Monthly Archives: November 2006

No really, it’s fun

From the Web site of National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), telling about the experience of writing the first draft of a novel in one month:

The first year’s trials and tribulations are laid out in the introduction to No Plot? No Problem!, but the short version is that our novels, despite our questionable motives and pitiful experience, came out okay. Not great. But not horrible, either. And, more surprising than that, the writing process had been really, really fun.

Fun was something we hadn’t expected. Pain? Sure. Embarrassment? Yes. Crippling self-doubt followed by a quiet distancing of ourselves from the entire project? You bet.

But fun? Fun was a revelation. Novel-writing, we had discovered, was just like watching TV. You get a bunch of friends together, load up on caffeine and junk food, and stare at a glowing screen for a couple hours. And a story spins itself out in front of you.

I think NaNoWriMo is part of a wider trend of people having fun by making stuff (can’t quite call it art) and distributing it via the Web. Examples: the people who use iMovie or some other free video editing software to produce videos which they then distribute free via YouTube; the people who use GarageBand or other cheap audio editing software to produce songs which they distribute via Web sites; the blogs, of course; the mash-ups; the immense wave of creativity that we’re seeing.

Sturgeon’s Law, which states that 95% of everything is crap, still applies to this wave of creativity. Given our current cultural standards, that means we can’t call most of these creative endeavors “art,” because art is defined the 5% (or less) of everything that isn’t crap. Not that that is really the point. Yes, more than 50,000 people are writing NaNoWriMo novels, and probably 20,000 will actually complete their novel, so there might be 1,000 NaNoWriMo novels out there that might be worth reading (at least, they might be worth reading after they are throughly revised) — but the real point of doing it is because it’s fun.

Case in point: I’m now 11,148 words into writing my own NaNoWriMo novel, and yeah, it is fun. It is a whole lot of fun. It is far more fun than watching TV or reading someone else’s novel.

Boxes

We moved into this apartment in late August, 2005 — over fourteen months ago. Last night, I was looking for a potato masher. I know we have one, or at least we had one. Maybe it had gotten lost in one of our many moves over the past few years. Then I remembered that there was at least one box of dishes that we had never unpacked.

I brought it out from the closet where we had unceremoniously dumped it, and began unpacking it. I found Carols’ old “Victory Garden” mug, another mug that says “REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE,” what’s left of the old plates and bowls that my mother made me buy for my first apartment back in 1979 (Carol says they are ugly, which is true, so they got stored in an unused cabinet), half a dozen bowls and plates that came from my grandmother’s house in Staten Island (also stored in that previously unused cabinet), a quiche dish that we never use, two of Carol’s favorite soup bowls, a pretty green plate with a raised floral design that Carol had found at a yard sale years ago, another plate from a yard sale with pink roses twined around the outer edge, the rest of the large white dinner plates.

One of the large white dinner plates, right in the middle of the pile, had shattered. None of the other plates or dishes had been broken, and I am at a loss to explain how that one plate broke while the others remained intact.

I also found some glass mixing bowls deep in the box, and three plastic travel mugs that read “Ferry Beach.” I did not find the potato masher.

Autumn watch

When I sit down at our dining table, I look right out our second floor window into the red leaves on the maple tree across the street. The north side of the maple is already bare. The other trees in the courtyard across the street lost all their leaves a week ago.

The wind is backing around into the north, and as I sit watching the wind slowly strips one red leaf at a time and sends it fluttering up the street. Red leaves dot the wet stone paving blocks in the street below.

The red maple leaves look particularly brilliant, almost glowing, on this dark, grey, wet day. It’s one of the most beautiful times of year.

happy birthday abs

NaNoWriMo, day one

…this is for all you who are doing the same thing…

I logged onto the National Novel Writing Month Web site to update my word count. I thought the connection was going to time out before my user page would load. Obviously, the NaNoWriMo site is seeing a lot of traffic presumably people are madly updating their user profiles or something.

As far as my own writing project (I can’t really call it a novel), it is continuing along nicely in its non-linear way. Current word count stands at 5,245 — which means that I’m a tenth of the way towards my goal, and it’s only the first day of the month. I’ll attribute some of that to my own (non-pathological) hypergraphia. But I attribute more of my progress to using WordPress blogging software as a kind of simple CMS. The chronological ordering of the blogging software allows me to arrange and rearrange chunks of writing, as I figure out the chronology of the writing project. I’m also assigning categories to different chunks of writing based on various topics, and assigning authors based on the principal personality in each chunk of writing.

I’m making this sound hopelessly complex, but it’s really not. It’s as if I’m writing on big index cards which I then file according to chronology; and it’s as if I’m using different color index cards for different topics; and somehow the index cards can also be sorted out according to principal personality (and a few other categories). Or to put it another way, instead of developing an elaborate filing system with character files, scene files, etc., I’m just using blogging software to automate all that. The end result is that it’s easy to make big changes really fast in response to the developing writing — how freeing!