Lake Neuron

The National Novel Writing Month web site has opened for 2008, and I have until midnight Halloween night to decide whether or not to take the NaNoWriMo plunge this year.

A bit of background, which will be redundant for those of you who’ve followed this blog in the past: NaNoWriMo is an exercise in which participants commit to try to write a 50,000-word novel (which is a novella, technically) during the month of November. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to write a good novel in that short a time, but “good” is not the first priority of NaNoWriMo participants. The idea is to just write — turn off your internal editor, stop hand-wringing, stop making excuses, stop claiming “writer’s block” and force yourself to spend time each day cranking out the 1,667-word average required to complete the task.

It’s an exhilerating experience, because you will tap into levels of creativity in this setting which you can never achieve while second-guessing yourself.

The finished product will be … rough. Some writers have, in fact, gone back and cleaned up their NaNoWriMo first drafts, turning them into marketable manuscripts. So far, I am not one of them.

I hit the 50,000 mark on my first attempt in 2004. I tried but dropped out early in 2005, and I didn’t try in 2006 because I was heavily involved in rehearsals for a play. Last year, I hit the mark again. I had — and, at some level, still have — high hopes for last year’s effort, a work of fiction inspired by my experiences in short-term foreign mission trips. But I’ve not been able to figure out how to clean the manuscript up and do something with it. A former professor of mine offered to look at the manuscript, and I spent months waiting on her, but she never got to it.

One day, I will turn it into something marketable.

Right now, though, the question is whether I’m going to try to plunge into NaNoWriMo this year. The two years I finished (or “won”) NaNoWriMo, I had ideas that drew heavily on personal experience, with main characters who were somewhat-fictionalized versions of myself. I’d like to do something more creative, but when I tried that in 2005 I came up short pretty quickly.

Whatever I decide, everyone needs to try the NaNoWriMo experience at least once. You can start by signing up at the web site. This allows you to upload your word count, check out “pep talk” e-mails and podcasts, interact with other writers and — if you reach your goal — download a certificate and web graphics indicating so.

If you do go to the site and sign up, be sure to friend me as a novel-writing buddy. My user name is John I. Carney.

My sister-in-law posted a link to an essay by Anne Lamott about first drafts.

The essay is about the need to write — just write, without expecting it to be good — and then come back and try to turn the writing into something better in the editing process. Sadly, the pace of the writing I have to do for my day job doesn’t leave much time for this kind of process. But I try to dip my toes in it from time to time, most notably in November, when (as regular readers will recall) I participate in National Novel Writing Month.

Those same regular readers will recall that my 2007 novel was fiction inspired by my short-term foreign mission experiences. It was, as you would expect given the demands of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, awful. NaNoWriMo novels are almost supposed to be awful. But I liked parts of it and wondered if it was something that I could rewrite.

I fumbled with it for a while but wasn’t quite sure how to begin what needed to be done. Then, earlier this year, my old screenwriting professor e-mailed me about another matter and, when she found out about the novel, she offered to look it over. I sent it to her — and set aside working on it, because I figured I’d wait until I heard back from her. I didn’t hear anything for months. I assumed it was because it was so awful and irredeemable that she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Actually, she just never got around to reading it, or at least she told me that this summer.

Anyway, I’ve thought about the novel several times lately, and reading the Anne Lamott essay was the latest catalyst. I still don’t know if it’s worth rewriting or if I’m capable of doing so, but maybe I’ll give it a closer look in the next few weeks.

It’s been almost a month since I sent my novel to my old screenwriting teacher, who had offered to look at it for me and take her “mean red pen” to it (her words, not mine). Other than an e-mail a few days later which made no specific reference to the manuscript but had a link to a Christian writers’ organization, I haven’t heard a peep from her since, and since she’s doing me a huge favor I am in no position to pester her about it.

It will come as a surprise to no one among my friends and family that I have been over-thinking this. The most likely explanation is that she’s been busy with her own life and hasn’t really had time to devote to looking at someone else’ manuscript. But my mind wanders through other possible explanations:

* The manuscript is truly, utterly horrible, and she is afraid she will offend me by telling me so.

