NaNoWriMo 2012 – Day 2
After my relatively slow start yesterday, I came to find myself stuck again. For some reason I just couldn’t get into the right mindset to start today and so I spent my day with everything but writing. I swear, at some point I was even cleaning out my kitchen cupboards, just to get away from that blinking cursor! The problem was mainly that I was just in too good a mood to throw myself into the paranoid mood of my main character. With distance these things never turn out that great, so somehow the circumstances were all wrong.
23.30 and I thought, damn, there is just no way I’m going to write a word today. Well, I was wrong. I filled a bath, took my iPod with me and started typing away. Half an hour later I had managed to write 545 words and I was soaked and relaxed with a bit of the heavy feeling you get when your bath is just a tiny bit too hot. Still far away from my target of 1700 words, but it’s a start and more than yesterday.
I am not worried yet by the way. Just because I have some difficulties right now to get into it, that doesn’t mean that it will stay like this. If I feel inspired I can easily write 3000 words in one day. I just need to get into the right working mindset. I am also not bothered about reaching the 50,000 words in a month. If it happens, good, if it takes longer, also good. At the moment I’m mostly dealing with other things anyway, so the writing is just a bonus. I’ll just take it one day at a time.
NaNoWriMo 2012 – Day 1
So, today started NaNoWriMo and I was quite happy to get started. Or so I thought in theory.
What actually happened was this: First I woke up and didn’t really do any work right away, because I wanted to read something first. Then I thought, well, first I need some breakfast anyway and fried myself some egg and bacon and gobbled down some avocado as well, all while listening to a podcast. When I looked at the time it was already 12.30! Now I really had to get started! What did I do though? First I restarted my computer – I do that about once every few months, but a few days ago something crashed and since then it has been acting up. Once it booted up again I remembered that I hadn’t done any software updates lately, so I fired that up and another 15 minutes went down the drain. Then I saw the state of my computer desktop and decided to de-clutter that a bit. Once I was finished with that I realised that I was hungry again and got myself some yogurt. Oh well, if I eat something, I might as well take a little break, so I watched an episode of X-Files.
By now it was 3.30 pm and I was starting to get annoyed at myself. Stupid procrastination! Finally I sat down and started with the work. However, quickly I realised that I was utterly unprepared. I hadn’t read what I had written before and after all, that had been months ago! While I was reading through that stuff, I was smoothing things out a bit here and there, adding a few words, a couple of sentences. When I reached the end I thought … well, fair enough, I can work with this, but immediately I drew a blank as to where to go from here. No planning, no brainstorming, well, I had done nothing. I pressed about 300 words out, but then I was just at a loss as to where to go from there. It was a couple of hours later and I decided to take a break and have some more food with another episode of X-Files, before continuing with the work. Since that episode was a “to-be-continued” one, I got sucked in and one episode turned into 4. Suddenly it was 9pm and I was tired already!
No, no, no, I thought, this is not how this should be going! So, I finally sat down and did the leg work. I looked at the structure and scenes I had so far and then started to collect ideas. The problem is that the part of the story that I have already, came about pretty much through associative writing, drawing on actual things that happened to me a few months ago. Of course I put an entirely different spin on the events, by completely changing the interpretation and now it’s as far away from the actual events as it could be. Still, it was somewhat born out of a specific situation. Continuing this fictionally was the idea, but really, there needed to be a red line, a story, and not just some ramblings that connect by mere chance. It took quite a bit of staring at the blank page to finally get into it, but in the end I collected quite a number of interesting ideas for scenes.
So, all a bit of a difficult start, but I think tomorrow will turn out quite a bit better, now that I have actual scenes that I can just write down and see where they lead me! I really should have done this stuff yesterday, but oh well, you know how these things work!
NaNoWriMo 2012
Well, tomorrow it all starts again. The big NaNoWriMo writing challenge! Last year my dad participated in it and achieved his 50,000 word goal. I myself wrote a novel of 80,000 words at the beginning of this year and one month of it was spent writing 50,000 words in just the same way as during NaNoWriMo. This time round, I will join the actual challenge as well. From experience I know that I can make the word count in one month, if I concentrate a bit. I also really wanted to get back into writing regularly, since I am basically stuck at home at the moment due to a recent flare-up of a chronic illness, which makes me feel entirely uncreative.
