November 5: 11-something teen
Still don’t have my computer working – boo.
Sat in the computer lab and wrote 6 pages anyway, and I like them – yay.
I have a great “the universe wants me to write this book” story I’ll relay tomorrow, but I just wanted to get down that I’m still keeping up with my counts.
Have a good week, all.
I’m not getting anything done. I didn’t realize I had school crap this week that would take time. And I’m also just procrastinating. This week is not going the way I thought it would. I reorganized the chapters, and know what I need to do. I just haven’t written anything new since Monday, and still need to do a stupid cite check for school. Which makes me feel like I only have today and the weekend, which makes it like any other week. And really, right now I’d rather watch a George Lopez DVD I have. Sigh.
I need more time. People can lecture all day about how writers write, but I’m not someone who can get up an hour early and write furiously. I’ve been producing stuff, but this is tough. There’s always something else “real” for school I could be doing, something I’m accountable to someone else for. So here I am in the middle of my “free” week, wishing I…had a free week. Bleh.
I don’t think I’m going to get another 10 pages out before Sunday. Although now my count is screwed up because I cut and pasted and reorganized, so it’s kind of meaningless anyway. Maybe I’ll give the total count a rest for a few weeks, while still trying to do 5 p/week. I don’t know. I’m annoyed, and I can’t tell if I’m pushing myself too hard or not hard enough.
October 15: 90 pages
Threw a tantrum today. Very undignified. Husband helped calm me down – took me to neighborhood pub, bought me veggie burger and lemonade. We came home, I wrote 8 pages, and the Giants beat the Falcons, so everyone’s happy.
I’ll try to post a picture of the treasure map/collage I made for the book. One phrase I glued down says “HAMMERIN’ AWAY.” I don’t think everything I’m writing is super fantastic, but I’m trying. And hammerin’ away I am.
September 16: 72 pages
Which means I’m now more than 25% of the way to 275. Neato.
I wrote 11 pages between having that whine-fest and now. Have no idea what the total count is because of the moving things around, plus my computer won’t charge and is functionally dead because of it, so I can’t get on and add things up like I’d like to.
The point is, I wrote anyway (on a school computer in a lab), I caught up, I got to write some loving-if-critical description of Long Beach, and I’m once again in good shape.
Up and down, up and down. I wonder if it’s going to be like this the whole way.
October 23: 95 pages
The new first chapter is done, and that feels good. And now I have a whole week to play with what I’ve got…should be quite an adventure.
But, now, to free movie screenings for inspiration.
October 8: 82 pages
I had a bad week. Couldn’t get anything done. My plan to catch up Friday only resulted in typing up the few pages I’d handwritten in NYC last weekend and adding a little bit. Yesterday we cooked and had a friend over and had a great time, but I did no writing.
But there’s always a new day. I went to Starbucks and to school and finished up a brand-new chapter. 8 pages. Now I’m 4 pages behind the Fall count, because of the week I took off, but I’m making it up in 2 weeks when there’s no classes at school. I feel a lot better, and I think this new chapter is really good. Phew.
I’m a little unsure of keeping the page counts going because now that I’ve redone the plot, I have several dozen pages that will have to get cut because they no longer fit. But I think the right thing to do is keep it all, even the stuff that seems like it’s the wrong plot, until I get to 275. 275 won’t mean I have a finished book, it’ll mean I put in a novel-sized effort and came up with almost all the raw material. After that I can fix it into something pretty. Anyway, I think that’s OK.
No page count this week. No pages, either. I thought I would feel bad the first time I missed a weekly goal, but I don’t. Because I just did a ton of work and turned this ship around.
Instead of just plugging along and feeling really ambivalent about it, I stopped and decided I did want a plot outline after all. I’m not used to a story of this scope, and it needs multiple plot threads and arcs. I needed a basic roadmap for all five members of my novel’s family, and notes about the other family members and significant others who show up. Characterization comes easily to me. Plot does not, and I wanted to feel like I had something planned that could actually be 275 pages, which wasn’t happening with what I was writing.
So I scribbled events on slips of paper, including events I’d thought of when I conceived of the novel that weren’t appearing in what I was writing so far, and started moving them around on my rug. I stood over it to see if it felt like there was actually rising action and a climax instead of just random episodes. I moved a child going missing, which was becoming a central event of my manuscript, into the first chapter where it provided strong but self-contained action to jumpstart the narrative and set up the bad relationship of the parents, instead of dragging on and on and requiring some kind of giant payoff I hadn’t planned on. I brought back a romance with a woman seeking asylum in the U.S. And gave another character a wedding. I even switched my narrator from one sibling to another. Suddenly the relationships really started to pop.
Maybe most importantly, I thought of cake. I meant the book to partly track a neighborhood “cake lady,” and the way making cakes for every family and neighborhood function allows her to see important moments in people’s lives. I had totally gotten away from that. So I thought of a dessert that would appear in every chapter to mark an occasion happening there, even briefly. That was great for keeping Mom in the picture and making scenes discrete in time.
Then I typed up a plot outline with a couple sentences about each chapter, including the cake image and the time of year that goes with it. Room to play around, but I could write straight from it without any new plot ideas if I had to.
I feel 500% better about where this is going. Next week I start moving around what I have into the new plot and writing the new pieces. The narrator switch will require editing, but not so much that it’ll be a problem. I think this is going to work. Right now I’m going to go get a cooking magazine so I can finish my novel collage/treasure map that I’ve been cutting stuff for.
As of 5:00 today, I hadn’t written a single word this week. I was prepared to write a pessimism post about how crappy my week was, how I had meetings upon meetings, I had to watch auditions for my singing group, I had to figure out how to get to and from the clinic site, etc. I almost gave up and didn’t try to write this week at all.
Then I napped a bit, and my husband gave me our stuffed hedgehog with a baseball cap on with the word “WIFE” taped on over “Yankees.” So I thought I’d try.
He came in the room an hour later. I held up three fingers. Three pages. That would have been enough to make me happy for this week. I said “I have a couple more paragraphs in me, and then I’m calling it quits.” He left.
I opened the door half an hour later. “I have four pages and a paragraph,” I said, surprised. We decided I had to go for it.
Twenty minutes later, I was rolling over that sweet delicious page break, the fifth page done.
A busy, crappy week, to be sure. But it’s Saturday, and I wrote my five pages. Small miracles. Hooray!