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 (just the) "Writing Dares" Entries NaNoWriMo 2006 Epilogue December 29, 2006 One of the surprising things about doing improv is how energy is more important than originality, and to show how uncomfortable I am with that concept, I still feel like I'm insulting improv by saying so (but I'm not). If my improv partner and I riffing off each other, it's better to have a quick, appropriate response than to take a second and come up with the most interesting, original action. The downside of this is apparent when you try to explain to someone else how the funniest thing happened at the improv show last night, and... it's no longer funny. You absolutely had to be there. It was the right response for the moment, but now that moment is gone. By contrast, when writing--where the work lives on the page, hopefully longer than just a moment--the first response to a problem is almost never the best one. You want to throw that answer out, and come up with another one. Then another one. And maybe your third or fourth solution to any given problem is the most interesting, the most new, and ultimately the most appropriate for the story you're trying to tell. And that, I think, is why NaNoWriMo didn't work for me, and why almost all of the extremely-rough draft of my first novel that I wrote in November will need to be thrown out. I sacrificed originality for energy and rarely went to a third or even second solution to any given problem. I thought I was being strong and tenacious, but really I was being lazy because I wanted to keep my wordcount up. The result is a sub-20,000-word draft that's only superficially fleshed out from my outline. Otherwise, my interesting decisions stopped after the first day. This doesn't mean that NaNoWriMo can't work for anybody. It just didn't work for me this year. I may even try it again in the future if it's compatible with my goals at the time, and I have a much more fleshed-out outline where fewer interesting decisions need to be made during the month of November, and I just need to put in prose form the notes that I'll have already come up with. Ah well. I think I can still make this novel work. I'm just not as far along as I'd hoped.
 NaNoWriMo Day 11 November 11, 2006 Great week overall. Spinach is back in the grocery stores. (What can I say? I try to be a healthy boy.) I finally beat a Palm OS computer program at chess, on the easiest level. (My YA novel's protag plays chess, so this is me re-teaching myself in the name of research). Rumseld resigned (though this puts the beat-down on a Rumsfeld-related humor piece I hoped to get to as my next submission to The New Yorker; I already have something in their slush pile so there was no hurry here) and Santorum lost his bid for re-election (FWIW I have no problem with bigots. I have a problem with bigoted acts.). Kevin Federguy is back on the market (call me!). And yes! I finished this draft of my first novel! I haven't decided what I'll do for the rest of the month, whether I'll still try to "win" NaNoWriMo by working on another prose project or just call this a personal success and move on. I know I need at least a few weeks away from this particular piece before I begin the revision process, and I also know there are certain things about the NaNoWriMo process that work against me. Doesn't mean it's a bad or substandard process; just means it's probably not right for me. I'll talk about this more when, again, I have some distance from it. Too early for analysis. Still, eleven days is hardly a fair shake. I've got 33K words left to play with in November. Maybe tomorrow I'll work on that Rumsfeld humor piece anyway while it's still hot, and do some brainstorming about another longform prose fiction story that won't suffer too much for lack of a good outline. We'll see.
NaNoWriMo Day 10 November 10, 2006 If the neighbors ask: "What's that awful smell?" Just say: "Alex's novel. He refuses to flush it." Yesterday, the longest single work of fiction I'd ever created was called "Outgoing," which clocks in at 13,862 words and which will be published in the February 2007 issue of Asimov's. Today, at 14,766 words and counting, we have a new champion: an ugly, ugly draft of a young adult novel. That's right, lovely people. 1912 words for chapter nine. One chapter to go. Suck it, second-week-slump.
NaNoWriMo Day 9 November 9, 2006 Chapter eight has just over 1K words. Would have done more, but I've got a headache I can't shake, and, frankly, this chapter doesn't deserve anything more right now. That's right, Chapter Eight. You let me down. Why can't you be more like your brother, Chapter Five? As much as I'm detesting this novel right now, I really am looking forward to going back through it. I feel like this draft is little more than me taking notes for the next draft.
NaNoWriMo Day 8 November 8, 2006 This awful draft of chapter seven has 1817 words. Now I'm sick not only of this story, but also of prose in general. Tomorrow, I will be sick of computers, followed by sick of the greater Raleigh-Durham region through the weekend, which should help me reach sick of natural laws of time and space by this time next week.
NaNoWriMo Day 7 November 7, 2006 Chapter Six has a current 1223 words. This was a tough one. There's a lot I had to skim-write (for lack of a better term) because even the setting requires more research than I could do online. So my interest in the story is already starting to lag. Only takes a day or two for a short story, so I can probably thank NaNoWriMo that I got this far without my inner critic convincing me to abandon this project. Just a few more days. Wonder if I could go 30 days on a single project without a break.
