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.
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:
What just happened?
I had a particularly good day writing (2300 words) and managed to draft a dialogue that I particularly like. Of course I know that probably half of it won’t survive the editing, but it’s good to be getting it out of me. The story is by now haunting me and suddenly starts developing when I’m in the shower or eating breakfast. It’s almost as if it wants to be written. My second lead character is also taking shape now and I had some good ideas how to make my research even more interesting. It’s begging to be written.
I’m starting to remember now how the whole writing process can manage to fully engulf you, gobble you up and then spew you out half-digested, wondering what the hell just happened. I’m sure that happened to me once or twice this week and I love it. Soon I have my protagonist visiting my dreams trying to wake me up, so that I sit down and continue writing. What was it about the need to write they always talk about? Well, writers need that. And it’s trying to eat me now … somehow cool.
Aiming high
Although I didn’t have brilliant ideas today that made me chuckle about my own sarcasm I surely had a good day writing. I managed to get 2300 words down and finish an entire scene that I was writing. I’ve also been putting off writing a specific scene that I have in mind, because I just wasn’t in the right mood. Obviously I had enough to write about anyway.
And then I also found this great feature in Scrivener that shows you how you’re doing with your project target. You can set the amount of words you’re generally aiming at, set a deadline and it will calculate for you how much you need to write every day to keep your deadline. It also shows you your progress in a neat colour-coded progress meter, a bit like the ones I’m posting here, just more fancy. It even lets you set a Growl notification that pops up when you reach your session target. Today I moved from a red project target bar to an orange one, so it actually gives me nice positive feedback on all the progress I’ve been making today. Certainly motivating. If I would manage to keep my target of 2000 words a day I would be finished with my goal of 80000 words by the 1st of April, which is so soon that it’s laughable. I doubt that I’ll be able to manage that, really, but aiming high sometimes helps with the motivation. As you might have noticed, my procrastination project has somehow amounted to something proper that I’m really eager to follow through. After working on it properly for a few days I’m happy to say that there can’t be any doubt now: It’s a great and promising project.
That’s it folks, I’m eloping
Nah, of course not! I said I’d stick with the project, and I will. However, it might actually take a little more time than anticipated. As I have already mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I had a great new idea while I was pondering my writing process. In fact, the idea didn’t want to get out of my head ever since. I’ve been in the process of developing the protagonist further. He now has a physical appearance, a character, life choices, and a serious attitude problem, which makes him not only interesting, but also the dangerous type I tend to stay away from in real life. I even wrote the first couple of scenes. It was a lot of fun because I could reminisce about my golden days, which is strongly connected to the story, the music, the films, all of that. I ended up with one really good scene that I probably don’t even have to polish much, since I completely like it already.
I just can’t help developing the idea further and I think I will actually keep it as my procrastination project. I even added a writing progress meter for that one too. By the way, procrastination is how I got through university: I procrastinated with the next project that I had to hand in. Why is it, that even when we do exactly what we want to do, we still procrastinate? Well, at least now I’m channeling that procrastination energy into something with great potential.
bearable is barely enough 