On writing

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my literary writing pursuits, and the sad fact is that there’s nothing really to write about. November is coming ’round the bend, as is NaNoWriMo, and I’ll admit to a little envy at those who are participating this year. I’m not; I’m not ready, and I have a couple of things on my plate that would make writing 1,700 words a day difficult, when those words need to be in some form of coherence and cohesion for a novel.

But the fact is, I’ve been keeping an eye on my “natural” writing habits, and reflecting on and off on patterns that I’m seeing. A lot of this is connected to some of the “revelations” (if you will) from my 5:30 AM exercise (which I wasn’t able to do for very long, but long enough). To quote the exercise again (emphasis mine):

So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can–and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before–begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically.

I’ve gone through my morning writing, and my “unconscious” writing could probably be categorized into three groups:

Journal-esque; things that happened to me, and written in a journal style instead of in a literary vein (i.e. fictionalized). Roughly 27% of my writing fall under this category.
Essay; musings, ideas, speculation, no real story behind them. Slightly less in number than journal-style writing!
Literary; quite obviously fiction! A number of them were fictionalized versions of a few real-life events, but most of them were “original” scenes and sketches. Around half of my writing was in this category.

Actually going through them was a bit of a revelation in itself; I’d expected the general numbers, but didn’t really expect essay-style writing to be almost up on par with journal writing. I only had a smallish number to work on, but the results actually mirror some of the “impulse” writing I’ve done (for example, for One Word, for One Sentence) in the past, and continues up to now.

From these, I have both an affirmation, and a somewhat disheartening revelation.

I’ve always known that my writing and literary interests tend toward the fantastical, the lyrical, the heights of emotions. Most of my snippet writing revolves around the latter: joy, love, passion, hurt, anger, despondence. More than half of my writing have a fantasy element to them: if not outright fantasy, then hints of it. So from what I’ve seen, this is really the area that I should be working with when I write stories, because it is here where my subconscious gravitates to when freewriting.

As for the disheartening revelation: I (currently) don’t have the longevity to write a novel.

I’ve realized this (from the aforementioned exercises) quite a while ago. But I’ve honestly tried to ignore it, because I want to write a novel. Trying to come to terms with the revelation that I don’t have the capacity to write a novel was difficult to stomach. Goodness knows how many times I’ve joined NaNoWriMo, both “officially” and “in secret”. I still have files upon files of half-baked “novels”, all abandoned in the middle (or, more precisely, all over the place–I’ve never written “in order”).

The longevity can be worked on, certainly. But it isn’t something that will come easily, not anymore after I’ve neglected it since college. I don’t think it’s truly lost; but it’s buried too deep for me to dredge out in, say, a month of frenzied writing, or continuous false starts on writing a novel.

So instead I will go back to my “roots”, ease up on the pressure, and do what my habits seem to point me towards: short story writing. Certainly not as glamorous as a novel (“hey, I’m writing a novel”) but, baby steps! And I do enjoy the quick sketches that I do. Graduating from short shorts to a short story looks to be quite sound, eh?

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See Angela write.

I know, I know. I haven’t posted here in goodness knows how long, and that’s a shame–all on my end, of course. I haven’t blogged, and I haven’t written much over the latter part of the year, and that includes journal entries.

I hardly know what to write about anymore, although there’s still that urge within me to write. I suppose I will be writing forever, after a fashion. Sometimes, I think, parts of me are all terribly out of sync. At some point, I am courageous, and bold, and I will write without being afraid of my subjects, my prose, or my inner critic…but then those are the times that I don’t have anything to write about. And so I write about mundane things.

And then other times, it’s the other way around. Scratch that–it’s that way most of the time.

Sometimes I wonder, if people need a tragedy in their lives, in order to write. A good many writers have either gone through tragedy, or suffer depression, etc, before they started writing, or during the period of their writing career. Is that some sort of prerequisite? What is it that goads people to write? Is the tragedy in their lives the catalyst?

