From the foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on.  He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels."

From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, regarding Robert Towne (who wrote classics such as Chinatown):
"Towne had two weaknesses.  He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts.  And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller.  He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events.  He was anguished over what he felt was his poverty of imagination."

You know, one of the ways I stop myself on some of my side projects is by thinking I don't have a grip on what I'm doing yet.  I imagine other successful people as knowing exactly what they're doing, not as people who are struggling. 

However, as artists, as creators, we must all be on the edge of human experience, right?  Working in the unknown.  Creating something nobody has seen.  It's going to be a struggle.  Only later might others look and go, yeah, that makes sense.

As always, it takes a ton of persistence, which is another word for being stubborn.

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Bob Dylan hadn't set out to write songs.  He played folk songs written by others until new songs just came out of him.

Tolkein absorbed epic poems and tales and wrote his own version of them.

Soak up the real, pure water--movies and stories themselves.  Never mind "the rules"--theories applied to existing art but not used to create that art.

Soak it up until your own story bursts out.

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Laying in bed this morning, the chorus flashed into my mind.  By the time the computer booted, I had a verse.

Little Betty Lou was feelin kinda blue and she din't know what to do last night
She couldn't stay at home so she called me on the phone and said "Boy I gotta get out tonight"
So I said

Hey you wanna go where we go when we go where we go when we go tonight?
Hey you wanna do what we do when do what we do when we do tonight?
Hey you wanna play what we play when we play what we play when we play tonight?
And it'll be alright
And it'll be alright

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wow....it's been too long since I've written.

I woke up on November 22 (Thanksgiving day) and started to work on my novel.  I was just over 40,000 words at that point.  I wrote a paragraph, didn't like it, deleted it.  I started again, didn't like it, deleted it.

I found myself wondering why I was having so much trouble.  Up until then I just sat down and wrote, without thinking too much.

The answer was in two words.

I wrote "The End."

I wasn't actually done with the novel but I was done with the first draft.  My head was already thinking about how to rearrange it and make it better and all kinds of second-draft-type ideas.

So: I didn't reach the goal of 50,000 words, but it's not a 50,000 word novel (at least, not in first draft).  I'm much happier of reaching the goal of getting the story down on paper.

My original plan was to start my second draft right away.  Then I read in Stephen King's "On Writing" that he waits two months before he even looks at his first draft again.  I thought that sounded like a good idea.

Actually, I'm itching to work on it right now.

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So, 5 days into National Novel Writing Month and I've broken 10,000 words.  I'm discovering a lot as I do this...

First, it really helps me to have a "sort-of" outline.  This story started as wordplay, which turned into a poem, which turned into images that nagged at me for months, which I then started outlining onto 3x5 index cards.  About a month ago I lost the index cards!  I'm sure they're in the house somewhere (I think I'm sure...) but I realized as I started writing that I don't need the index cards.  The outlining helped but now I'm just going on instinct.  And I'm amazed at how many new ideas and themes are showing up into the writing.

Another thing: I've always read about the "inner critic."  The whole goal of NaNoWriMo is to turn off the inner critic and just write.  Quantity over quality (and then rewrite in December...).  Turning off the critical facility while I'm writing has really freed me up, but I'm noticing something else interesting: my creative side doesn't trust the critic!  So, even my creative instincts are saying "We should rewrite this because I've got an interesting idea of where it could go..."

When I feel that way, I tell myself: trust the rewrite.  We'll be able to do it when we get there.

You see I'm splitting my personality.  Well, here's what I've decided:

November belongs to the heart.  I'm going to write this story down as passionately as I can, without thinking about it much.

Phase 2, which will start in December, will be heart and head together.  There are bound to be plot inconsistencies and sections that need to be removed or added.  Also, I plan on rewriting each chapter one by one.  At that time I will know what's going on with each chapter, how it fits in with the whole novel, and I will understand the characters, settings, and themes better.

Phase 3 is mostly from the head.  This is going to be critical editing. Fixing grammatical problems and that kind of a thing.

After that: submit to an agent and hope for the best!

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NaNoWriMo

Last year in November I had a vision about a young warrior discovering what it means to be a man.  I've been letting the idea grow in my heart over these last 12 months and the other day I decided I would rebuild my laptop (with Linux) to be a word processor for writing this down.  I want the laptop to be a stripped-down computer with one purpose: I turn it on and write my novel.

As I was reading up on writing software for Linux, I discovered something I had heard of but completely forgotten about.  November is National Novel Writing Month!  I saw this on November 1, and I had my laptop ready to go on November 1, so I think that's a sign I should get busy and write this thing.

What better day to start?  I'm taking a two-hour train ride to Richmond tonight.  I should be able to get a few thousand words in.

Keep an eye on my progress here: Doug's profile at NaNoWriMo

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I am into everything.  I've got tons of projects in various states of completion: websites, music projects, music practice, fiction writing, nonfiction writing, an art festival I want to run next spring, a HAM radio project I would like to kick off, languages (living and dead) that I would love to learn, and more.

Given that I have MAYBE five hours a week to put into passions like this....something has to go.

I've talked about minimalism of possessions.  What about minimalism of activities?  Minimalism of targets of passion?

Even this list of ten or so projects is a reduction for me.  Thinking about reducing it to three...two...one?...is painful for me.  I've made a quick list of my fears of focusing on one project or hobby:

• what if it doesn't carry all the rewards I'm seeking?
• what if I can't do it as well as I like?
• what if I would have been amazing at something that I dropped?
• what if I get bored with it?
• what happens to the other ideas I have? Do they die?
  

and, of course...

• WHAT IF I PUT ALL THAT EFFORT INTO IT AND I'M STILL NO GOOD AT IT??

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