In the past I've done a "timed write", which is when I put my fingers on the keyboard and let them run until the timer stops. In this case, I'm looking at twenty minutes of work wherein I will let the thoughts go with as little effort at revising as I can muster.
Fortunately, I have a lot on my mind. Tonight, we did a tradition that I personally dislike, which is the annual pumpkin carving. There's nothing that really appeals to me, as my artistic abilities are limited when it comes to sculpture, and I don't really enjoy getting all slimy. Plus, pumpkin guts smell. More than that, however, it is a really wasteful tradition, one that is somewhat ameliorated when you buy the fake pumpkins from craft stores that you can keep from year to year. Gayle has a handful of those, which do a lot to add to our family's décor. So I was happy that Demetrius, my youngest, picked two too-small pumpkins for Halloween. He liked them because they were cute (the only criterion that matters at that age) and since carving small pumpkins is significantly harder, we convinced him to decorate the pumpkins with felt-stickers. He sat on my lap and drew triangles for eyes and funky looking mouths. I carefully cut the stickers out, then he applied them with all of the studious care that a five year old can generate, making sure that the whiskers of the kitty cat all came out from the right place on its face, and that the hat of the witch had a strap going across it. Once we were done, Demetrius asked if I would read some My Little Pony books to him. These are the easy-reader types, the ones with one or two sentences on each page, none of which were more than ten words long. I read to him about the big fair that one pony put on, and another about the bad dream Pinkie Pie suffered. He picked out a handful of sight-words to work on (he's struggling with "The" when it's capitalized, but he's got "Look" and "Like" down pretty well) as we read. I told him, "Once we finish with your books, I get to read Paradise Lost to you, okay?" "Okay," he said, not knowing really what I meant. But he's a kid of his word. When we finished all of the My Little Pony (plus a PAW Patrol book), he sighed and said, "Okay, Daddy. Now you can read me some Paradise Lost." He settled on my lap again and I began to read. There's a certain power to that poem that comes through reading it aloud. Maybe that's part of why I like teaching it so much: The vivacity of the poem is palpable when it's experienced the way it was brought into this world--through the tongue. Milton's dictation of this epic poem is a feat in and of itself, one worthy of our remembrance. That the poem is this good on top of his struggles in the crafting it puts it on a whole other level. Anyway, as I spoke the sonorous words from book 4 (we were at the part where Gabriel is trying to find Satan in the Garden of Eden), Demetrius poked at the sight-words he recognized in the tiny print of Milton's epic. "'I'. 'Look'. 'Like'." I would compliment each one and then resume my reading. I kept him captive for a page or two, then released him. He was happy to go and change into his pajamas, as it meant being liberated from more Milton. (He was curious, though, to see so much writing in the margins of the book. I have a used copy of the Hughes edition of The Complete Poems and Major Prose, which was carefully annotated by a student elsewhere. I conversate with her markings, weaving my own ideas and thoughts in between hers. Despite the fact that I have my own copy from Norton, edited by Gordon Teskey, there's a charm to the marginalia of the Hughes that I can't escape. That and there's a lot more of Milton in the Hughes--the Teskey edition is only of Paradise Lost with some supplemental parts--which makes it my favorite. It's one of my favorite books, a short list that includes the Complete Works of William Shakespeare Norton International Student Edition that I bought in Stratford-upon-Avon my first time there, and a copy of Paradise Lost from the 19th century. Anyway, Demetrius was shocked that there would be so much writing inside of a book. I pointed out that it was a way for me to think more carefully about the words that are there. I then said to him that it's only okay to write in a book that he owns, and never in a library book. He nodded his head sagely, as if he fully understood that injunction.) Demetrius then plopped a dinosaur book we checked out from the library onto my lap and settled in for a little bit more reading before bedtime. I don't know how much longer he's going to fit on my lap. I've talked about this before, but it's still something that preys on my mind. I've spent so many years (eleven, thus far) as a married man also being a father--we started our family about three years after we wedded--and so it feels like I've always had a pocket-sized human to care for. Now that our third and last is working his way into the grown-up world of knowing good and evil, I find myself being more worried about him. It isn't that the world is so much worse off than it was five years ago (though it is, in important and changeable ways), or that we ourselves are worse off. It's simply…I don't know. A sense of the impending ending that all parents have to confront at one point or another. After all, children must grow older--as I did from my parents. But there's something special about these rare moments of them politely caring about what's in front of them, of when they aren't crying or whining or pouting. It's a rare thing, I think, to have my son on my lap, listening to words that matter so much to me, comprehending none of them, yet being happy to be there because he was there with me. As I brushed his teeth tonight, he said, "You're the best daddy that I've ever had." It's hard not to fall in love with that. Final word count: 1105 ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Today, my family and I made a bit of a surprise decision and detoured from our journey home from our Spring Break destination. So, instead of being at home with my personal WiFi, I'm in a two-star seedy motel in Roosevelt, Utah.
