NaNoWriSpr: On Vising and Revising

Here's the primary difference between what I'm doing this spring in what I'm calling NaNoWriSpr, in which I'm trying to write most of a 75,000 word novel in 4 months, and what is usually attempted during NaNoWriMo, in which writers try to write 50,000 words in a month: I'm researching, planning and especially revising as I go.

Of course, this doesn't mean I hadn't planned and researched in advance. I didn't have an outline, but I'd first conceived the novel (and written the first two paragraphs) in 2007. I've been researching on and off since then. And starting last fall but particularly over the Christmas break I tried to finish reading what I thought were the primary research texts, having all the supplementary ones (I thought) ready to go for when I needed them. I had a big picture idea of what might happen in my story, at least the first part, and the primary characters were coming into view.

And I am so glad I wasn't thinking I had done enough to plow this out in a month or two.

See, this is a complex novel, and as I'd mentioned, it's set in a different place and time. I had looked into the era a little bit--read a book or two--and had done a heck of a lot more research on certain aspects of the story and its genre, but that didn't mean I'd read enough memoirs of the time or the times before that my characters would have lived through or had read through enough books or articles about my setting and events of the period. I'd spent a lot of time developing my main character and getting into his head, but I still felt some distance from him and was still working to get to know the others.

And so the first stages and drafts of the early chapters have taken a lot of what I've come to call vising time: others might call it visioning or planning. I've needed to immerse myself by researching the era and reading memoirs and watching documentaries, much as one seeks to learn a language by immersion.

And like learning a language, I've of course tried writing about these people and their times and given the early efforts to a few other people to see whether they felt I was getting it right to communicate engagingly with the modern reader (which is of course the bigger trick, as in this case I'm learning a language only for translation to those who aren't familiar with it). The workshops in my fiction-writing class have been tremendously helpful in this, as have a few helpful friends.

As with learning a language, they've been kind in these early efforts to point out the places where I wasn't quite getting it right. This has supplemented the clarity a sleep can bring to my own distance from my writing to see where it can be improved. And both processes have encouraged me to go back and hone my writing to make sure I was going in the right direction. I'm still working on this, but I can already tell the efforts have borne fruit.

See, for me, I really can't imagine trying to make a draft without all of these processes involved at once, which is why NaNoWriSpr feels so much more reasonable and manageable than NaNoWriMo to me. At the same time, I'm thankful for the NaNoWriMo model, as it reminds me it's okay to push myself and that immersion in the writing act is a useful way to go.

So even though I haven't technically hit my "new pages" limits,  I'm pleased to announce that I've written 60 on-their-way-to-good pages with six weeks down and ten to go.  I'm thrilled about this, in fact, as the early parts of the novel are the most important to get just right in so many ways, and now that I know where I'm going and I've introduced most of my characters it will go faster, I hope.  But even if I stick to my 10 pages per week average (which wouldn't be surprising as I expect to continue to revise a lot as I go, and the amount of pages for revising continues to grow) I'll get to my goal within six or seven months, with a much much better draft than I had for my Novel in a Drawer after I finished the first draft in 18 months.

I'm getting better at this. And faster. I can tell. Which is encouraging, as this is a much more complex project than the previous one.

Man, this is fun. Exhausting at times, but fun.

NaNoWriSpr Goals and Challenges

Yesterday for my fiction-writing class, I was asked to write "a paragraph" about my fiction-writing goals for the semester. The following is an adjusted version of what I wrote:

My primary goal for my fiction-writing this semester is to either have a rough draft or most of a rough draft of a novel manuscript by the end of the semester, reaching roughly between 250 and 300 pages. In order to reach this goal, I realize I must write between 70-80 pages per month, or 15-20 pages per week (totaling between 3500 and 5000 words per week). This first week I reached my goal, but just barely, by writing 15 pages, for just over 3500 words. As per the syllabus, I want to revise 30-40 pages of this draft by the end of the semester and have it be more polished. I want to choose segments for workshopping and polishing more based on how important they are to get feedback for rather than merely what I have done. And so I want to work hard so I have choices about what to share and not share. That said, I know I’ll want my instructor and my classmates to give me feedback on the first 10-15 pages, and blessedly that’s already drafted after this past week. 

I don’t want to accept meaningless procrastinatory excuses from myself for not doing the work. I know I’ll have to change stuff after the semester—the primary goal is to get something down on paper so I can work with it further this summer. But while this draft is largely a “s***ty first draft” (cf. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird) I also don’t want to push myself so hard to produce pages that the work has holes the size of Texas, especially at the expense of a logical and complex plot or characterization that goes along with that. Nor, since I’m writing a piece set in a different time and place, do I want to sacrifice key research that I must do and then have to rewrite large sections because of a major anachronism or something that wouldn’t happen in that place. 

So while I fully expect to make changes (and likely large changes) after the semester ends, I also want to think deeply enough about what’s going on in my opening acts that pulling it all together in the end will be relatively easy. That means I will have to be okay with going a little slower in the beginning when I’m laying the groundwork (probably in the 15 pages per week phase, with a lot of thinking and outlining time to go with it), but will hopefully have a little easier time once my characters have been established. At that point, I hope to legitimately expect more pages from myself to “make up time.” 