These last few days I have been working on blog posts for my numerous blogs and I’ve generally brought myself into a writing mindset, so that I can just jump right in once November starts. I will make an effort to keep you updated about my progress on achieving my 50,000 word goal. The project for this month of writing will be the one that I alluded to in my last post. Here a short description:
The novel will be an exploration of mental driftwood. The main character jumps from association to association in a world coloured by paranoid delusions, dreams and coincidences. It will be accompanied by visual fragments, photographs or graphics that relate to the content in one way or another. The idea is to take normal everyday occurrences and interpret them in a way that is bound to seem threatening to the main character. The reader in this case will have to decide for himself whether he wants to get drawn in by the visual aids and the use of the pronoun you, or pull away into safer waters if that is possible. Main themes will be urban alienation, loneliness and depersonalisation / derealisation.
So far I already have quite a number of words, 11,000, so the goal for the end of November will be 61,000 words. At this I will probably not stop and try to get to 70 or 80,000, because 60,000 is still a bit short for a novel in my opinion.
Imaginary people invading the real world
I have some great news, my friends: I finished the first draft of my novel today! You can probably imagine how happy I am about this after months of work and partly struggling with writer’s block. The draft is almost 85,000 words long and has some in some parts already polish. It turned out vulgar, outright pornographic in parts and the thought of my parents reading it makes me want to crawl into a very dark hole. In some way that’s almost reassuring, but since they know my pen name, I probably can’t prevent them from buying a copy if I ever publish it. Scary!
Where it will go is still written in the stars. First I will have to start editing it. Only after the first, or maybe the second edit I will actually show it to other people. Since I’m in a bit of a grey area with some of the details, I will also have to make sure I don’t piss a certain person off, who happens to feature in the novel. This can either be a very bad thing if this person has a problem with it, since rewriting the lead character kind of defeats the point. However, if this person actually likes it, then this could actually open up some cool possibilities. At this point I can only be very unspecific about this, but I hope that it will all work out for the best.
I will now leave the novel be for a few days, since I will be busy with work stuff, but I expect to start editing in June.
I have also been working a little bit on a different project that is slowly taking shape. However, it’s a somewhat disturbing in some ways, so that I can only work on it over short periods. I tend to have the problem that my characters start invading the real world. The best example is the lead character of my novel. He’s obsessed with records and since I did a lot of research about the topic, I ended up buying some records myself and getting my brother’s old record player out of storage. Since the record player is rather shitty though I’m now planning on buying a good one and have literally spent hours researching the right kind of record player. I imagine, that once I have it, I will end up getting a new system for it as well, which will take more hours of research and so on. All because my lead character happens to be fanatic about records.
japanese spider crab © Lilly Schwartz 2012
Then there is the thing with the Japanese Spider Crab. One day this little monster featured in my other project in some remote thought of the main character. It really was a rather unimportant side remark and I can’t even remember how I even came up with mentioning it. However, days later I still ended up in the Sealife Centre here in Berlin, because they happened to have one of those beasts there. They can have a span of 4m and look really scary. Since this project meanders from one bizarre thing to the next I try to only spend a few days in a row on it, since I don’t want it to invade my life too much. I should probably also never write about really crazy characters, because it would probably mess with my head.
At the same time this very knowledge that fictitious characters can well start to have a real impact on your life as a writer is something that I really cherish about having written this novel. Writing gets you a lot closer to a story than reading it and it somewhat makes me wonder about some of the more disturbing books I’ve read over the years. I wonder what these books have done to their authors.
New ideas and some progress
These last few days have been rather productive when it comes to writing. Although I have been trying to work mainly on the novel, I was inspired to work also on a different project that combines writing with visual imagery. I used to do this already many years ago in quite a different and very minimal fashion. Back then I worked on this by taking pictures and adding a short statement to it, inside the frame. The statement might have been one word or just a half sentence, usually in German. Back then I was still writing poetry. Not particularly good poetry, I might add, but just the usual teenage angst type of stuff.
