Joy Ray

On the one hand....

For those interested, a quick update on how my novel is going:

1. I finished a start-to-end draft in the beginning of January.  Which I began working on the day after Thanksgiving.  After working on previous and unfinished drafts for three years.

2. Having finished my first complete draft, I have since been editing. 

3. Being a ruthless perfectionist, my editing will in all likelihood not be totally complete by the time I go back home. Sigh.  But I hope to finish it up shortly thereafter. 

4. I'm vacillating between disappointment in not meeting my (probably unrealistic) goal of being 100% done when I go home...and excitement over the fact that (on the other hand), my novel is more or less "done" but I'm just "polishing" it.

All I can say is, behold life as a Virgo, Libra rising: the curse of the ambivalent perfectionist!

Theme cloud

One of the revision exercises suggested by the Plot Whisperer is to jot down ideas about the theme of each scene. Here is that list for my novel-in-progress, turned into a tag cloud.

abandonment action age ambition americans avoid becoming belonging betrayal better boredom career carefulness carelessness comic coming community concerns conflict confrontation connections control country danger deception devotion diligence disgust disintegration dread drinking ego everyone failure family fear financial focusing foreign future gathering gratitude happens help hostility identity idolatry indulgence inevitable information insider issues journey justice kindness knowledge lack letting longing love maturing memory mistaken mistrust networking obligations obsession oneself opportunity others outsider passion past pays perspective persuasion plan pleasing pressure prestige prior problems punishment quest relief restoration retaliation sacrifice secrecy self shared skills solve taking technical trust truth unexpected violence

created at TagCrowd.com

It's official - I have completed the first draft of my novel!

As of 12:12PM on Monday, January 5, 2009, in Buenos Aires, Argentina - the first draft of my novel is at last complete! It took 39 days to write, and is 87,500 words in length.

There is still a lot of rewriting to go, but this is definitely a HUGE milestone! Thanks everyone for your support and good thoughts. Keep them coming as I would like to come back to the US (in 49 days) with a draft that's ready for public consumption.

And now for a brief update

The last week or so has been crazy, a whirlwind of sand, holiday parties and a wee touch of Montezuma's revenge! And we have been camera-less for most of it (soon to be remedied, I hope). Forthwith, a brief synopsis of the highlights.

This is a stuffed fox. We have been to 2 parties at this fox's home, where we mingled with politicians (no seriously), got tango lessons, and set off many fireworks on the roof (the latter of which is apparently the time-honored way to celebrate Christmas here in Buenos Aires).

This is the beach at Pinamar, which is about 4 hours from Buenos Aires. I did not take this photo (alas: no camera, no helicopter). We spent the weekend there, during which time it rained, we ate rabas (calamari), it stopped raining, we ate alfahores (crazy sweet cookie things), and Johnny Cash never quite wrapped his little head around the concept of "water that moves around on its own."

This is a pisco sour, which is really good as well as quite strong. The foamy stuff, we learned yesterday, is egg white. We also learned that despite the fact that I'm not the biggest seafood fan, I actually love ceviche. It is the new sushi!

In writing news, I am very close to completing a draft of my novel (!!) I have around 40-50 pages to go, which isn't much in the broad scheme of things. And the end seems to be easier to write than the middle, so I feel less like this...

...and more like this...

Yay!

Numbers, words, and the importance of psyching oneself out

I am the sort of person who is motivated by numerical goals. For instance, a few years ago I got into running. Each mile equalled Y laps around the little track at my gym. I’d count the laps and use the count to psych myself into going a little further. I was able to run more at the gross, dingy gym than outside along the beach, because of the weird way in which numbers are motivating to me.

I’m finding it’s the same with writing, and what I call BookMath™, which works like this: a typical novel has 80,000-100,000 words; I expect mine to come out at the upper end of that range because of its complexity and multiple POVs (2, at this point).

