Am I There Yet?

April 20, 2020

In the novel Writers & Lovers by Lily King, when a character talks about how their writing is going, they speak in terms of how many pages they’ve written. In one scene, a novelist describes her ex-boyfriend, also a writer, begging for a second chance. The ex hasn’t even started writing his book, but the dumped novelist has written two hundred and sixty pages since he left. Their respective page count is how we know she will never take him back.

In another scene, our main character, Casey, asks another writer, George, about the story he’s working on.

“’How long have you been working on it?’

‘Three years.’

‘Three years?’ I don’t mean for it to come out like that. ‘It must be more of a novella by now.’

‘It’s eleven and a half pages.’”

When George tries to ask her out, she thinks: “I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and a half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.”

Pages are one thing, though, and words are another. I prefer word count. A page could be sloppily handwritten in a pocket notebook or in a 10 pt font single-spaced with the tiniest possible margins. A page could mean anything! Word count is the only measure by which I can meaningfully chart my progress.

At the beginning of the month, I joined a group of writers led by Nina Semczuk for an April NaNoWriMo in order to get back to work on the fourth or fifth draft of the novel I’ve been working on. I did NaNoWriMo back in November but hadn’t worked much on the novel since. As I found then, the external accountability of sharing my word count is obviously the special sauce I need. This latest draft is going much better than I expected.

I usually track my word count in my own spreadsheet, but for this round I’m only using the spreadsheet shared with the group. I keep a sticky note on my desktop with the total word count I have to reach and how much I’ve done so far today. Whenever I feel the urge to quit a writing session early, I update the day’s count. Seeing the number helps me push onward. I’m like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at every word count update, hungry for that feeling of accomplishment in reaching that daily goal.

My goal for the month is 55,000 words. As of today I have 38,511 words. In Google Docs, using the font Spectral Normal at 12 pt with 1.5 line spacing, 6 pt before and after every paragraph, indenting the first line of each paragraph, without page breaks between chapters, with 1 inch margins, that’s 82 pages.

(I used to just type into Google Docs without changing a thing, but I recently decided to switch up the formatting from draft to draft as a visual reminder to create something new and better instead of just rehashing what came before. Each draft looks a little different from the last one, even aside from all the different words in it.)

I feel validated when I read about writers like Fran Lebowitz who also fixate on how much one writes in a day, not discriminating between page and word count:

“I’m not interested in the thoughts or ideas of these people, I only want to know how many pages a day they wrote. I don’t know many writers. … But as soon as I meet any, as soon as I can figure out that it’s not too intimate a question to ask them, which is about six seconds after I meet them, I say, How many words do you write a day?”

Even better is recognizing the importance of word count in someone else’s writing process, demonstrated in this story Lebowitz tells about a man at Sotheby’s showing her an original Mark Twain manuscript:

“He showed it to me. A short story. He was telling me about the manuscript and where they found it and everything.

He said, I’m pretty knowledgeable about Twain but there’s one thing we don’t understand. We’ve called in a Twain scholar.

I said, What is that?

He said, See these little numbers? There are these little numbers every so often. We just don’t know what those are.

I said, I do. I happen not to be a Twain scholar but I happen to be a scholar of little numbers written all over the place. He was counting the words.

The Sotheby’s man said, What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous!

I said, I bet you anything. Count. I don’t want to touch it, smudge up this manuscript. You know, like the sign says, you break it, it’s yours.

He counted the words and saw I was right. He said, Twain must’ve been paid by the word.

I said, It may have nothing to do with being paid by the word. Twain might have told himself he had to write this many words each day and he would wonder, Am I there yet? Like a little kid in the back of a car — are we there yet?”

Like a little kid in the back of a car, like one of Pavlov’s dogs — perhaps there is something instinctive and primitive about making word count the thing that gets you through the writing day. The work itself can be rewarding too, but only when you’re deep in it, not when you surface and wonder if it’s time for dinner, if it’s time to get up and pour yourself a drink. That’s the moment when you check your word count and figure out how much more you have to do. You catch that refreshing little breath, and then you dive back in.

April 20, 2020

Another Draft, Courtesy of National Novel Writing Month

December 3, 2019

At the end of October, inspired by some fellow writers, I decided to use NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month: a challenge wherein writers the world over attempt to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days — to rewrite the novel I’ve been working on for a while now. I’d made very little progress in months, so the idea was that NaNo would get me back into it and, just as importantly, get me back to writing every day.

And it worked, because now I have a new draft. I ended up writing an average of 1800 words a day, anywhere between 300 and 800 words in the morning and then another 1000 to 1400 words in the evening. On my best day, I wrote just under 2200 words.