It's been a day of adventures. I'd like to wax nostalgic/poetic about the incredible sites (and sights) that southern Utah provides, but I'm pretty drained. I drove through a canyon at night whilst my little ones watched Spider-Man: Homecoming and/or fell asleep. Midnight is rapidly approaching. On the whole, I think I'd better call it a night. Nevertheless, I wanted to make sure that I put in at least a hundred words of writing. I've been reading my book, War Golems (which I think I'll change to War Golem because it's really only about one golem), and I'm coming up on the end of it. Odds are good I'll have it finished by the time I get home. So, that's a good thing. I'm enjoying my own book, which is always a bit of a surprise. It makes me hopeful. Anyway, that's all for tonight. I'm going to sign off by saying: Two hundred words. This month, in order to try to improve the number of words I write in an hour, I told you about what Chris Fox says about writing 5,000 words per hour. I am still pretty far from that--I can't quite manage 1,000 words in 15 minutes, so I'm not even close to hitting 4,000 an hour, to say nothing of a loftier goal--but I also did what he recommended and that is to record how long I write and what my output is. To facilitate that, I created a spreadsheet.
This thing is pretty straightforward: it has a date column, a start and end time, and the total words for the activity. I've also included a column that is the type of writing I did. Look back over the month, I spent almost the entire time writing essays. One day was filled with thousands of words during the observations I mentioned before. A couple days had me writing in my novel. But, essentially, I wrote over 42,000 words of non-fiction this month. I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it's nice to scratch the writing itch with these essays. I don't have to stress about plot holes, character development, or world building contradictions. On the other hand, I'm not "improving my craft" if my craft is fiction. I'm not saying that I'm doing a bad job by writing the essays, but a basketball player who wants to drain three-point shots can't practice layups and say, "Well, I'm still practicing basketball." If I really want to improve my fiction writing, I need to write more fiction. I do have some excuses/defenses/explanations, though. First of all, I've been plotting out NaNoWriMo for a couple weeks, generating note cards (which I should be doing now, as a matter of fact, but since it's Halloween tonight, I won't have time to do the essay then. Sigh) and other necessary things to make next month work better. While that's a type of writing, I don't know how to count that in a timely way, so I let my note card creation and plotting slide to one side. And maybe that's on me: What actually counts as writing? Unable to answer that question, I've chosen not to count the work I do elsewhere--which, if I'm being honest, is probably only a few hundred words anyway. Secondly, I've been putting a lot of time into planning for the horror novel I'm poking at. I've written quite a few chapters of that book, all from one character's point of view (which is an interesting approach for me, because this way the voice is more consistent between chapters). This process was focused on more in September, however. I only have two chapters that I wrote during the month that were on the book. That surprises me: I always thought that I was a fairly prolific writer, considering all the other demands on my time. Yet I've proven that I don't write a lot. (Okay, so some of my writer group might disagree, as I've written...well, a lot of books. And forced them to read a lot of books. And, comparatively, yeah, I have a greater output than they. But this isn't about them; it's about me. Narcissism at its finest.) I'm glad that I'm keeping track, because it's forcing me to realize that I'm using my writing time differently than I anticipated, and the result makes sense. You see, I'm a little frustrated with my creative writing right now. Part of it comes from the fact that the past few weeks have been really crazy and there aren't a lot of opportunities to sit down and write. Saturdays--my main writing day--are pretty hectic. And, since I spend time writing me essays when I should be writing chapters, I've managed to find a way to procrastinate while at the same time pretending I'm improving. Wow, I just played myself. Anyway, the schedule is nothing: If I really wanted to write more stories, I would write more stories. And, sure, there has to be balance in everything. But looking over the 42k words that I've generated this month, how much have I improved? How can I know? Short of rereading my own work (which, as I've said before, is one area of writing that I'm deplorable at), what's the big takeaway? Here's what I'm seeing in the graph (see below): I am committed to writing and writing more. I'm still lazy (hence prioritizing essays over stories) but I think I'm gaining important skills. I don't know if they're the skills that I really want, but they're strengthening anyway. That's the reason why practice doesn't make perfect--you only perfect what you've practiced. So I really need to step up my commitment to storytelling. Hence the reason that I'm going to do NaNoWriMo 2017. This will be my third year and I'm anxious to write as much as possible (to the point that I might even take a personal day off at some point in November) and tightly focus on storytelling as the art form I'm most interested in. I will be posting the chapters as I draft them in the 2017 section of my NaNoWriMo blog. You're welcome to read the train wreck that is a first draft as it's being made. Phew. Next month is going to be even crazier. After some vacillating between options, I decided to write my third consecutive NaNoWriMo book. It will be an attempt to use some of John Truby's advice on four-corner motivation, in which the protagonist is opposed by three different villains/opponents and that they have differing but similar motivations to the main character. The details can be found in Truby's book, but the thrust of it is that by carefully putting in the time to establish strong antagonists, I'll have a detailed psychological map of the characters from which the conflict will more easily arise. The hope is that I'll have a more satisfying first draft than my previous two attempts.