If you want to meet this old incarnation of me (and maybe understand a little German, although that’s not entirely necessary for the most part), head over to http://www.klickerklacker.info. I have to say that the UX is slightly off, since it was supposed to illustrate that the world is not intuitive by itself. If you want to get to know people you sometimes have to keep prodding at some issues, even if you think you’ve already reached the end of the line. So, after the pop up opens you can find more than one picture, just keep clicking on the pictures until the window closes. Nowadays I would probably use a different approach to typesetting on the pictures themselves as well, but a few of the pictures I still find quite interesting.
strange apparitions © Lilly Schwartz 2012
The project I’m working on now is again a combination of text and pictures, but this time with a focus on the text. The pictures I use are mostly public domain, old illustrations from long out of print books, historical photographs, or pictures taken from scientific sources. The idea is to create a study of how different lines of thinking flow together with the perception of the external world. By taking aspects of our visual culture out of context, we can easily create a view that is largely unrelated to what reality really looks like. All of this is based on the assumption that our perception of the world mainly depends on how we interpret what is happening around us from our individual viewpoint.
It is in fact also a quite personal project and might not even say much to other people, since within the project I take little things that happen to me and interpret them differently in a what-if kind of mode. Instead of the relatively down-to-earth type of person that I have become over the last few years, I take on a very paranoid, maybe even misanthropic viewpoint. Of course this can only make sense for anyone else, if I really go overboard with this and create an interpretation that is so absurd that everyone immediately sees how strange all of this really is. The weird thing is that this different interpretation might be closer to what my view of things would have been like during the chaos of my teenage years, of course without reviving the more naive aspects of teenage angst. It plays with melancholy, anxiety and a sense of doom that befalls us for no apparent reason, while working mostly with strange coincidences and focussing on disturbing aspects of the world around us.
So far I have no real clue, where this will lead me, whether it will be long or short and whether it will even reach a conclusion, since it meanders through every day thoughts, obsessions and nightmares. As I say, I’m actually concerned that it might not make much sense to anyone else at this point, but I think if done right this can also be quite interesting to other people. I will tinker around with this for a while and see whether it works or not.
On the novel front I have finally cracked the 70,000 words mark and added a scene after being a bit blocked for a while. I’m not sure how long it will still take me to finish, considering that I’m somewhat distracted as well, but it feels like I’m close to finally wrapping up the first draft. There are still at least 4 scenes missing, but I already know most of their details since I’ve been going over them a lot in my head during the last couple of months.
Vulgar and slightly pornographic
Progress, progress, progress. Yesterday I accidentally wrote a whole scene without using the word “fuck” once. When I noticed that, I was so shocked that I had to change the scene this morning. Tells you something about that writing style of mine. When I told a good friend yesterday that what I was writing was “vulgar and slightly pornographic” he said “I know, that’s what I gathered when you said you’re writing again …” Haha.
So, yesterday:
Today then the great surprise that I was about to crack the 40000 words, so 50% of my novel. This milestone crept up on me somehow without me noticing. The second lead character is getting more shape now, although most of the things that are known are things that this person doesn’t do. The scene about the things this person doesn’t do was quite a fun scene to write, because it’s reasonably difficult to describe these things people don’t do without being boring. It’s like the pink elephant you’re not supposed to think about. Writing about the things people don’t do, makes explicit how much can be said about us even by just observing our non-behaviour. Very strange. I should write a short story about someone who doesn’t do certain things. It would probably be fun and a cool experiment to still have a sort of change in the character within the story.
With my scene about the things the second lead character doesn’t do, I didn’t manage to crack the 40000. I cracked it with a description of the colour grey. There is quite a lot to say about this colour, mainly because it’s so versatile. 40000 words. Quite an achievement! And I’m still on track to finish the first draft on the 01.04.2012. I have to write 1900 words on average every day to make this deadline. So far I’ve not been having many problems to achieve that, since the story seems to be coming naturally to me.