A challenge like this is really useful to get quickly back into the habit of writing. The momentum of something new and yet familiar (since I already knew something about my story and characters) helped get me over that initial hump of getting started, and then the rest was simply stubbornness (and a constant awareness of my word count) to make sure I got my words in for the day.

The daily word count goal was exactly the kind of motivation I needed. When I used to write every day in a single morning session, I could maybe write 1000 words, but usually less, so I didn’t think it was going to be easy. (Unlike lots of people, though, most of my non-working time is my own, so I have it much easier than most.) But I found that most days it didn’t take much to get there — mostly just sitting down with my laptop, opening the document, and continuing where I left off, no matter how unequal I felt to getting down what was supposed to happen next. Near the end of the month, there were a few days where I had the fleeting thought about not bothering to get to 1667 that day because I was tired and just wanted to go to bed (at, you know, 8pm) and was ahead of my overall goal anyway, but then I would look at the little graph of my daily progress on the NaNo Stats page and power through.

I wrote this entirely as a fresh draft and only went back to my old drafts and notes to remind myself of the names of minor characters. I kept a small list of scenes at the end of the document that outlined where I still had to go. It was helpful to see where I was heading next and steer myself in that direction. The story went to a few unexpected places, but I think what this draft did more than anything else was narrow the timeline (from a whole summer down to one week) as well as the setting and story enough to spend more time with the (many!) characters themselves and figure out what was going on with them.

One of the best things I did with this draft was not write about anything from the perspective of the character who appears at the centre of the story. Previously he’d gotten quite a bit of his own page time, but I could never settle on how to portray him. For this round, I decided I wasn’t going to get into his head at all. I like that it forced me to figure out how to show who he is from the perspective of other characters. I didn’t get it right, but I liked the path it started me down, narrowing my focus a bit and letting me spend more time with other characters.

The next stage is a bit of a black hole, of course, because I’m terrible at revising. So far I plan to write out the outline of what I have, compare it to the outlines from my last couple of drafts, and try to create a bit more structure on which to hang the material I have spread out over some 150,000 words. There are elements I can bring together, and there’s a lot to throw away. And then, maybe, in bits and pieces, I’ll get some other eyeballs on it? I’m thinking a lot about why I’m still reluctant to let other people read it and trying to put into words what I want (and don’t want) from early readers. It’s scary but it’s good.

Some additional reading about NaNoWriMo to get thinking about next year: 20 years of NaNoWriMo, two vital reminders for writing a novel, why word count matters, and the best writing advice for NaNoWriMo.

December 3, 2019

Three Kinds of Writing

August 3, 2019

I’ve been thinking lately about the three kinds of writing Joanne McNeil recently described in her newsletter, All My Stars.

  1. “There’s the writing I want to be doing — that fully engages my imagination, that is risk-taking, and might not command a huge audience, but when it is well-received, there is no better feeling.”
  2. “There’s the writing that I know will always whip up attention when I want that.”
  3. “And there’s writing that helps me feel less precious about publishing, such as this newsletter, which I think of as like an ice rink figure skaters practice on that is open to the public. Nothing written here is ever perfect, but it isn’t meant to be, either.”

She has an idea for a critical piece about William Gibson and starts taking notes, but then realizes the piece doesn’t fit in any of those three categories, so she abandons it. “I don’t have all the time in the world,” she writes, “so I have to make choices about what to write and when and why. But it was a nice idea for a moment; so instead I’m describing this discarded idea as I pirouette on my little ice rink.”

August 3, 2019

Another Thousand Words

July 1, 2019

The second year of #1000wordsofsummer ended this weekend. Although I got a lot of value out of it last year, I didn’t participate this year. Well, I sort of participated, for three days. But I’m not currently at the stage in my novel writing saga where churning out a thousand words a day is important. I have plenty of words already. It would be all too easy to strike down some new path and allow myself to get distracted from the revision process. At this stage I don’t need to be creating new content as much as I need to be figuring out what to do with what I already have.

At the beginning of May I started assembling the second draft. I say assembling because the second draft didn’t begin as a copy of the first draft. I started a new document entirely and wrote up a sort of dramatis personae and then started copying over chapters from the first draft. I moved pieces around, added new pieces, then divided the document into three main sections to organize the writing better, although all three sections will be interwoven later. I did a good chunk of new writing, then copied more over from the first draft, rearranging and rewriting a bit as I went, but not letting myself get too far into the weeds at this point. I wanted to assemble something that I could go over with more attention later, when I have more of a structure in place, more scaffolding which I can remove later, as Zadie Smith might say.