Why am I even asking–of course tragedy can be a catalyst. I’ve written copiously when I’m depressed, out of a need to relieve myself and let all that pent-up emotion out before I explode.

Does that mean that, right now, as I’m writing this “comeback” blog post, I’m depressed?

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5:30 AM Writing

I’ve started a new habit: I wake up at 5:30 AM to write.

The alarm goes off at 5:25 AM, and then I drag myself out of the bed to fire up my computer, open StoryMill, hit Command-Shift-F for full-screen, and start typing away. I haven’t gone through the ones I’ve written yet, but they’re usually just a couple of paragraphs each, with typos all over the place (I hear Typinator going off about once every other minute, correcting my typos). That’s what happens when I type with sluggish hands and with my eyes closed.

Why am I doing this? Basically for two things:

to train my body to write creatively again, and
to find out which kind of writing I instinctively fall back on when most of myself is still not functioning properly.

I got this activity from Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. I seem to remember talking about this a long while ago, but as I can’t find that entry, I must be dreaming (I swear I’m fully awake now though). In chapter 5 of the book, she tells us that we “must teach the unconscious to flow into the channel of writing”.

So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can–and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before–begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet…your primary purpose now is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense.

And so I write. I’ve actually “cheated”, and I think I know the answer to #2 (what writing type I fall back on) but we’ll see how this goes. In any case, I don’t see any pattern yet in my morning writing; it should come out in a month or so, I’m gauging.

The good thing? As early as now, I feel like I’m finding what my writing voice is. I already know, in a way, but I’ve written in the same “voice” at least thrice already (and I only started this week). Writing while my brain’s still muddled with sleep has its rewards, for all it’s difficult to get words in order sometimes. :D

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Blogging

My blogging here is rather sporadic, something which I’m quite sad about. One reason for that is probably that I’ve grown disenchanted (again) with my layout, for all that I loved it when it was new. I’m still trying to come up with a new layout, but it isn’t easy.

I’m trying to get more into blogging, though, and I’m sure as soon as I actually decide on a new, better, more readable layout for Seasonal Plume I’ll be back in the game. (I’m actually thinking of going so far as just downloading a theme and using it… I’m trying to resist, though.) However, I do have two new “blog projects”.

The first is Frontend Friday, over at my tech blog, where I talk about various things related to frontend stuff: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other frontend issues. I’m still trying to feel around as to what topics are interesting, so feel free to suggest.

The second is I’ve just accepted an invite from Tech Blog Philippines to be a contributor, and in time you should see a couple of posts from me on there, probably revolving mostly on things I find interesting but wouldn’t exactly fall in the realm of what’s “bloggable” in Indiscripts–I’m sure there will be some overlap, but not by much.

As for creative writing…I’ve fallen into a funk again. Sigh.

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Better late than never

A happy, hopeful new year to all!…even though it’s past mid-January already.

I pretty much disappeared after mid-November–from my writing log, anyway–mostly due to a lot of things happening at the same time. Some of them are personal, but most of them were work-related and season-related. I flew home to the Philippines on December 20, flew back to Singapore on the 27th with family in tow, and took them around until January 2, when they went back to the Philippines.

Even with all of that, however, I was able to finish my 50 Books for 2007 challenge. Just barely made it! The above link also goes to the full list, which admittedly still needs a bit of sprucing up: one more thing that I haven’t gotten around to doing. I am starting a new 50-book challenge this year, and have so far read two books. In time I’ll put up my challenges page, which will link to all the challenges I’ll be doing that are reading- and writing-related.

I also got to 50,000 words for my NaNoWriMo novel this year, but I wasn’t able to finish the memoir; there are still a lot of events to go through and a ton of editing to do once that’s over. I’m not abandoning it, however — I’ll continue to work on it as I go along. The exercise has definitely been one of the longest-running writing exercises I’ve ever done since I graduated high school almost eight years ago. I’ll have to make sure this keeps up.

