nanowrimo

Time Flies


Not literally and yet literally, time flies. And it’s not about fun either. I am not always having fun. The dishes, the laundry, the child, the cat, the groceries, the miscellaneous errands. The care and maintenance that goes into the all of the aforementioned can run a considerable range up and down and around the old fun meter. There are my various physical activities (running and swimming) and mental activities (my novel, the blog, attempting to keep up with the world of literature and the news of the day – although sometimes I don’t get to today’s news until tomorrow). I have written about this before but I just run out of time, nearly every day it seems.

As I sit and type this, I can hear and feel the roof shuddering because Rob is out back in the pitch dark building a new gable over the kitchen window box because the roof is leaking and it’s pretty much winter here now. And he hasn’t time either and I don’t need to wonder why or how this happened. We merged our lives and doubled everything essentially but the time we are alloted.

So, the novel is over 31,ooo words and 108 pages and I am certain I will hit the 50,000 within a week but I will likely not be done. More like 3/4ths done. I have discovered however my novel writing style, which as I suspected it would be, is not a start at the beginning and write to the end; but more of a have a good idea where things go and write as the ideas germinate whether that is starting in the middle or rearranging chapter order as you discover that you wrote chapter 11 when it should be chapter 2. My writing is more and more consuming time. I am becoming of those people who sit in waiting rooms with their laptops open and pounding away.

Tomorrow I promise to blog more topically but tonight I am tired and there is a novel calling and a hay fever attack subsiding and my husband is back inside to be snuggled up to. Time just continues to fly by.

Two Miles, Two Thousands Words and Whatever Comes Next


Last fall I couldn’t run a mile. As a matter of fact, I had lost so much weight because of gallbladder issues that by the time it was removed, a year ago today, I could barely manage a half hour of walking. A good deal of the weight I lost by that point was muscle and I couldn’t see how I would ever regain the fitness ground I had lost in the few short months since the summer when I had put time and effort into regaining that ground. I also couldn’t write. Stringing more than a few sentences together, and on rare occasions a paragraph or two, was taxing. I had started to blog but my effort was sporadic even though I began blogging in the hope that I could jump-start my long dormant inner-writer. And as for what was coming next in my life, I hadn’t a clue.

Today I can easily run two miles and walk another mile or two besides. I lift weights again. I have regained muscle and even though that has pushed up the number on the scale and put me back in a size ten, it is were I was at my fittest ten years ago. Tone and level of fitness are what has always mattered. I can’t say there wasn’t a secret thrill in weighing in at 138 lbs, which I did at one point, but on my almost 5’10’’ frame it was alarmingly thin. And I didn’t like not being strong. Or able to run or swim. It just wasn’t me. I am 44 in just a bit over a month, and these are the years that truly can decide what one’s senior and elderly years might possibly look like. There are some things that proper nutrition and exercise can’t protect us against but they can help determine whether how active we will be able to be. I don’t want to be one of those 60 year olds hobbling about with too much weight on them, plagued with all sorts of preventable maladies and unable to participate in life to the fullest.

I am also able to write again. A great joy that I don’t think I can find the words, ironically, to really express. There is a line in the children’s novel, Harriet, the Spy, that talks about Harriet’s thoughts “limping along like crippled children” because she has been forbidden to journal in her notebook after it causes an incident at her school. That line about sums up my feelings about being unable to really write. I can fairly easily knock out 1500 to 2000 words at a sitting now. I blog daily for the most part, and thanks to the inspiration of Nanowrimo (National November Write a Novel Month), I am almost half-way through a complete first draft of my novel. I am really very proud of myself. Back in the dark days last fall, I knew that I wanted to take my experiences and generate a fiction novel from them. I hadn’t a clue where to begin though I did write a few short pieces that I am now expanding on or incorporating into my present work. Caregiving and then widowhood have been such growth experiences, and I know that other widowed people would find it appalling that I appreciate what I have gleaned from both, but I think that most people would acknowledge that even when you wouldn’t choose to experience tragedy on any level in your life, these experiences can change you for the better. They can provide you with insight and the basis on which to hopefully be a better person.

