Lost: One Mojo

I've been looking for it everywhere. I'm really hoping it didn't get left on the train or in a hotel room in California. Anyone seen it (my mojo, that is)? I definitely need it for the weekend--I have about fifteen pages of term and conference papers to cohere, one twenty-page paper to revise, and one creative non-fiction essay-like article to write between Friday night and the wee hours after the end of Saturday Night Live (which I better not be watching this week).

We'll call it, not the three-day novel or NaNoWriMo, but the day-and-a-half pile o' non-fiction, academic and otherwise, I've got to write. (Titles are everything, no?) Anyway, once this is done, I'm hoping to plow into some novel manuscript re-writes during the rest of November. But I have have have to get this done first.

So it's important that I find this mojo by tomorrow noon. Please let me know if you happen upon it somewhere (and feel free to heckle me throughout the next couple of days if I'm not getting the writing done)...

Oh, and for someone who's been reading archival theory (i.e., reflections on the preservation and loss of our pasts) all semester, this book reviewed by Gregory Wolfe over at Good Letters intrigues me. Alright, to school, to school...

Reading and Writing at Different Speeds

So one of my professors mentioned again in last week's class that part of our job as graduate students was to learn to read at different speeds--to learn to scan some things very quickly while choosing to spend hours reading more important things in-depth.

I feel like my ability to do the fast kind of reading in the COM field is finally coming to me. It's always a learning curve for me to master this fast reading when approaching a new genre of heavy critical tomes (the same was true when I went back for my MA in English at first), but after a year of slogging through COM theorists and quantitative and qualitative articles and essays, I finally feel like I can scan these genres when I need to, which should make this school year significantly less laborious.

The thing is, as I reflect on Ril and the others at TextFIGHT doing the slightly insane but incredibly gutsy 3-day novel thing this weekend, writing is something that can--and probably also should, at times--also be done at that fast-scanning sort of speed.

I think the key to this fast-writing, as with fast-reading, is not just in learning to do it, but learning to do it so that one does it relatively well. That calls for a facility with both the craft and the rules of whatever genre you're working in. The material you come out with is bound to be rough, but being able to do it well shows a sort of mastery over the material you're working with, as well as a lack of self-consciousness about the process.

Our media ecology is an ideal test bed on which to develop this sort of lightning speed--and I can do it in blog posts, facebook statuses, wall posts, and emails, which is excellent priming for the pump of other kinds of quick writing. I've also been known to plow out a quick poem, creative non-fiction essay or a homework assignment, and I'm getting closer to this speed for COM essays--hoping I can get closer to it this semester.

The one key place where I haven't quite mastered the speed of fast writing, however, is in my creative writing. I feel like my mastery of the generic conventions and knowledge of my characters comes so slowly that I'm not there yet. I've been known to speed-edit after the first draft, but the first draft tends to come incredibly slowly, in part because it's always a very long side project that gets easily de-prioritized. I think, oddly enough, it will take going over the hump to fast-writing COM essays before I'll get the confidence to try something similar with my novel-writing.

I do hope that I get to do one of these contests someday, however--I think it would help. Oh, 3-day novelists (or anyone else), any comments on the process?

Writing Advice from Steve Martin

Ah, words of wisdom from one of the masters:

Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol. Sure a writer can get stuck for a while, but when that happens to real authors, they simply go out and get an "as told to." The alternative is to hire yourself as an "as heard from," thus taking all the credit. It is also much easier to write when you have someone to "bounce" with. This is someone to sit in a room with and exchange ideas. It is good if the last name of the person you choose to bounce with is Salinger. I know a certain early-twentieth-century French writer, whose initials were M.P., who could have used a good bounce person. If he had, his title might have been the more correct "Remembering Past Things" instead of the clumsy one he used.

--Steve Martin, Pure Drivel, p. 7-8

I'm particularly thinking here of Ril and the others at TextFIGHT starting the 3 day novel contest tomorrow. Just, well, track down Salinger and you'll be okay.

Poor Timing, Once Again: A Lament

Rilla and one of her friends are doing the annual Labor Day weekend 3-day novel(la)-writing contest this weekend and have some interesting commentary on the process over at TextFIGHT.

Here's my two cents' worth of complaining/lamenting on these weekend-long and month-long creative writing contests (yes, that's you, too, NaNoWriMo):

Can't anyone arrange one for those of us involved in the educational-type systems? Yes, that's right: Why Labor Day weekend, right after my first week of doctoral classes? Or why November, right when all my final papers are coming due and, when I'm teaching, the students are handing things in? Why not something in May or June or July, when I could actually shift a few things around to commit some time to these important creative things?

I'd love to do one of these things sometime--well, at least NaNoWriMo, since I thoroughly believe those who created the 3 day contest were somewhat possessed--and I would love the support of others engaged in the same pursuit on the same timeline.

Alas, (poor Yorick,) my chances of doing NaNoWriMo, at least within the next few years, are slim to none. (Speaking of which, the most I can commit to this blog at the busiest times of the semester is a posting or two per week--I'll try to do at least that, even during the busiest times.)

It makes me sad.

NOTE: Please excuse the two sequential days of lamenting--the downturn toward fall and winter often brings on such moods. On the up side, I'm back from my trip, which had the desired results--I think my editing skill is back and ready, just in time for the semester. Plus, after a truly delightful time away, I might even be sane again, which is always a strong plus for the beginning of paper-production season.