Today:
The flavour of real people
What I am writing at the moment is supposed to capture a certain mood, which wafts through certain parts of society. It’s the mood of those, who are disappointed now, because even the good jobs nowadays make you feel useless and as if you’re wasting your time. Underneath it all there lies a certain truth. Namely that whatever you do, you’re trying to sell people crap they don’t really need. We need food and shelter, and then only when that is covered, we can even start to think about whether our work is fulfilling or not, or whether we even want something like an iPad. No amount of cash or shiny objects will ever make us happy, even if advertising tells us otherwise. No, it’s fundamentally what we ourselves do with our lives that matters. Living with dignity helps, so that you don’t have to apply for benefits even though you have a 40 hour job. Being valued, really valued helps. Not being a hamster in a pointless wheel helps. Doing something that you enjoy and makes you feel as if you’re contributing something worthwhile to society, that’s what has the potential for happiness. A lot of people don’t ever have a shot at something like that and this is at the core of what I’m writing. There is a lot of sarcasm in it and a lot of universal truths that are demonstrated with someone, whose life is shit for no fault of his own.
There are some very odd characters in it generally, interesting people you might not ever meet in real life, but they all have people I know as a basis. None of them is inspired by one single person, they’re all mixtures of different people, who have the characteristics of a certain type of person, who is trying and trying, but never really gets ahead. I’m trying to make these people more than stereotypes, because they are fleshed out with details, with conflicting emotions that make them inconsistent, like the real people out there. That’s where I’m trying to get, capturing the flavour of certain people, without copying them one to one. And every one of them expresses this fundamental need for meaning that society is failing to provide somehow, although they themselves also all fail differently at their attempts to live a different life. It’s not so easy, really, but I’m having a lot of fun writing it. I can criticise a lot of things, because they stay the opinion of the story teller, which might or might not be my own opinion. I can make fun of a lot of things and to be honest I’m also expecting to piss people off in the process. Fundamentally though, I’m just trying to tell a story of those people, who end up never getting what they really want, because that’s just how their life works.
I’m making good progress. Last night I couldn’t sleep until late and ended up working a scene over and over until it had just the right attitude to it. I was tired, so it was difficult, but in the end I closed the laptop at 2.30 am and was finally happy with what I had written. 2400 words again and 2 scenes. It feels as if there is still a lot of work to be done, but I’m progressing with the writing. Soon I will be halfway through.
Give me sarcasm
There are days when it’s harder to write. Today it was a difficult haul somehow, although it was all about stuff I know well and that I care about. Still, it was difficult. In the end I found my sarcasm pretty amusing and think it might actually annoy the hell out of some people. Probably just what I’m going for on this one.
I’m still on schedule and made my daily word target of 1800 words. Since I’ve been writing significantly more than I was meant to the last few days, the number for my daily target is falling. I still have that half written scene on my back though. Well, yesterday’s unfinished business is now the day before yesterday’s unfinished business.
Today I am past 33.3%, so I have 1/3 finished. And I’m still having a lot of fun with it. I think that’s the most important part!
Yesterday’s unfinished business
I guess, when things you normally would have to research just pop out of your memory, you’re writing about something that is very close to your heart. Today this happened to me and I was glad that somehow I could start making sense of some things that weren’t quite clear to me before. It’s as if there has been a secret motivation behind it, although it only just now became clear to me.
However, I got so tired in the end that I got stuck mid-scene, which is not really good, if your routine is to start your day by thinking up a new scene to write later while you’re still in bed. Yesterday’s unfinished business isn’t exactly fitting in that context.
In any case, I actually have a third of it written now. I need to just finish that one scene and write one more to actually be able to make a cut and start with writing the second part, which I hope will be at least a bit less context and a bit more action. Not entirely likely, since at this point it’s mostly still building the conflict for the third part, the calm before the storm, figuratively speaking. The third part is supposed to be all action and rip everything to shreds.
Vulgar badly written crap … or not?