* The manuscript puts her to sleep every time she picks it up.

* The manuscript is truly, utterly horrible, and she can’t force herself to look at more than a page or so per day.

* The manuscript has driven her stark raving mad, and she is currently in the care of trained professionals.

You know, if my writing were half as creative as my neurosis, I’d be on the New York Times best-seller list by this point.

I still felt pretty crummy when I got up this morning, and I’ve left a message at the paper that I won’t be in this afternoon to work on the Sunday front page. I suspect I will feel better tomorrow, but I’ll probably be wheezing and sneezing, so I plan to bow out of cooking for men’s club breakfast at church. I want to make it to the breakfast if I can, because Marilyn Massengale will be our program, giving her moving rendition of the creation story.

Meanwhile, I got e-mail last night from my old scriptwriting professor. She and her husband, my film professor, were going to hire me to work for their production company after college, and I went down and lived with them for a couple of months in 1985, but their project fell through and I hadn’t really demonstrated much reason to be there. I have kept up with them through the years, though.

Anyway, Theresa thought I might have been near the tornado damage in the Tennessee and e-mailed me to check on me. In my response, I suggested that I might ask her to look at my novel some time. She e-mailed me this morning telling me to send it on, and I’ve done so.

This scares me, because Theresa is all about writing a marketable manuscript, and she will be honest with me about whatever she doesn’t find marketable. (She said in her e-mail she would take her “mean red pen” to it.)

I’m continuing to make little haphazard tweaks to the novel. I’m about at the point where I probably need to show it to someone who will give me an honest opinion.

Which leads to the question … do I really want an honest opinion?

One part of the novel that I definitely haven’t been satisfied with is the moment when the main character Gets The Girl. It was definitely speed written during NaNoWriMo, and I thought it sounded cheesy and cliched.

I did some major work on that scene tonight, and while I’m still not satisfied with it I can say that it’s a major improvement.

Well, I finished the Preston Sturges tonight. In the process, during a couple of breaks from reading, I tinkered with my own magnum opus, making some needed changes to the passage about an emotional meltdown the hero suffers just before the end of the book.

The Sturges book was fascinating, even if it does give short shrift to the very classic films one wants to hear the most about. (I imagine that Sturges, while directing, had a lot less time to journal.) One interesting thing about Sturges is his blithe self-confidence, and how he used it to establish himself as a playwright, and then a screenwriter, and then (after many setbacks) fulfilled what has now become a cliche: “But what I really want to do is direct.” Meanwhile, he’s trying to run a restaurant and an industrial concern to sell a diesel engine of his own invention! Sturges had plenty of financial setbacks in his life, going, if not from rags to riches, than at least from the prospect of rags to riches and back, several times. But he always believed in his own potential.

I think I may need to summon up a little of Sturges’ hubris to bring this book to completion and see it published.

I continue to make little tweaks to the novel, and I’m pleased with them, but I’m just putting off the fact that I need to make some major changes. I’m just not sure where to go next.

As I think I’ve said before, the novel has way too much exposition. There are too many cases where situations and relationships are explained ham-handedly instead of making themselves known through actions and dialogue. Maybe this novel is beyond my capabilities after all.

Don’t worry; this is just my day to think of the novel as junk. Tomorrow, it will be the greatest work of fiction since “Of Mice and Men.” Then, day after tomorrow, it will be junk again.

I used to always flatter myself that if I were to write something creative, I would be the type of Christian who could find success in the secular marketplace, with work that stands on its own artistic merit but reflects my Christian world view in very subtle and artistic ways. That’s why it’s so ironic that I’ve written what amounts to “Christian fiction,” in the genre sense. If I do sell it to a publisher, it’s something that will probably be sold only in Christian bookstores.

For the past couple of weeks, on and off, I’ve been flipping through a printout of the novel, marking things up. This is still a relatively shallow rewrite; I’ve been tweaking passages that read badly or making other cosmetic changes. I need to go deeper, and I will, eventually. In some cases, my markups have included notes to myself to go back and rewrite a whole passage or to insert some as-yet-undetermined dialogue or business which will help to flesh out a character.