Finally, there is what comes next and who knows what that might be. My horoscope for yesterday told me that it is time for me to confront my fears, many of which have no rational basis, and get ready for the future. I don’t know how prepared a person can be for the unknowable future but planning and being open to all the possibilities is near always an excellent place to start. A lot of good people and things have come my way this last year. I am more grateful for them then I will ever be able to express. More things are coming, I believe, and I am going to strive to take them one at a time and be more appreciative than freaked out (which is my wont when I am feeling overwhelmed at the light speed my life seems to travel at anymore).

Whatever comes next. A Canadian winter. Houston in the New Year perhaps or a publishable novel that someone might really want to read. I am ready.

On Writing – again


NaNoWriMo applique

Image by Sean and Lauren via Flickr

November is National Novel Writing Month, and I have decided not to miss it this year by getting a jump-start on my novel now. So I visited the website to see what exactly writing a novel in the space of a month entails. As it turns out, there is surprisingly little too it. Simply an idea and the stamina and imagination necessary to churn out roughly 1500 words a day. The key to this is resisting the urge to revise as you write. A mighty urge in my case, as I revise with the same amount of thought I give breathing. Drafting and revision are nearly synonymous in my mind. Like twins conjoined at the chest, it would require a painstaking separation. Thoughts and emotions are tangled in sentences and paragraphs in my mind, and perhaps I am not up (or down) to the standards of the true novelist in training. So I googled up some random thoughts on writing to see what true writers think about the craft.

 

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” This is according to Anais Nin (1903-1977) the French born American novelist. To some extent I agree with that. Writers, good ones anyway, have the ability to make mental movies in the minds of their readers. Their words are like paint on a canvas. Their keyboard is akin to the keys on a piano. Letters to words to sentences and then suddenly paragraphs take shape and form a world in which the reader can live along side characters they will come to know as intimately as lovers. Fight Club author, Chuck Palahnuik (b.1961) described it best when he said, “The unreal is more powerful than the real because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.”

 

I wasn’t born knowing how to write. There was a time when I could not quite take thoughts and transport them to paper. I did arrive in this world with a natural affinity for words and a need for an inner-life rich with story, internally generated and externally fed. I wasn’t taught to write either though I have taken many creative, and not-so, writing courses on a variety of writing related topics. And, I can’t teach anyone to write, and this in spite of my twenty years as an English teacher. Doris Lessing (b.1919), the Persian born British novelist, said something interesting about learning to write that I had never really thought about before, “I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.” The hard work I agree with, most of the time, though there are those times when fingers fly and seem to almost be writing for you. The sacrifice of personal life I hope is not the norm. I have been captivated by the page, my own and that of another writer, but I am not certain that I would chose writing, or reading, over husband and family at this point in my life. As much as I long to be a writer professionally, there are things more important and more precious. I prefer the American feminist and author, Brenda Ueland’s(1891-1985), take on writing, “I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, absorbed, happy, and quietly putting on one bead after another.” Can one write the great American novel, as a Canadian in training, this way? At a 1500 a word per day clip?

 

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), a New Zealander and a writer, is quoted as have said, or written, “Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” I can relate to this because until Will’s illness, I was much the same way. I am rapidly returning to it, and much like the American writer/activist Gloria Steinem ( b.1935) who has said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else,” I also feel that writing is the only thing I do over the course of a day or week that is not a waste of my time or an imposition on it.

 

It was the American playwright, Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), who provided me with the most useful tips. The first being this, “If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”

 

And the more useful still, despite her own admonishment, “Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.” A reminder to tape to the side of the screen as I prepare for November at a probably more modest pace than 1500 words, but six months is a decent amount of training time for any type of marathon.