Do you ever have one of these days when you read what you’ve written and think “My goodness, I wonder what it sounds like to other people!” Am I just writing pretentious dribble, or is this merely vulgar badly written crap that should never see the light of day? Or is it actually brilliant and people will see it for what you intended it to be? Well, in any case, I’m having one of these days, after I heard an interview with a writer who I admire and who I’d like to ask for an opinion at some point.
I also wrote quite a bit today. I have to say that while I was cooking dinner I had to sit back down and write down a sentence that just popped into my head while I was stirring some prawns in the pan. Another sentence came to me in the shower again and in general I really feel like I’m making good progress on the story. I ticked off several points I wanted to put into the story and I’m almost ready to start the second part now which also introduces the second main character.
At the moment I’m wondering whether my structure might not actually be a bit boring, but at the moment I can’t really decide, because I’m too much into the story already, to be able to judge objectively. As you might notice, I’m having a rather skeptical day here. Well, it’s fine though, I’ll just carry on and then deal with these issues later on, when the whole story stands.
the shower: a creative fountain (pun intended)
Having a long shower is probably the most productive action a creative person can take.
“Hey, why is our water bill so high?”
“I’ve been writing lately …”
I somehow managed to get 4000 words out today, all thanks to my shower this morning. Came up with two whole scenes and wrote them too! Now I’ve written too much today to write about writing now, so excuse the fact that I’m merely boasting about my word count.
One inch at a time
Something strange happened today. I turned my routine upside down. Instead of working dutifully in the morning and procrastinating mostly in the afternoon I did it the other way round today. I was writing messages to friends, checking the stats of my blog, reading facebook, tweeting, writing another message, listening to music and then finally I sat down and started to write. Actually I sat down with a coffee and then finally it started to flow a bit, maybe there is a connection there.
Today the writing went slowly though in general. I’m still working on the procrastination project, and since that’s the one I can’t leave alone at the moment, it’s probably a sign that it’s the project with the bigger potential. Right in the first paragraph there was this little detail that I needed to research, which quickly amounted to a major web search, but then finally I found what I needed. Even after that it didn’t quite want to come together until finally something popped, it all started making sense and the sarcasm was just flowing out of me (that’s a good thing in this case). In the end I even started chuckling about one of the sarcastic remarks, which almost never happens to me, and then I was quite happy with what I wrote today. It was such a struggle to really get into it though.
I’m also not quite hitting my preferred 2000 words a day mark lately, but that’s hard anyway if you’re still working on the story, the characters and the places at the same time. It’s more like 1000 at the moment, which is decent enough I guess and I believe that it will pick up as soon as I’m more sure about the details of the scenes. I already have a couple of new ones in mind, but they are mostly the challenging ones. Oh well, I’ll get there eventually.
character development in the subway
Did you ever notice that there much more crazy people in big cities? Well, yesterday I was on the subway here in Berlin and was suddenly surrounded by all sorts of strange characters. It was about 8pm on a Friday night and I was on my way home from buying a new desk. So we had:
- the junkie
- the dog
- the dog hater
- the dog owners
- the dog lover
- the homeless man
- the bottle collector
- the asshole
- the friend of the asshole
Now, let me just paint the picture for you:
1. the junkie
He looked almost young, but he had extremely weird bags under his eyes that were as pale as the rest of his skin. He had unwashed thin brown hair that almost reached his shoulders. He was wearing mascara combined with army boots, black jeans, a brown leather jacket of indefinite age, mismatching ski gloves – one brown one black – , a weird black women’s hat with a grey hatband behind which he had stuffed a tea spoon. He had also over-sized yellow children’s sunglasses lying on the rim of the hat that suggest his origin in the punk scene. Apart from that he sported the most bored look imaginable that would still dart from one person to the next.
2. the dog
An old female German shepherd’s dog with brown fur, slightly hanging ears and rather melancholic eyes. Several times she tried to escape out of the grip of the male dog owner.
3. the dog hater
Arab with a white beard who was sitting down. As soon as he saw the dog standing next to him he reacted as if he was offended, stood up and left.