Tonight, I started transferring the marked-up corrections to the novel as it is stored on my hard drive.

I think I like this novel. But I also think I need to make a few major changes to it. The romantic scenes near the end are way too abrupt and need to be heavily rewritten. Some of the Kenyan characters are given short shrift — although, in a sense, this may be a testament to my shallow understanding of some of the people with whom I worked in 2004, 2005 and 2006. If I understood the real-life Kenyans better, my fictional Kenyans would seem more real.

I talked to an old college friend of mine last night who now works in intellectual property law. Maybe in another year or so, I’ll have a contract with some book publishing company for him to look over. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

I just scanned the first chapter of the novel. I’m not doing anything serious yet, just making notes when I see something I’d like to rephrase. I’m going to hopefully look through and just reacquaint myself with it — see how it reads. There will be continuity problems or other things that I overlooked or forgot about when writing the novel over the course of a month which will be a lot more obvious as I read the novel over the course of a few days.

Today’s word count is courtesy of OpenOffice, since NaNoWriMo’s word count feature shut down at midnight last night. The NaNoWriMo word count might have been slightly different. When I compared the two from time to time during the month, sometimes OpenOffice was higher, and at other times NaNoWriMo was higher. Apparently, the two program use different algorithms for deciding what counts as a word.

I had another inexplicable burst of deadline-free productivity this morning, and took the story all the way to my intended ending, so it’s complete for now. I am making a backup copy on CD, which will go into my lockbox. I may print out the story just to see how it looks on paper, but I’m going to set it aside for a few weeks before I make any serious attempt to rewrite it. It really is rough; it really does read like it was speed-written in a month’s time. But there are moments in it that I like very much, and I think it will be worth the effort of trying to rewrite.

Thanks to all of you for your support and encouragement during November.

The weird thing is, once I broke 50,000, I wasn’t on deadline anymore. Once I broke 50,000, it didn’t really matter how many words I wrote tonight. There was no reason for me to keep up the breakneck pace I’ve followed all month, much less exceed it.

But I got carried away anyhow — this stretch contained a big, climactic scene, and one that I felt intensely personal about. My total word count today was in the neighborhood of 3,000 words — almost twice the 1,667 that is a NaNoWriMo participant’s daily goal, and 10 times what I needed to break 50,000 after yesterday’s performance.

I think I can wrap up this draft over the weekend — if not tomorrow, then Sunday. Then I will set it aside for a bit and come back to it later in December. There is major rewriting to do. But I will do the rewrite this time. After the 2004 NaNoWriMo, I set the manuscript aside for the whole month of December. When I looked at my manuscript in the cold light of January, I decided it wasn’t marketable and haven’t really done anything with it since. This one may not be marketable either, but it’s unique enough that I feel like I need to at least try.

I was at 50,127 words when I updated my profile and triggered the “winner” page of the web site. I will continue to work and update my official word count this evening. The word count will be frozen at midnight tonight as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned. I don’t know whether I can wrap up my story tonight or not; if not, I will just finish it over the weekend.

Suffice it to say I will be making 50,000.

I am sure I will be able to turn in 50,000 words to NaNoWriMo’s automatic word count validator tomorrow night (or later tonight, if I get a sudden flash of inspiration in the next hour). That will mean that I am a winner of National Novel Writing Month.

I do not, however, know for sure if I can finish the actual story tomorrow night. I am close — very close — but I still have a few little kinks to work out, and the story may run a few thousand words over, depending on how I get there.

I do think that the finished novel will be even longer than that when I go back and rewrite it. I have done a poor job fleshing out some of my characters, and I need to work in some new dialogue, perhaps a few new scenes, to do them justice on the page the way they appear in my mind. But I have a framework to build on — and I think it’s a pretty good framework.

My only fear is that the romance that works through the second half of the novel (which is part of what I’m trying to tie up in the last few pages) won’t be realistic. I’ve had an incredibly stunted social life, and it could be that my ideas about what’s romantic and what could lead to a deeper relationship are silly and that the novel will read like it was written by the Hardy Boys about Nancy Drew.

I think too much. I need to relax and enjoy the prospect of crossing the finish line.

Almost there….