And this goes along with what I want to talk about today, because I cringe every time I think of my first two NaNoWriMo books. This isn't to say that they're bad, but that's because I'm trying not to be as pessimistic about my writing. The fact is, they're really rough-rough drafts and that means that they were pounded out over the course of a single month and relentlessly worked on when I didn't want to write. Like, at all. If you're a frequent reader, you may even remember that I didn't put out any new essays during NaNoWriMo, even though the 2016 election was going on, because I was 1) too emotionally stressed out by the election to want to write about it, and 2) I was writing the novel that I then gave to my wife as a Christmas gift. (In point of fact, she has not finished the book, despite reading it as it was being written during the first part of the exercise, and she has a copy of the book sitting on her shelf. She's embarrassed by it, but I don't blame her; it's not a particularly good book). Here's the thing that matters with regards to the NaNoWriMo approach: Getting a book done. I can write fairly fast (I've talked about it before, though i'm trying to improve the speed) and, given a solid week of cabin retreat writing, I could definitely put together a better draft of a book than I get in a month of NaNoWriMo work. The reason is pretty simple, actually: Writing in small, continuous chunks is less efficient for me than writing in long, large chunks of time. Since I normally only get the small, continuous chunks, I don't complain too much. But when I can really "be a writer", I can write a lot. Like, a gross amount. This isn't to brag (too much; it's like, the one thing that I feel good about myself for being able to do, though being prideful makes me feel bad, so I feel bad for the thing that I feel good about--being stuck in toxic shame cycles is rough), but more of an area that I feel in control of. I like the idea that, though I can't control what kids remember from my classes, I can't control what my own children remember to do (like brush their teeth without me going ballistic that I've had to ask them to do it seventeen times in the last three minutes), or any other gross thing that is going on in the world, I can control my writing. I can write a lot. That's a good thing. But last year's NaNoWriMo was rough because I decided at the spur of the moment to do what I was supposed to do beforehand, which was to prepare and plan--outline, get my notecards ready, set out the pacing of the story. Instead, I had a loose idea, ran after it, ran out of steam (pun: It was a steampunk story), and fumbled my way toward the desirable ending word count, rather than the natural ending of the story. I seriously have a physical reaction to the idea of reading the book, knowing how bad it is. The first year's isn't much better. It's good that I'm trying new thing, I know, but that one's plot was so clever in my head and so dull and dreary when I got there that I'm relucatant to think that nanomwer is a good thing for me. I may be diluting msyelf. As a result, despite my original plans to make this be my dinosaur book, I've decided that I'm going to take a different tack that still involves science fiction, but I'm skipping the dinosaurs. Not only would I spend too much (as if that's a thing) doing research over the smallest of details, but I also wouldn't be able to focus on what I want: Dinosaurs eating people. Like, that's always been my problem in outlining dinosaur books--there aren't enough dinosaurs there. And since I really want to write a dinosaur book, I can't put it into a NaNoWriMo that I don't want to ever read again. So I'm trying something new. In order to prepare for this, I've done a timed write on this essay (fifteen minutes only) and tried to get 1,000 words during the timing. This will give me time during the evening to work on my NaNoWriMo and, I hope, make the experience more enjoyable. As a slight aside, I've also tried to turn off my interior editor. The original draft of this was so full of spelling mistakes that it looked like the page was bleeding. (I had the word page spelled bpage, I kid you not.) So even though I wrote this for fifteen minutes only, I also spent almost seven minutes going through and editing the parts that I messed up with in my frantic sprint. I can't say that the essay is particularly good, which goes along with my complaints about my NaNoWriMo script, but it's good that I'm trying to improve. Right? Right? I sure hope so, because if not...well, that was a lot of work for absolutely nothing then. (15 minutes: 994 words) Brevity is the soul of wit." I happened across a promotion for a book called 5,000 Words Per Hour. It made an outrageous claim that one could write upwards of (unsurprisingly) 5,000 words in an hour. I did some due diligence: I looked at blogs that discussed the author, Chris Fox's, writing and what he claimed. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't getting a book that said, "If you could write 5,000 words per hour, imagine how different your life would be! You'd have so many books--you'd have all the books. And all the women. Even if you're a woman, you'll still get all the women because you will be able to write 5,000 words per hour."