4. the dog owners
A man and a woman. He sported indefinite male looks with indefinite clothes, rather indiscriminate. He was standing and kept the dog locked between his legs. The woman was blond with chin long hair, a Scandinavian face, boots and a good coat. Both youngish, probably early 30s. She sometimes started talking to the dog and made noises to get her attention.
5. the dog lover
Indefinite male character, starts asking questions about the dog, for example whether he is afraid. The owner now starts making sure that the stranger knows that the dog is female. A quick superficial comment of the dog lover says that it looks as if the dog was afraid, since the male dog owner has to keep her between his legs.
6. the homeless man
He is far to the left, so I neither see his face nor his clothes. He sports a slurring voice that suggests how unhealthy it must be to live out there in the street while it’s as cold as it is now. He desperately tries to sell his homeless magazine for the price of “only 1.50€” and “maybe you can also spare a few cents so that I can wash my clothes”. When the homeless man gets onto the subway the other passengers scurry away as if they were dealing with a leper. I can hear their thoughts “Oh god, I hope he doesn’t touch me.”
7. the bottle collector
The reaction of the passengers to him is similar to that towards the homeless man. They scurry in all directions when he sits down, the female dog owner gets up and the bottle collector takes her place. He has a little shopping cart, like the ones old ladies use, and a plastic bag from a cheap supermarket is tied to its handle. It gets dislodged several times and falls to the side, which he is trying to prevent while mumbling to himself. When he got the bag under control he puts his hand deep into the shopping cart as if he was artificially inseminating a cow and produces a bottle of beer. It is obvious by now that he’s staggeringly drunk. He gets the bottle opener out of a front pocket of the shopping cart fiddling a long time to find the pocket, finding the bottle opener in the pocket and struggling not to let it slip out of his hand. After he has opened the bottle the opener disappears more quickly back to its original place. The unshaven face of the bottle collector scrounges up as if he’s eating a lemon when he is drinking from the bottle. Apparently he doesn’t like beer. A shame really, since that’s all he can afford.
8. the asshole
He is wrapped in stylish attire, or what he thinks that entails. Padded running shoes that honestly look silly, but which are probably incredibly expensive, jeans of a tight, but not too tight fit, with the tag of one of the expensive brands, a jacket that is hardly enough for the weather but looks expensive. His face is red, as if he’s too warm or on weird drugs. He’s young, but older than his friend, maybe 25. Short spiky hair cut with about a ton of hair gel in it, eyebrow piercing. He probably has a distasteful tattoo somewhere under his clothes too. Every couple of minutes he speaks on his smartphone which is for some reason pink. First I think that he might be gay since he’s paying too much attention to his clothes, but then he doesn’t quite have the right style and shouts too loudly while he’s speaking on the phone. After his first phone conversation he says to his friend. “That was my half girlfriend. You met my proper one, but you gotta meet her too, she’s gorgeous. A little stupid though.” Yeah, you gotta be talking, idiot! Later on the way out he shouts at random strangers that he finally has arrived. Definitely drugs, but no idea what kind.
9. the friend of the asshole
He sports the gangster style, baggie clothes, instead of a coat he wears one of those sports jumpers into which two guys of his stature would fit. He has a baseball cap sideways on his head. About 18, seems almost shy, but he might be played down by his cocky friend. His comments are short and I can’t hear them from where I am sitting. When they leave the train he trots behind the other guy like a silent shadow.
Obviously the junkie, the bottle collector and the asshole left more traces in my memory, but this doesn’t mean that they are good characters for main protagonists. They are too far removed and it’s hard to feel empathy for them without further characterization. I feel compelled by the male dog owner who remained somewhat indefinite, since he didn’t speak and had nothing special about him. Also the friend of the asshole seems worth exploring. How and why does he cope with that cocky bastard? However, these passing characterizations might actually be enough to make a subway ride more vivid, maybe that’s enough already.
So, now I know it: Next time I need some character meat I just get on the subway for a while and watch people.
bearable is barely enough 