The end of an era

Well, as soon as I hit the “Publish” button, NaBloPoMo will be over for me. Can I get an alleluia?!

Just kidding. :) (About the alleluia, not about finishing.) Well, it’s been quite the month, now, hasn’t it. One feature-length novel to go, check. A side of blog posts every day, check. What next? NaBoMoReMo, and then…New Year’s Resolutions, I guess. Somewhere in there I’ll take a break.

But not from blogging. I don’t know how to stop, nor would I want to. And, you know, since this is the month of the turkey, can I just say thanks for all of you readers out there? Some we hear from in the comments, most we don’t, but I appreciate every last one of you who reads Top of the Mountains (however obsessively or once-in-a-blue-moonily you follow along ;)). This blog wouldn’t be what it is without you. And I’m not just saying that. Sure, it’s easy to say, but it’s also true. You really do have a large influence on what happens here, not just in the comments but also in the posts themselves. I wish I knew who all y’all were, so I could thank you individually, but this group thing will have to suffice.

Speaking of resolutions, I probably ought to sneak a peek at mine from January to see if I’m anywhere near accomplishing them… (Note to self: in the future, if you really do want to meet your goals, you probably need to review them before November 30. Just an idea.)

Really?

You have lost me? You wrote a proverbial ream. You did it. Congrats. However, you called it rather a”crummy” novel. What a huge time chunk just to put out a 50,000 word novel that you consider crummy.

One thing I learned from DeMille was quality not quantity.

As an artist I take my medium seriously. Yes, sketching is important, but even there, the better the sketching the better the finished products.

The artists that people most often admire have developed in the discipline of their work. Artist acquire the habits of an artists, Writers write. In both cases quantity without an eye to quality does not develop that discipline, and usually does not crescendo
toward masterpiece work.

Writing everyday is a good discipline. Somehow I cannot image C. S. Lewis just blogging or writing for quantity. I see him flowing with inspiration, measuring his words, etc. Several of his books are compilations of talks. Talks have to be measured for clarity and power. Just blogging to blog and take up mind share, or writing to feel like you have written a novel, is like standing up and just randomly talking as a practice for a dynamic lecture.

All in all, something has been missing this month. I have not put my finger on it.

Yikes, I looked at the sidebar and its Donna, Donna, Donna. You’ld think I was sick all week or something. I am not very creative when I am on bed rest. I am back in the saddle and I am heading back out of blog land, I have a newsletter to edit and a book to finish the editing and pre-publication work on.

Ah, but the quality v. quantity argument doesn’t apply here. If I were releasing the novel as it is, and doing that over and over and over again, then you’d be right. But first of all, this was just a rough draft. It’s okay that it’s crummy. It’s not supposed to be good — if it were, I’d be some kind of genius freak of nature. First drafts (especially 50,000-word long ones) aren’t going to be that good, period. That’s why writers revise. Yes, my novel is crummy now, but I’m going to revise it and polish it until it sparkles and shines. Getting a crummy first draft pounded out is the first step in crescendoing towards a masterpiece.

Second, writing for quantity (and you have to realize that this is a once-a-year, very limited scenario) got me to push past whatever it was that’s been blocking me from writing long works. In this case, it didn’t matter quite so much what I wrote — the fact of doing it was what mattered. It showed me I can write long works.

Third, writing for quantity doesn’t necessarily correlate to a loss in quality. Constraints often blossom into true creativity — I’ve seen it happen several times here on my blog, where I wasn’t feeling like blogging but I decided to go ahead and do it anyway, and a really good post came out of it. (Yes, there are times when it backfires, but I’m just saying that it’s not a 100% cause-and-effect.)

Fourth, it’s not as if I was trying to write a crummy novel. In fact, I ought to clarify. By “crummy” I mean that it’s still a very unfinished book. It’s raw. The story’s pacing is often too cluttered, and the style is repetitious, and not all of the elements cohere into a smooth whole. But I wrote what was in me, got it out on the table, and now I can work with it.

Fifth, in defense of NaNoWriMo, this 50,000 word novel was worth every ounce of effort I put into it. Every drop of sweat (metaphorically speaking, of course), every minute — all worth it.

Hmm, hopefully this doesn’t seem like it’s a response against you; if it reads that way, I’m sorry (I’m in a hurry and writing this off the cuff, no time to revise). All I want to do is defend NaNoWriMo and writing first drafts, and allowing those drafts to not be good. If you write with the idea that your first draft has to be polished, you’re going to crash and burn before you get very far, I’m afraid. You have to let go of the internal censor — if you don’t, your writing will be stale, cardboard, dead and dry. That’s just the way it works. (And by “you” I mean the general you, not you specifically, Donna. :))

As for something missing this month, I don’t know. (Has anyone else felt that way?) If anything has changed, it’s probably been that I’ve been rather tired and worn out. But even being picked clean to the bone hasn’t made me regret it. Most of the time you have to sacrifice to do something big. (Whether or not this was a valuable goal is, of course, dependent on whose value system you’re working on. For me, it was worth it. For you, perhaps not. :))

I have no problemo with drafts, if that is the intent. I do them. I brainstorm. I cluster. I write like a river when it flows. There have been a few times when I was creating the curriculum for my school that I would type through the night and not sleep because it was pouring through me. Even then, it needed editing.

When I created my award winning stained glass mural, the tree of life, it was a blood , sweat, and tears experience, really. I did several 36 hour stints. When I create in glass, I crate the concept in the right brain, execute it in the left, and do not know what it will really emerge as until done. When I got the tree finished, I cried. I ended up taking a third of the glass out and cover the under-drawing with white, and free hand create and cut, until the final piece went in. The goal was quality work. It took hundreds of hours over several months and I had never created anything that huge before. Now, I have a difficult time with small. The end goal was not to fill a 3×6 whole with glass, it was to communicate my testimony and 3×6 was the only size I felt could adequately meet that goal.

I am sorry if it sounded picky or even short sighted. It just seemed like the “50,000 or bust” was the goal, and not to be a conduit for inspiration to flow through in a creative effort to create a good novel.

ํNaNoWriMo seems like something envisioned and typically executed as a writing exercise. Something to get folks writing. For someone like Ben, it enables them to prove something to themselves, and paves the way for a more natural writing process in the future (since NaNoWriMo is anything but natural, if you ask me). For others it may have entirely different meaning and value.

Ben’s already defended himself quite well, but I thought I’d throw that in there. Too much focus on a goal for the goal’s sake isn’t going to get the desired result pretty much ever. But Ben’s a very goal-oriented guy. So I can see how this month has been very valuable for him, and I’m sure he has the wisdom to differentiate between the goal as a means, rather than an end.

Donna: “50,000 or bust” was the goal. :) I went in with the expectation that I would throw this novel away, and that attitude allowed me to just write, write, write, throwing words on paper at 2,000 words a day. It didn’t matter what I wrote, so long as I wrote enough. Like Rikker says, this isn’t how I plan to write novels in the future, since I do hope to write good novels in the future. :) But even with this buckshot approach, there’s enough good stuff in this rough draft that with the right amount of rewriting, I could turn this into something worth reading.

Rikker: Thanks, you said it better than I did. :)