Over the first week I got together about 12,000 words, took a break for a work trip, then added 7,500 words. I skipped a few days, then added another 16,000 words. Then I didn’t touch it again for sixteen days (oof) between our 11-day vacation and the week of recovery afterward. I opened the document most mornings during that week, but didn’t have the time or energy to give it the attention it needed.

Finally last Tuesday I sat down with the seeds of a new scene in mind and plowed out a thousand words. It felt so good that I did it again for another two days. Now I’m back to assembling words from the first draft, reorganizing groups of paragraphs, making little edits as I read through the scenes. I’m okay with that.

Although I didn’t join #1000daysofsummer, I loved getting the daily emails. Here’s a great passage from the email on Day 10: “We create a space for one idea to live next to another, so that our ideas will have a big home together. But writing is also about reaching out beyond yourself and offering up your best thoughts and connecting them with the world. Everyone gathers together on the shelf in one way or another.”

And some words from Alexander Chee on Day 3: “The legal pad and pen is like a change in the wind in my heart, the new idea raising its hand. The notebook makes room for it and the pen is the door it opens to walk out. A tiny door the size of where the ink comes out. And it cost me less than ten bucks for the pens and the notebook.”

I wonder where I’ll be this time next year, if the challenge repeats in 2020. New novel? Still editing this one? Done forever with writing? Ha. We’ll see.

July 1, 2019

Books Only Lead to More Books: Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

May 28, 2019

Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a memoir about reading and writing and immigration and isolation and mental health. The title comes from an entry in Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks, a reminder to Li why she does not want to stop writing and what writing a book is about.

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

Li had suicidal depression while writing this book, and the quote below encapsulates the heart of the book. For her, being a writer is important, but being a reader is much more so, and reading itself is connected to the choice to live or die.

“I do not equate writing with real life … but I am unable to articulate what real life is. … Of course writing is essential for a writer, and being read, too …. Writing is an option, so is not writing; being read is a possibility, so is not being read. Reading, however, I equate with real life: life can be opened and closed like a book; living is a choice, so is not living.”

(Li’s most recent book, Where Reasons Die, is a novel about a mother conversing with her son who died by suicide. Li’s son died by suicide shortly before she wrote it. I didn’t know this until after I read Dear Friend. I haven’t read the novel yet, nor any of her other books.)

This passage complicates the idea of being isolated and present in our lives only while reading:

“I spent my days reading novels whose characters crossed paths only in my mind; I was reading writers’ diaries and biographies connected by footnotes. I did not see people outside the household often; I did not talk with anyone but one friend by phone. Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one’s real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one’s days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.”

So much of the book is about how to connect with others and how much we can really know of each other. But are we achieving what we intend with what we write? Although books can provide so much pleasure, is it perhaps better to remain silent?

“I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence. Still, I am greedy for what I am deprived: I have a friend who erases many sentences before putting down one; another friend keeps her thoughts to herself. Yet I believe that there is truth that is truer in the unexpressed; having spoken, I am apprehensive that I no longer have a claim to that truth. Why then write to trap oneself?”

There is nothing easy or conclusive in this book. However, there are sentences scattered throughout the book that read almost like aphorisms:

“To read oneself into another person’s tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.”

“For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.”

“Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.”

“Is it really to express myself that I write? Not if I think about what it is in myself that needs to be expressed: hardly anything new. This tireless drive to write must have something to do with what cannot be told.”

“Writing is a confusing business. One’s inner clock, set to an exclusively private time, is bound only to what one writes. Life is lived in a different time zone. Caught in between one’s family. To protect them from the internal clock, one risks alienating them; to include them, one risks intrusion.”

“Writing, as long as it is one’s private freedom, will always be disloyalty.”

Finally, I love this counterpoint to Susan Orlean’s perspective in The Library Book, about writing a book being protection against being forgotten:

“The possibility of being remembered, however, alarms me — it is not from the wish for erasure, but the fear that people’s memories will erase something essential. Expectations met and unmet, interpretations sensible and skewed, understanding granted or withheld, scrutiny out of kindness and malevolence — all these require one to actively accommodate others’ memories. Why not turn away from such intricacy? The less I offer you to remember, the better I can remember you.”

My copy of the book came from the library, but when Scott checked it out for me (a belated credit to him for checking out nearly all those library books I mention borrowing in my last post), for some reason it didn’t register to my account, so in theory I could keep my borrowed copy forever. I stuck it full of sticky notes when I read it earlier this month, so now I have taken my notes and am finally ready to give it back. But not before having bought my own copy.

May 28, 2019