and the plan is to enter them all. I doubt I'll have enough material prepared by then to actually enter every one, but setting the bar high might mean I'll get to some. A few. More than zero.

In an effort to fill out my submission pool, I dug into my old computer and took a look at some of the stuff I did during my undergrad... the idea being that I could just grind these old drafts through the sausage-maker of my new brilliance and come up with something acceptable. Honestly, I'm kind of astounded at how different this undergrad stuff is from what I'm doing now--so spare, so minimalist, so not-in-first-person-full-of-ponderous-hand-wringing. I wouldn't say it's better, necessarily, but I think it takes a better approach. Comes from a better place. I think I'll enjoy revising these for the final product that will come out, but I'll probably also spend a lot of time whinging and wondering where that "better approach" went to in my time off school.

half the battle

So first I was like: okay, I'm gonna get over myself and start submitting things this summer.

And then I was like: oh wait, I don't have anything finished.

Write first, then submit. Is that how it works?

FW fatigue

I belong to the forum at GameFAQs, a site for video game enthusiasts where probably 95% of the membership falls between the ages of 14 and 17. The forum is divided into hundreds of subforums, some for general interest stuff like movies, TV, and, yes, books, literature, and writing. I'm both surprised and not by the fact that more intelligent and thought-provoking discussion goes on there in a day than has come up on fantasy-writers.org in the past few months. It's not a genre thing, either--most of the members there are fantasy fans, being gamers, and there's a lot of interesting discussion of classic and contemporary speculative fiction.

It seems like a lot of FW members are satisfied posting mostly (or in some cases exclusively) in pursuit of silly social threads and other non-writing-related things. And then there's this persistent undercurrent of willful incuriousness, the rejection of "elitist academia" and such that always rubs me the wrong way. I don't know why it bothers me so much. It's not like any of it really affects me--how other people choose to approach writing has no bearing on mine, and if the social threads are how people like to have fun, I should just be cool with that and ignore it, right? But over the past few weeks I have been dangerously close to being driven away by the volume of it all... moreso than usual. Honestly, if it weren't for the handful of people there I really like (and my modly responsibilities), I'd have probably wandered away long ago. Sigh.

is a puzzlement

I had a meeting with my fiction instructor today, just to shoot the shit at the end of term because we're all supposed to meet with her at least once. This may have been a bad scheduling decision on my part, because it is the last week of class, which means she is quite busy. I got excused a few times because she had to take phone calls--nobody's fault but mine for waiting on this so long. It was pretty comical to pop back into the student lounge every ten minutes, with the same people sitting around wondering what the heck I was doing.

The reason I held off on meeting with her was because I have this nasty tendency to try and turn people into my therapists when I start talking about my writing (or particularly my approach to writing). Nearly all of the problems I run into with writing have nothing to do with the work and everything to do with where my head is and the thought process that comes from that, so this is an inevitable thing. Point is I didn't want to go there with my instructor, because it shouldn't be her job to shoulder my pathos, and I didn't want to give her the [unfortunately correct] impression that I'm a whiner.

Well, I can't hold off talking about myself for long--it's one of my many charms--so after some hemming and hawing it came out anyway. I opened with the fact that I don't like my writing and haven't for many years, went on to the business about being all words and no ideas, and finally ended up at the idea that I still write like a fourteen-year-old. A prosy and knowledgeable fourteen-year-old, maybe, but still in that adolescent zone in terms of character, tone, and thematic elements.

And finally, finally someone saw where I was coming from with regards to my own work.

I am so tired of my own opinion of my stuff being dismissed by my classmates. Just because I'm hyper-critical doesn't mean my feelings don't count, though many students in the program would have me believe that this is so. They wouldn't like it if I told them their reading of their work was wrong, so why should I be treated any differently? And more than that, it's nice to know that I'm not crazy and that my concerns about my writing have merit in the eyes of someone experienced. I would much rather have my judgment be praised than my writing.

She got it. She saw what I was talking about in my work. I felt so vindicated.

She asked me, sensibly, why I got into writing as a pursuit in the first place if I'm so unhappy with it. The only answer I could come up with at the time was that I was a snobby preteen with an entitlement complex. I thought I was the most brilliant person on Earth, so of course I should be the youngest blockbuster novelist ever, and people have been padding my ego on it since then so I just kept on. Writing to satisfy that urge to be a genius. She then went on to ask me why I got into writing when I was writing seriously, and, well... nothing came to mind. I'm still running off that entitlement complex, even though I know it's improper. I didn't say so, of course.

In the end, she suggested I do that daily free-form writing thing, where first thing every morning you open up a Word file and just type until you hit three pages. The twist is that the topic is always: "What am I writing for, why did I start this writing thing in the first place?" While not first thing in the morning, I tried doing it as soon as I got back to my room... mostly because I had a huge lump in my throat from angst and wanted to preserve the melodrama of it for purgative purposes.

I made it half a page before I ran out of things to say.

I feel like that does not bode well.

I did, however, come to the discovery that I write to solve puzzles. I write to hack out my thoughts on things that I find intellectually elusive, and this has always been true. When I was first starting out, doing my fanfiction, I went for stories that explained inconsistencies in the source material. Now, I toy with themes I don't fully understand, like consensual incest--and relationships in general, if I'm being honest. As a lifelong single person, the dating, relating, and marriage world is inscrutable to me. This is probably why I write so many romances despite not being a romantic person myself.

This puzzle business explains a lot of things, like why I burn out on stories after I've figured out the ending via outline or inspiration (already found the answer, so why continue?), or why I get so bent out of shape when another writer beats me to some larger thematic point I want to make (someone else already found the answer, so why bother?). Writing as mathematics. That sounds like me.