NaNoWriMo Day 6 November 6, 2006 Chapter Five clocks in at 1747 words, so at almost 9k words I'm technically half-way done with this draft of the novel. There are some fun interlude mini-stories I want to do between chapters, but I anticipate they'll be a few hundred words apiece. And I'm not sure I'll want to touch them until I have a better grasp on these characters. I can't believe I'ma actually considering starting a second novel for the second half of NaNoWriMo.
NaNoWriMo Days 4 and 5 November 5, 2006 Chapters Three and Four "done." Again below 1667 words both weekend days, but with Telltale stuff and server problems taking much longer than expected, I'm just glad I got something down. But I don't like it that my average has already fallen below that minimum To clarify something I wrote earlier: I expect the final version of my novel to be in the 50k-60k word range. But I'm starting to suspect that the draft I finish this month will cap in the 15k-25k range. On the bright side, I might be done with that draft by mid-month, and then I'll have to figure out whether it's in the novel's best interest creatively for me to start fleshing it out to the 50,000-words immediately or to set it aside to give myself some perspective from it. It would be nice to "win" NaNoWriMo my first year doing it. But that's always been the secondary goal.
NaNoWriMo Day 3 November 3, 2006 Chapter Two "done." Fell below the 1667 minimum words I should have done today, but my average is still above that, so no sweat (yet).
NaNoWriMo Day 2 November 2, 2006 This is going to sound a bit weird, but I actually finished a draft of my novel yesterday at the 2K mark. See, this NaNoWriMo thing is a stretch enough for me as it is--writing this fast, choosing quantity over quality, etc... So the big thing I'm taking from my normal short fiction writing routine is my process of going from outline to final draft. It might be a mistake, but I know what I need to finish something I start. I begin with an outline. Then I start putting in story beats and sometimes even moments I might want in each section (this is fleshing out the outline). This would be like a negative second (-2nd) draft. I had something between outline and -2nd by Tuesday night. Then I'll put all that together and flesh it out a bit. Like I'm turning this into a treatment/summary. For a short story of 5-14,000 words, this draft (we'll call it negative first or -1st draft) would be between 500-1000 words. For a novel, this is apparently about 2K and that's what I finished yesterday. Now I'm working toward a Zeroth (0th) draft by the end of the month. I call it 0th draft, because even after outlines my stories usually don't really start taking shape until I start the revision process. My first draft takes a while, but I think it's worth it in the end. Will my zeroth draft get to 50,000 words? I don't know, but the first chapter, which I wrote today, comes to about 2K words. I anticipate about ten chapters. But my goal is to finish a real draft of a novel this month, which I will view as my 0th draft. "Winning NaNoWriMo" is nice where it overlaps with my goal, but I'm perfectly willing to throw out what doesn't work for me.
NaNoWriMo Day 1 November 1, 2006 National Novel Writing Month begins. I set aside the outline that was "coming along" a week ago, because it had some problems that made it less-than-ideal for NaNo. So I plotted another young adult book I've been bouncing around in my head--mainly as an exercise--and it ended up being a stronger candidate. It's a standalone novel with no sequels planned. The other one was the first in an epic series, and the authors I know have all said that you shouldn't do that for your first novel anyway. But I've written too many crappy stories before they were "ripe" in my head, so I was going to go with it anyway until I got all satisfied with this new one. Sorry, rambling. Which is a good habit for NaNoWriMo, I hear. Would be nice to be able to get the NaNo site to come up. Victim of its own success, I'm guessing. For those interested, I'm using the free no-frills progress chart from Writertopia.
NaNoWriMo is GoWriMo October 24, 2006 
So National Novel Writing Month is a week away. The first NaNoWriMo was eight years ago November, which is the same month and year I started writing seriously and submitting my work to publishers. We just fit, NaNoWriMo and I. I came closest to participating last year, but I had more immediate deadlines I wanted to hit.This year, my first novel's outline needs work but it's coming together enough that I'm gonna go for it. I will attempt to write the first (more like zero-th) draft of a 50,000+ word young adult novel in November. And in December I'll get my head examined. In January I'll probably see if I can revise the novel into something publishable. If not, then at least I'll have gotten the learning project out of the way. To others about to WriMo, good luck. My username at the NaNoWriMo site is alexotica. Do with it as you will.
November Writing Dare update November 21, 2005 My first story (of three stories I wanted to finish this month) gave me a plethora of problems. I screwed up in the outline phase, and created a story structure which would work fine in a visual medium like comics, but with the way the prose was going, there was too much expository writing and not enough movement. I had trouble simply telling the story. I decided to work through it rather than abandon it; I'd rather be in the habit of finishing what I start than in the habit of meeting arbitrary quantitative goals. I finished a not-nearly-publishable draft this weekend, ready to be revised later this week as time permits. Second story shouldn't give me much trouble. I finished the outline today, and it'll probably come in at under 2000 words. Accomplishing the dare's three stories is not impossible at this point, but not very likely either. I'll err on the side of getting these two pieces right before I spread my time across three mediocre stories if I can help it. Still, if I have submission-ready drafts of both stories by the end of the month, that's quite an accomplishment for me, I think. This has been a productive month for me outside the dare as well, which is why I'm not more negative about this failure. On the creative side of things, I wrote a revised draft of a short film by fellow Carrboro writer Jeremy Pinkham (an as-yet-unnamed comedy which we might film with director Steve Milligan as early as this weekend), finished recording Song of Myself (the third and longest book of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass) for Telltale, and revised a number of comic scripts. And I'll probably reveal some personal developments later this week as well. Stay tuned.