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NaNoWriMo Day 8: Trudging along

I hadn’t written more than 700 words the two previous days, but as Singapore is on a holiday today, I tried to catch up. I did pretty well, I think:

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=20299]

That’s almost half of the goal by the eighth day, which isn’t bad at all (this might still grow within the day, as it’s only 9pm). Unfortunately, I’m still not half into the 2.5 years that my memoir is supposed to cover. Granted, there shouldn’t be too much after the first year, but I’m unearthing a lot of things from my journals as I go along that I never really know.

There are two things that are bogging me down from going through the events:

Research. There’s a lot of journal entries to wade through, both relevant and irrelevant to the memoir, but things I need to go through anyway.
Processing. This does chronicle a trying time in my life, and going through my journals is painful and troublesome.

I’ve come to the conclusion that creation itself is also scary. It’s not just the pain that going further in the memoir is going to give me, but also the general reluctance and fear that comes packaged into translating something into writing. Already I’m running into decisions that I’m putting off until the second draft: decisions and questions like, should I be as faithful as possible to what really happened or can I combine certain conversations together in order to conserve space? and how do I filter out effectively all that’s not needed, or how do I compact these into shorter, more concise scenes?

Already, I see that whatever my output for this month is, by the second draft, it’s going to be cut by half. I’m going to have to wade in with a highlighter and highlight important scenes and ideas and emotions, and find out how to make it more concise (see Questions Number One, above) and cut off the rest. I also see that I am going to need a printer, and lots of scrap paper. Oh joy.

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Thoughts on the Memoir (Day 4)

So today I think I overreached myself a bit; my Excel report card told me I would finish by November 13 if I kept this speed up. That’s because I’m now at:

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=10466]

I stopped myself from writing more this afternoon mostly because I don’t want to suddenly inexplicably burn out, and because while things are getting “interesting”, I want to think about things a bit more. The first painful part of the story is “over”, although I feel that I wasn’t able to treat it correctly: not objective enough, not emotional enough. That sounds rather contradictory, but I’ve yet to find that balance.

I’m writing the memoir mostly in chronological order, although I’m ending up going back to a few previous scenes again and again to add/modify a few things as I remember them. I currently don’t have any chapters whatsoever, and sadly I’ve also needed to combine a few conversations or jump a few events just for the sake of moving the memoir along. Even so, I feel that I haven’t given things proper focus. As the writing progresses, I feel that I’m going to go back to the start and tweak with things, as well as add a few more things here and there, to minimize the sudden jumps (i.e., “The next week…”) and to provide a bit more insight into feelings. I’m going through it so quickly that I think it reads almost like an adventure story, although it really should be more about emotions, motivations, and the like.

The challenge here is the source. I’m basically going through my journals to grasp how the events moved along, but as I had not written about it for the longest time, I’ve had to rely on a few chance mentions and memory, both of which aren’t very detailed or clear. I do write at length about it once I had started, but right now my memoir is dealing with that point in time when I’m not writing much about the situation.

I feel that once November is over and the actual draft is done, I’ll be spending December editing the hell out of the memoir, and removing whole chunks of text, rewriting a few things, and rearranging how the story is told. At the moment I feel that a lot of the start is dragging, and that I should find a better way to “show” how things are without going on and on about things practically a day at a time. 10,000 words and I’m only at the third month in a timespan of almost three years. That’s not really easy reading. (Not that it’s meant to be easy reading.)

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Day 2: Changing POVs

The second day of NanoWriMo has come and gone. I’m off to retire, but I wanted to write a bit before I did. I’m going along rather splendidly in terms of the word count goal. I stopped as I hit some faintly problematic stuff in memoir-writing: that is, research into the exact sequence of events and things. It’s still a little slow going.

[pfmeter id=3 target=50000 progress=4278]

One thing to note, however, was that I changed the point of view of my story in the middle of writing it. Since this is a memoir, I’ve been writing it in first-person perspective. Unfortunately, a few problems came up, namely:

limited knowledge; or, inability to provide a bigger perspective of each scene, and
it increasingly felt a little too close for comfort.

