Writing is Like

Writing is like trying to piece together a puzzle from a bag of puzzle pieces you found in the back of your closet: no picture on the box to follow, no way to know if the pieces you have are for one puzzle or several.

Writing is like trying to take a decent picture of the sunset on an iPhone. The colors never come out as beautiful as your brain interprets them.

Writing is like cracking pistachio nuts and then dropping them into a box. The pistachios are words, and the box is your novel. You can't see the progress you're making because the box is opaque. You crack open a nut, discard the shells, and drop the little green kernel into the darkness, hoping it's enough. The only way to know how far you've gotten is to pick up the box and shake it, to hear the satisfying rattle, to feel the weight. But actually see your progress? Harder than it seems.

Lately I've been feeling jealous of visual artists. Not because I wish I was better at art (though sometimes I do) but because their progress is so obvious. From a blank canvas, an image emerges. The pieces of a quilt come together, square by square. A sweater is birthed from the apex of two knitting needles. The results of this kind of effort are tangible: you can touch them, see them.

Writing a novel is different. It feels transient. Your progress is marked by pages and word counts, by how long it takes you to scroll. When I open my word document, I don't immediately get a sense of how far I've come, or of how far I need to go. All I see are the last few paragraphs and a little blinking cursor. It's the same no matter where I am in the process, which makes it feel like I'm starting from the same place, every single time.

I suppose it was different before computers. When you pulled a finished page out of your typewriter and placed it on the stack of pages that came before it: physical, tangible proof of something that was once in your brain. I like the idea of this, but the truth is, I've tried writing big projects on typewriters, and the form is too rigid for me. I can barely get through one page before I'm dying to change something and frustrated that I can't.

In a lot of ways I love how mutable writing on screens is. I can sit down and put whatever is in my brain on "paper", knowing that it is instantly changeable whenever I feel like it. It's freeing. I can tell my inner-critic to take a seat and not interrupt until I tell her it's okay to do so. On the page, anything can happen, and if I don't like it, no big deal. One click, and its gone.

The flip side of that coin, though, is that something so changeable is hard to hold onto. A novel in itself is hard to picture all at once, while if I asked you to visualize a painting you could do it, no problem. I feel as though I'm trying to hold water in my hands but it keeps slipping through my fingers. I want to be able to hold something up, to say, "Look what I'm making. Look how far I've come." But all I have are word counts. All I have are page numbers. They work as markers, as flags. But they don't feel substantial. You can't glance at them and see the whole picture.

Instead, I just catch glimmers. A shape appears out of the fog. I hit milestones, and compare them to things I can visualize more easily. For instance, I recently passed 50,000 words, which is about the length of The Great Gatsby. When I don't have a good frame of reference, I try to make time the thing I can measure. I've been logging my writing using a time tracking app. There at least I can see how much of my day goes to this thing, this growing, changing thing that is impossible to see.

Most of the things I want to make are intangible. Things like novels (which will hopefully be book-shaped one day, but probably won't be for a long time) and podcasts and blog posts. It's been plaguing me because I want to share my progress, to have something to show for my efforts, but all I have are these words and pixels.

And so, I build my days around them. I carve out the time and record and measure and make due with flags and markers. When my first draft is done (and it will be soon, I hope) I will print the entire thing out (warts and all) and hold it in my hands. I've always imagined myself lugging a manuscript around with me to coffee shops, marking it up in different colored pens, but honestly I'm not sure that's the fate for this project. This feels almost like a practice round, like the challenge I cut my teeth on. I may come back to it, I may not. Either way, I'll have it. Physical proof of something I made. And that will make all the guesswork worthwhile.

Until then, I'll just keep dropping pistachios into the box.

Halfway

In case you weren't aware, I'm writing a novel. Actually, you probably weren't aware because I've specifically not mentioned it on this blog until now. But yesterday, I hit an arbitrary milestone towards my arbitrary word count goal of 80,000 words, and it felt like time to announce: I made it to the halfway point.

Halfway. The term implies that something is in the process of becoming something else, but it's also a pause. On Dictionary.com the sample sentences for halfway are as follows: "He stopped halfway down the passage"; "She woke halfway through the night"; and "I'm incapable of doing anything even halfway decent." Besides the humor in these sentences (especially the last one), I find that the halfway point is a time for reflection. So I'm reflecting.

It's hard to know what to say about this book because for so long I've avoiding calling it what it is. I avoided saying that I was writing a novel (except to my family) because I didn't want it to fall into the ever growing category of "Projects Laura Says She's Working on But Never Finishes." Besides, the same goal has shown up on my new year's resolutions every year for probably the past ten years: "Write a book!" Always with so much enthusiasm. Always with so much hope.

I've never gotten as far with a project as I have with this one, and miraculously, it feels like I might actually finish it. But right, I'm supposed to be reflecting. I'm such a future-oriented person that I tend to see every accomplishment as a gateway to the next big thing. I need to stop doing that. I need to acknowledge all the work that went into making it happen.