Even after the research, I was a little dubious. After all, that is a lot of words per hour. I did some calculations and found out that it would be more than eighty words per minute--a physical feat that makes my arms hurt, and I regularly crank out words at about 74 a minute. That extra six per minute? It feels basically impossible. Nevertheless, since the book was on a promo price (only $1.20? I guess I pay more for a Mountain Dew, so I'll give it a go), I went ahead and bought it. As it clocked in at 88 pages (though I don't know how many words, ironically), it was a quick read. And, really, as far as a book on the technical skill of typing goes, that's probably a little long. The essence of Fox's argument? Write in sprints (which are dedicated, focused quantities of time, much like the timed writes that I've done in the past) and gradually learn how to do a lot in a very short amount of time. Writing sprints are difficult because you have to turn off the internal editor. (For example, I'm still doing that, backspacing and fixing words as I go. I spelled editor as editoar in the line above, but you couldn't tell because I fixed it. It goes along with the concept of editing one's work, I suppose, which is why sprinting is hard to do.) Not only that, but one has to write, completely focused, for the amount of time. He recommends starting off low, then increasing it to larger chunks. I'm capable of remaining focused for a specific amount of time--about fifteen, twenty minutes--and that's where, according to Fox, I'll see the largest gains. The thing is, I know--loosely--what he's talking about. When I'm doing a writing sprint (timed write) for an essay, it's less about following an outline, though. See, for my fiction writing--where I really want to increase my speed--I spend time looking over my outline and making sure I know what the scene is going to do. After a certain amount of time--usually about forty minutes or so--I can feel myself dropping into a different mind-state. Fox calls this the flow, but it's basically the runner's high, but for writers. Everything seems to be going well--thoughts are clicking into place, characters are behaving well, details are clear and open and visible in the mind's eye--and the entire world fades away. Just music, fingers, typing...it's magical. I think this is an addicting state of being--I think Fox is an addict. Being in this trance-like state is difficult to get into (that's why I have to go on a writer's retreat to my cabin twice a year to get my fix; it's almost impossible for me to get into at home). And when you get into this sort of state, it's hard to want to come out--and even harder to survive without it. It's like I said, a runner's high but for writing. And since bodies build up tolerances, it takes more and more effort to get into that state. For Fox, he writes every single day, including holidays. I'm not quite that hardcore--there are plenty of times when I don't write--but that's a good habit to have, too. Now, what am I hoping to do with the information in this book? Well, I'm starting here. This was a fifteen minute timed sprint, and I'll post the total words at the bottom (as I've done with the other timed writes) but I'm not quite ready to spend additional time to edit what I've written. I think that's the big hurdle that he doesn't foresee as being problematic. He has a couple of paragraphs that dismiss the instinct to fix while you go, but for someone who teaches English and has an allergic reaction every time he sees the red squiggly lines beneath a word, it's really hard to let that go. Additionally, I'm not going to wake up at five in the morning just to write. Sorry. I couldn't really do that for God on my mission--waking up was one of the hardest things of being a missionary--so I really won't do that, even for my writing. Nevertheless, I'm going to try to improve my words per minute/hour. I don't want to go the dictation route he endorses--maybe at another time--in part because the feeling of typing itself is part of the pleasure of writing. Like, that physical action of fingers on keyboard is enjoyable to me, so I don't want to cut that out. But I do want to increase my output. Maybe this will be the way that I can do that. At least, that's what Chris Fox says. Time: 15 minutes. Total words: 919 |
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