Every day while we’re here, I am trying to write 3,000 words. I’m not sure how I arrived at this number exactly, except that it seems to be the wordcount BELOW which I feel the itchy, irritable undercurrent that I didn’t write enough today dammit, which makes it hard to relax and have fun and sleep and so on. And ABOVE which, I feel bliss, success, accomplishment, boy I’m the greatest ever. And isn’t that a nice way to feel?

Some days, like the last 2 days, I have written 5,000 words – whoo! Other days, like last Sunday, after we’d been out at a nightclub with our Argentine friends until 7:30AM…nada. So far, I’ve written about 40,000 words in 2 weeks – which is almost half of my novel. Or at least half of a draft of my novel, which then will of course need editing. And I have to say, I’m feeling pretty damn skippy about that!

The big question, about which I’m trying not to think: Can I finish a complete draft at that pace, say, by January? If I can, it will be the first time that I’ve actually completed a draft versus gotten stuck somewhere in the middle and become suddenly obsessed with playing Yahoo downloadable games about running a car wash or pet store or fashion boutique (anyone else out there love those, too?) So I’m not thinking about the end goal, I’m just thinking 3,000 words a day.

My Addiction

I am also trying not to go back and tweak as I write but just make like Lee Nails and press on, with the idea that I can and will sort through the details later.

Why I’m here

Someone I know asked before we left why I couldn’t just stay in California, at home, and work on my book. I am discovering that at least part of the answer lies in inspiration. I know how things work in the US. I know which restaurants I like, how to get copies made or use an ATM machine, how much to tip and how traffic rules work.

Here, it’s like starting over. I constantly am ping-ponging between two states: On the one hand, vacation-style relaxation, induced by blue skies and warm temperatures, and a laid-back South American vibe; on the other hand, an undercurrent of high alert that anything could happen – we could unknowingly break a law with serious consequences, there could be a political or economic meltdown, we could find ourselves in the midst of a riot or protest, we could inadvertantly offend the wrong person, and so on.

Or on a simpler level, trying to accomplish basic things that we take for granted back in the US can also induce mild panic, especially given the language barrier. Nothing is the same. For instance, we never know what our food will taste like, or even be comprised of, after we order it – what, after all, is an insalata completa – complete with what? (Answer: everything from hard-boiled eggs and potatoes to green beans, beets, lettuce, tomato and onion.) And what could a “celery and cheese” empanada possibly taste like – is there any way on earth that could be good? (Answer: yes, it’s delicious.) Every transaction, from going to the pharmacy for cold medicine, to printing out the pages I’ve already written, is fraught with adventure and potential pitfalls. So to get inspiration, I literally just have to step outside my door and do something a little different from the day before.

Maybe this is especially true because my book is set in South America, or maybe this sense of strangeness is, generally speaking, a good catalyst for writing (or at least: my writing).

Either way, this alone is worth the price of admission.

Outline versus inspiration

Currently I am on what I would characterize as the third major draft of my novel, not including a lot of re-writing that happened along the way on Draft 1. The big question that I have not yet resolved to my satisfaction has to do with outlining: how much should I plan out in advance?

Draft 1

The first time through, I tried writing my novel with practically no outline at all. I had some characters, I had in mind a Big Event that they would all collectively share in at some point, and beyond that I knew their stories had to be interesting on an individual level. What I found is that a) it was incredibly stressful to write the story in this way – literally having no idea where each character was headed, and b) about 75% of the way in, I realized that the stories didn’t add up or fit together, and were more like an interwoven collection of short stories connected tangentially by setting. As good as many of the individual scenes were, and as much as I loved the characters, I couldn’t work out how to end the book in a way that was both plausible and satisfying (unified). I tried adding and changing characters, storylines, and so on – but couldn’t get to the end. So I started over with…