Jenn Reese's Day of the Dead Writing Dare November 10, 2005 So for those of us with non-novel writing needs this November, author Jenn Reese has proposed another alternative writind dare for the month of November. The easy part is you make up your own challenge for yourself. This is also the difficult part, because there's no point in taking the Dare if you aren't going to push yourself. I challenged myself to three short stories and a sonnet because, well, I need three stories and a sonnet by the end of the month. We're a third of the way through the month and I've got the sonnet going in the mail today, and my first story almost to the point where I could call it a rough draft. I summarized a few scenes as placeholders when they weren't working for me or were otherwise killing my momentum. As long as I have a decent-not-quite-polished draft by the end of the week, I'm still making good time. This from an unbelievably slow writer.
Continue reading "Jenn Reese's Day of the Dead Writing Dare" Filed Under: Journal, Prose and Poetry, Writing Dares Saying No to NaNoWriMo November 1, 2005 
I first heard about National Novel Writing Month a few years back, and it seemed to me to be the mother of all writing dares. I've been at this writing-and-submitting-and-journaling-online-about-it thing since November of 1998, the month and year of the first NaNoWriMo. So both this journal and NaNoWriMo are seven years old. To date, my longest piece of fiction is just over 12,000 words (and 12=3x4; 3+4=7). The last time I attempted to write anything longer that that, I was in seventh grade. So you'd think the planets are aligned (all seven of them; Pluto's out and I'm thinking they're gonna relabel Jupiter as a sun soon anyway), trying to tell me that this is the year. But, alas, though I consider taking part every year, I have decied once again that this isn't the right time for me. But not for lack of writing. I have three short stories, some sonnets, and a comics project I need to write this month, and, considering I'm generally such a slow writer that I'm lucky to finish a decent short story in a quarter, it's probably not a good idea to try and tackle a lesser-priority novel on top of all that. Maybe next year. But to those about to NoWri, I salute you.
Writing Dare, Forum, Future, Etc May 11, 2005 Between April 15 and May 15, I've been taking part in a create-your-own writing dare started by Jenn Reese, and I figured I'd take a page out of Jay Lake's book and write a story every week for four weeks. As an incredibly slow writer (one of my more recently submitted stories took 3 years from concept to first submission) prolificacy isn't one of my strengths. I'm on week four, still working on my third story. And I've been writing every day, at about the same time, out of steam through most of it. The writing's crap. Crappier than the worst of my "regular" work. And I don't know how much of it is forcing myself to write a way in which my mind doesn't want to work, and how much of it is growing pains. I'm trying to imagine it's like when you go from being a relatively fast hunt-and-peck keyboardist to someone who knows proper hand position. At first it's an incredible slowdown, but if you can push through, you'll be faster and more efficient in the long run.
Continue reading "Writing Dare, Forum, Future, Etc" Filed Under: Journal, Prose and Poetry, Vanity Smurf, Writing Dares A Real Problem January 20, 2001 (Selected republication of old entries from the pre-Movable Type journal...) Well, I guess I should finally admit it. Over 50,000 words into my million-word goal (I was actually ahead of where I wanted to be by mid-month), my wrists screamed "no more!" And they haven't shut up since.
Continue reading "A Real Problem" Filed Under: Journal, Vanity Smurf, Writing Dares |
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Alex Wilson writes fiction and comics in Carrboro, NC. His work has appeared/will appear in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Rambler, LCRW, Weird Tales, The Florida Review, Futurismic, ChiZine, Pif, and Dragon. Locus Magazine has called him a "promising new writer," and Publishers Weekly also has nice things to say. Alex runs the audiobook project/podcast Telltale Weekly and the writer wiki Guidevines. He publishes the minicomic/zine Inconsequential Art. He is a 2006 Clarion graduate. Blog Archives 2008 - Clever Label TBA 2007 - BadYearNoCookie 2006 - Clarion! 1st Pro Sale! 2005 - Peers and Peerless 2004 - Telltale Launch 2003 - Dog bites, acting out 2002 - In my mind, I'm going... 2001 - Marriage, Macs, 1st Cons 2000 - Setback, Milestones 1999 - Engaged, Graduated 1998 - Creative Independence    Powered by MT 3.35 MySpace Profile Technorati Profile |
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