The second issue is due largely to the fact that I am writing about a certain time in my life: it’s currently a bit too “close” to me. Since the point of this exercise is also to do some post-processing of that situation, I decided a more objective, distant voice would better suit this scenario.

Hence, now I am writing in third-person omniscient, and I have a chunk of text greyed out in my text that needs to be converted over to that POV in time, as well as expanded. I kept it in since it’s really part of the story, I just need to do a rewrite.

The Wikipedia entry for Point of View actually has the exact same scenario that I am using (although it’s an advantage in my case):

The disadvantage of this mode is that it creates more distance between the reader and the story. A variation is where the narrator is a character in the story; a small amount of the story might be told in first person.

I kept the first part of the memoir in first-person; the introduction/prologue, if you will. I will probably expand this in time, but for now it will have to do — I don’t want to go in and edit it since that might bog me down.

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NaNoWriMo 2007

It’s that time of the year again — it’s National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. If you don’t know what it is… where are you been, seriously?

It’s also that time of the month where I always set myself up to fail, apparently. I’ve joined almost every year, but after writing about a few couple thousand I slack off rather horribly. This year isn’t different, as I have signed up again for the 50,000 word challenge.

However, what I’m going to do will be slightly different. Starting November 1, I’ll be working on a memoir chronicling a certain time in my life. There are three things that I’m hoping to “hit” with this:

do some internal processing of the events and emotions that are related to the subject matter,
for memory’s sake, so I have something to look back on that will hopefully be a little more coherent than my journal entries, and
if my journal entries on the subject are any indication, I should be able to win NaNo this year!

It should be good as both a writing exercise and a way to process the events. I probably won’t be posting much snippets from the novel, as it’s obviously something that’s highly personal in nature, but I do hope to be blogging about the experience of writing the memoir itself.

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Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

Why does it seem like a lot of my favorite YA authors seem to be leaving Earth this year? I just found out that Madeleine L’Engle died last September 6, at the age of 88. Of the books she wrote, the ones I read and loved were her Kairos books, principally the ones with the Murrys. (Of the O’Keefes, I’ve only been able to read An Acceptable Time).

Lenneth posted a wonderful interview with her: Allegorical Fantasy: Mortal Dealings with Cosmic Questions. I practically couldn’t tear my eyes away from the interview — I felt it had great meaning to me personally, both as a writer and a Catholic.

I’d like to highlight some lines that I felt were very meaningful for me:

[Writing and praying is] not a matter of feeling like it, or waiting when I feel inspired, because both in work and in prayer, inspiration comes during rather than before.

…Freedom comes on the other side of work. If I want to play a Bach fugue, I must practice scales. If I hope for any transcendent experience in prayer, I have to have just done my ordinary, everyday prayers, which is the same thing as practicing my scales. I have to write every day. Freedom and discipline, rather than being antithetical, are complementary. Permissiveness, either from others toward you or toward yourself, ends up being restricting and crippling. If you choose to be a writer and a mother, you have to be incredibly disciplined. Otherwise you won’t manage. Discipline does not imprison you.

This is truly something that I personally have to work on, even though I’ve read this same thing from various places and books, and they all say the same thing. And yet I still don’t get to write on a daily basis — creative writing, that is.

We’ve got to be free to fail. … We live in a world that insists we be successes. If you’re not free to fail, you’ll never be anything but mediocre. You must try to do more than you can really do. Sometimes, you do do more than you can really do. That’s the marvel of it.

I feel there is a lot of truth in this statement, and frankly I feel this is where my biggest difficulty lies, especially in writing. I might go into this in depth at this blog some other time, but basically I’ve been coming to the conclusion for some time now that my biggest barrier in terms of writing is my fear of failure at what I most want to do.

I remember seeing, once back in the Philippines a month or so before I moved to Singapore, these beautiful new editions of her Kairos books. I wanted to buy them, as I didn’t have my own copies (the ones we have are really technically my sister’s) but I didn’t as I was moving. I really should have bought them.