Draft 2

Coming out of Lisa Cron’s excellent UCLA Extension class on “Preparing a Pitch Package” (which involved things like creating a synopsis, for which you need a solid plot that goes all the way to the end of your book), I was all about the power of the outline, plus thinking about theme. So I did a really detailed outline and then began to write my book again, from scratch, with many new characters and mostly all-new scenes. But a funny thing happened here (and I will first say that this is in NO way Lisa’s fault, instead chalk it up to an over-zealous student, namely me): writing started to feel like homework. The scenes were flat and dull. Usually I expect to have to go through about 6-8 drafts of a scene before it’s any good – but these were beyond bad. None of them had even a sliver of what I would consider to be good writing. I wouldn’t inflict them on my worst enemy. So after getting only 25% of the way done on this draft, I stopped work for 3 months until deciding to come here to South America (where my book is set, and where I was when I came up with the concept in the first place) and begin…

Draft 3

This time I am trying Whatever It Takes, including some ideas described by Martha Alderson, aka The Plot Whisperer. Disclaimer: she has written some books that I haven’t read so I may be completely butchering her ideas; I came across her website a few days before leaving the country. What I have been finding most helpful is that she describes thinking about the key transitions in the plot (the “End of the Beginning,” which transitions to the Middle; the “Crisis,” which transitions from the Middle to the End; and the “Climax,” which comes at the End) as scenes.

So it’s not enough to have an outline wherein the transition between the Beginning and the Middle is: “Betty decides to move to the country to pursue her dream of buying a trout farm”. In fact, that decision has to be encapsulated in a dramatic scene. (“Dramatic,” meaning you can’t have that scene be, for instance, Betty driving in her car to her new country home, reflecting on all the changes she’s making in her life. You need to dramatize the move and the change through good scene-writing, e.g. conflict and so on.) In fact, these three scenes (End of the Beginning, Crisis and Climax) have to be the BEST, most interesting and exciting scenes of the whole book. It’s all about 3 scenes.

So far, I am finding this idea incredibly useful. It gives me a structure/outline that I can clearly keep in mind (3 scenes!), while letting most of the detailed stuff be more flexible. But then again I’m still in the early stages (the End of the Beginning) so the real test will be as I move into the dreaded Middle.

Can I live there too?

My friend Karen just moved into this crazy place called Castle Green in Pasadena. I'd never heard of it before but quite frankly it looks ridiculously amazing. She is blogging about that and her novel-in-progress (kindred spirits!) here.

An ode to late bloomers

Thanks to the ever-fab Lisa G, a reassuring article from The New Yorker that dispels the myth that "doing something truly creative...requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth."

To wit: "The paintings [Cezanne] created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world."

As a late bloomer, I am heartily relieved.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

The importance of crazy shit happening

Sunday nights have so much good TV that the big question becomes what to watch first.  A few weeks ago, Mad Men was at the top of my list.  Now it’s either True Blood or Entourage.  The question is WHY? 

 

I have come to the following conclusion. Mad Men is all build and no bang.  Promising storylines are set up for weeks, then dissipate without anything really great happening.  For instance:

·         What happened to the priest who seemed a tad too interested in Peggy Olsen, the brainy copywriter chick?  There were forbidden sparks-a-flyin’…but then…nothing.

·         And what about Paul Kinsey, who went campaigning in the South with his African-American girlfriend a couple of episodes back.  Seems like he should have ended up in jail or at least gotten beat up or dumped.  But again…nothing.

·         Or what about when Miss Holloway got stuck reading TV scripts and was surprisingly great at it, until she got passed over for a man.  Shouldn’t she be plotting some kind of revenge?

Once you get used to drinking and smoking at the office, the non-plotlines wear a little thin.

Contrast this to True Blood, where not only does crazy shit happen in each episode, but crazy shit happens to each character in each episode. Just last night alone, Sookie lost her virginity to a vampire who also drank her blood, Jason went to a scary vampire bar, Tara saw her mom get exorcised, and a house burned down thanks to redneck arsonists.  Now that’s TV!

UPDATE: Well I saw the previews of next week's Mad Men season finale and it seems there will at long last be wrap-ups of at least 2 of the aforementioned plotlines...but dang, why the wait?  They're good but not that good, ya know?