So let's start from the beginning. This isn't like other things I've written, where I can pinpoint the exact moment the idea came to me. I do know when the seed of the idea appeared, though. It was the summer of 2014, and I was working at the Harris County Archives. The office was quiet, and white, and I was cataloguing the dates and contents of documents in a series of boxes, so I often listened to music and podcasts to fill up some of that quiet, empty space. I listened to two podcasts back to back: the "Wild Ones" episode of 99% Invisible and the Radiolab episode about the Galapagos Islands. I'd always had a passing interest in the Galapagos, but these two episodes filled me with curiosity. Who lives on the islands? What was it like in Darwin's time vs now? The islands loomed in my imagination: they felt untamed and magnetic and completely mysterious. I knew immediately that I had to write something set there.

I got as far as writing the first paragraph of a short story called "Mother and Daughter Go to the Sunny Galapagos," before in classic Laura fashion, I abandoned it. For a year. One day I re-opened the document, re-read the paragraph and let it grow into something larger. Something with more scope than a short story. Something that could, maybe, one day, be a novel.

I think there are a couple of factors that have made this project easier to write so far:

1. No re-reading. I hardly ever go back and re-read what I've written after writing it. That's not to say that I don't edit as I go - I can write and re-draft and tweak whatever I've written that day as much as I want. But as soon as 24-hours have passed, I don't look at what I wrote the day before unless it's just to remind myself where I am. If I did re-read whole passages with even that little bit of distance, I don't think I'd have the confidence to keep going, no matter how much I told myself "It's a first draft. It's supposed to be bad."

2. Loose structure. I think I've finally figured out an outlining technique that works for me. Basically I make a list of all the scenes I know I want to write, in somewhat chronological order. As I write, I move those scenes onto a list of existing scenes. That way I can see what I've written and what still needs to be written at a glance. I write in what is basically chronological order, but if I really get stuck, I let myself skip ahead to important scenes from my list that I really want to write.

3. Cutting myself slack. I want to finish this draft. I want to finish it so badly it hurts sometimes, because I know exactly how far I have to go, and how bad I am at writing every day. But I also know that I'm not the kind of writer who can just pound out 2,000 words a day and not care if they're bad. I like being happy with what I've written that day, even if it's only one sentence that I'm proud of. My goal is to write as quickly as I can without turning the experience into a chore. I even let myself "start over" when I thought – 25,000 words in – that the novel needed to be told from a different character's perspective. It took me 5,000 words of back-tracking to figure out that no, that wasn't the case.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm really proud of how far I've gotten. I still have another 40,000 words to go, but somehow they don't feel as daunting. Because I'm halfway. And I'm pausing. And that's a good feeling.

Novel in Progress is....Finally in Progress!

Hey Everyone! I've been in San Antonio these past five days, on a business trip with my parents, which is why I haven't been posting or commenting. Of course I've gone much longer stretches of time without posting or commenting, so this explanation falls short. My apologies. 


Anyway, while in San Antonio I began thinking about my novel, and how I've been afraid to start it or even take a step toward it for a while now. It took me a while to find a good idea. Actually I had a number of ideas, but some of them I lost interest in and couldn't move forward on, or I thought they weren't novel worthy enough. But I've finally settled on one. It may not even be a particularly good idea, but I'm interested in it, and thats what counts. During my little trip to San Antonio, I think I realized that my goal is really just to finish a novel, and I'll worry about publication later.


*sigh* What a breath of fresh air! For a while there I kept thinking way too far in advance, instead of just focusing on what I have to do right now, which is outline my story and then write it. And yes, I'm doing an outline. It's a slightly modified version of The Snowflake Method, which seemed like the best place to start for a beginning novelist like me. 


So, if you'd like to keep track of my progress....wait a while. Haha. It's going to take me a long time to finish the design documents, partly because I'm working on revising some short stories that are going into a Blurb book made by me and my very artistic best friend (a.k.a: VABF). My goal is to finish them by the time she gets back from an art workshop in Chicago (I'm so proud of her!!), so that we can start laying things out. So...that means my novel is on the back burners for now, but I will still be working on it whenever I can. 


And... I've been talking way too much. All you people out there have something to say! What are some projects that you're working on?

Diary of a First Time Novelist

Dear Diary,
        It's me again! As you may have heard from the pages of my other (countless) notebooks, I got it into my head that this was the summer that I was going to write a novel. Having never written a novel before, the whole process seems terribly daunting. So far I have a basic outline of the plot, and several in depth character sketches. I started writing a couple days ago, and it's going ok, but I find that I can't write for long periods of time. Maybe it's my inner editor kicking in, telling me everything has to be perfect the first time around. I know I shouldn't expect perfection, but it's hard for me to loosen up and just write. What should I do? But then again, why am I asking you this question? You're just a dumb diary :)


Laura


There you have it folks. This teenage writer is attempting a novel. Not that I haven't tried before. I've thought about taking part in NaNoWriMo, but school work pretty much takes over my life in the fall. Summer is the only time I get any real writing done. If you'd like to keep tabs on my progress, look for the picture of the typewriter on the left. 


Oh! And before I forget, let me bring your attention momentarily to the new page features. (Yay! Are you excited? 'Cause I am.) To your left you will see a place where you can follow me, a box that tells the (rather discouraging) word count of my novel-in-progress, and finally a list of blogs that I found interesting, and hope you will too. Now, if you look to your right, you will see the Daily Photo Prompt, my profile, categories, and archives. And up at the top is a quote that I thought was pretty cool.


I hope you enjoyed hearing about my writing struggles, but I'd also like to hear about yours. What work-in-progress is giving you the most trouble right now? And how do you overcome the hopeless desire for perfection?