Kamikaze Creation

I'm embarking on a completely irrational mission. While reading one of my favorite diarylanders, I was enlightened on the topic of NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. Upon further research, I realized I haven't been getting enough abuse at work or home so I've decided to take it upon myself to cause severe brain damage every single day at 7:00 AM.

I have to write first thing in the morning or I will spend all my creativity for the day ruminating on why I don't have to write. It would take me an hour to put some words down, but I'll spend six convincing myself I don't have to.

In any case, the point of the challenge is to write an entire novel during the month of November.

While this sounds like an asinine task, the participants assure you that it can and has been done. And in Bird by Bird fashion (and if you haven't read it, read it now -- I mean, now) it is broken down into 1,667 words a day. How do you eat an elephant? Bite by bite.

The point is to write every single day, 1667 words, whether you want to or not. 1,667 words is not an enormous amount of writing. I think the hardest part is doing it every day. Because if you skip a day, the count becomes 3,334 words, which is an enormous amount of writing.

In preparation, and to figure out just how much time I need and how to schedule my day (writing first thing, remember?) I've been warming up. I started a week ago, just kind of freewriting, what Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, calls "morning pages." 1,667 words takes me about an hour. And that includes getting coffee and adjusting my chair and changing my music every half album or so. If I stopped to think about where I wanted to go with the writing, I would stall and end up useless. So I'll be writing and hit a block and just keep on anyway. A lot of it sucks. But looking back through what I've written (and I've made a pact with myself -- NO editing, you red-pen-loving freak) and there are a few great images, or paragraphs, that just give me goosebumps and the feeling of,"wow -- I wrote that?" It's really great.

And then, as the NaNoWriMo site guarantees you, there have been days of I Hate Myself and I Want to Die. There have been a day or two when I hit the "Word Count" button every sentence or two, when I'm pulling teeth without novocain, but then I'll hit something good, someone will walk by and I'll get to write about their ugly hat, and I'm off and running.

This will not be the first time I've written a novel. I wrote one in the fifth grade called Stride for Stride which was a story about the horse racing industry and the people behind it. Their relationships, their dedication to that life. The ugly sides of it too. Pre-Seabiscuit Block Buster. It was a beginner's novel, but a beefy 250 page work of fiction nonetheless, and my mentor had me research publishing houses. I sent the manuscript out to a dozen or so agents who wisely did not offer to publish it for me. She knew very well, just as I do today, that it was clearly a fifth-grade novel and could never, by any stretch of the imagination, be distributed in print. But she encouraged me anyway, and backed me up, and the enthusiasm of that support has stayed with me for 15 years.

Today was really weird in a synchronicity way. I have this stack of cards, called the Observation Deck, that I use frequently. They have the simplest phrases on them, like "Take a look inside" or "Capture the scent." But combined with a random image or thought, they can really get me going. Inspired by an emotional outpouring last night that left me drained and cried-out when I woke up, I started thinking about loss. I was thinking about how so much of what we feel as loss is not losing something in your hands, but the plans you had for that thing in the future. You're mourning not the lost child who was two years old, but all that child might have been in its lifetime. We do this to ourselves. And our fear of not being able to realize those plans is what paralyzes us to the present. It's pretty textbook I guess, but being able to truly get it, and to be able to apply it to a situation in my own life was a sudden and unexpected gift.

Deep in this thought, I bent over my backpack (having one of those mornings when nothing fits anywhere it's supposed to and I'm dropping everything and unable to get out of the house) and my deck of observation cards fell out of my bag where they are crammed in an elastic band. The one that landed face up said "Locate the fear."

It takes me 40 minutes to walk to work each morning, and I've been using the time to think about what it is I want to write about, so when I get to the café I'm ready to go. And I walked all the way to Harvard Sq. this morning thinking about a million different kinds of fear, and how frightened I am of some things, things more important than trains, and when I got to writing I knew what my main character feared the most. I knew it clearly, just how I knew that the fear of losing a friend to distance was causing me unnecessary pain.

So this morning I located the fear. Inside the fiction. Which made everything else in my life seem a step removed. Less dramatic. Strange, huh?

I'm looking forward to this project. My sister is doing it as well, and some of her students (she teaches English). I think I can do it. I really do. Not only does the abuse appeal to me, but also the idea of showing up every day to prove just how important this words thing is to me.

Anyway I have to go finish my Halloween costume. I'm high as a fucking kite from this spray paint. Wait till you see this costume. You'll be so scared of me that won't sleep for weeks.