I’ll also have slower going in the beginning is because I’m still doing some of my background research. For instance, I just got a few more books through interlibrary loan that will provide me with useful background info for my era and setting. I know this specific set of research tasks will bear a lot of fruit in furnishing me with vivid and apt material for characterization and setting details, but I’ll have to work extra-hard both to get through this material fast and to not get too distracted by all the other research I could be doing. Thankfully I have a lot of experience in researching quickly. (God bless grad school.) Hopefully, if I can do this and still get 15 pages per week written in the next few weeks, I can get up to 20 or even 25 later on. 

Current word total, after one week: 3531 words. 15 pages. 

15 down, 235-285 to go. This may seem daunting, but through baby steps is totally possible. Go team NaNoWriSpr!

On the Writing Life and Seedlings (Re)Born

So I've posted about it briefly on Facebook, but I truly haven't mentioned here why I've restarted this blog. Here it is: I've finally entered a season of my academic life, for the next few months at least, when it will be possible to actually balance my writing life, both of the academic and the creative varieties, with my teaching life.

It could have been possible over the summer, but I had to move and was pretty burnt out (still recovering from a very full load of teaching so soon after finishing the diss, so regeneration was needed before this semester, which involved a new school and new classes and all the adjustments that come with that.

Despite all that, though, over this summer and into this past semester I was able to crack slowly back into my writing side, like one of those seeds from childhood school projects beginning to germinate and push back up through the dirt surrounded by the inevitable styrofoam cup.

It started small, as it should: a couple of more articles written for the ever-delightful catapult magazine; finally cleaning up a chunk out of my MA thesis from years ago and sharing it at a conference this fall for some great feedback; and then finally revising a couple of chunks of my dissertation intro and extending out the ideas in semi-new directions. I'm grateful to note that both conference papers have been accepted for spring academic conferences. And in the midst of the semester I jotted down some ideas for a diss-related journal article and for turning my diss theory into a book down the road.

Without even talking about my projects for this break, next semester, and the spring (I'll save those for later posts), now that I look at the list of "small" starts, that it's pretty miraculous that I think of this list as small, because my pre-PhD self would have thought of it as a huge list. I won't lie--the PhD process and the dissertation were painful, and I protested much in the midst of them and afterwards. But as I've mentioned here before, my writing muscles have become strong, and my writing stamina grew tremendously from those challenges. I'm delighted by this, and am delighted to be back, firmly planted and with my writing life's metaphorical seedling head again above the soil to the point where it seemed obvious that I would restart this blog.

Sometimes that whole instant gratification thing is overrated, and as my students and I discussed the other way, the work itself--regardless of what happens with it--is valuable. I'm so thankful I was given the strength to stick it out, or I wouldn't be ready for new challenges!

But the Grass! It Really IS Greener!

As of this past Monday, the dissertation is off to my committee. The defense is in less than 2 weeks. I've gotten more sleep. I've noticed that there's a world outside my doors. And I've already started one of the large-scale writing projects that was waiting behind the dissertation.

The beautiful thing is that having researched and written a large project on the scale of my dissertation (approved by at least my advisor so far) has given me confidence to embark on other similarly large-scale projects that I've been dreaming about for years. People may at times take the three little letters that will hopefully soon adorn my name somewhat lightly.  And at times I'll be among them.

But in reality, the pain I have nearly won through in getting this degree to this point is worth its weight in gold--or should I say writing confidence. It's not just that the credentials will give me more credibility, both in and out of the academic arena. 

That's key, of course. But even more important to me is the fact that I've won through a major battle with that part of myself that insists that I can't finish large projects quickly. That I don't have the words to describe things adequately. That I have to wait to start writing things until I've done years of research I don't feel qualified to undertake.

With the (near-)completion of this dissertation project (which, incidentally, I liked, and still like a lot), I've done more than get to the (near-)end of a project that has taken a lot of time, and induced blood, sweat, and tears (along with a few hives, which is a story for another time). And I've even done more than jump enough hurdles to get to the time I've been craving for these other projects.

I've also been given the grace to beat my way through a lot of barriers to writing motivation and found a land of no excuses on the other side.

And I must say, the grass really is greener over here.

The Diss Handoff, Part Deux: On Strength Training

So I've been thinking a lot lately about page counts. Page counts have always been my nemesis. This story is perhaps best told in numbers:

1. Undergrad: 6-8 pages in about 10 hours. Much angst. Best push ever in undergrad: 21 pages in three different papers in 10 days. Thought I was Superwoman.
   
2. MA in English papers (yrs. later): 12 page paper in about 12 hours, though still only 1 or two days of that a week max. Feeling proud, though--not only coming back, but getting faster.
3. MA thesis: still about 1 page per hour, but simmering and analysis, so 100 pages for a single large writing project produced in roughly 4 months while working 12 hours per week. Doing well and happy with the results.
4. PhD papers: getting closer to 2 pages per hour when under the gun. During final month of the semester produced 70-80 pages for 3 different final papers. Best day: 18 pages of a single paper.
   
5. PhD preliminary exams: Many were in-house in 2-hour chunks, so I pushed the amounts up to 3.5 pages per hour. 70-80 pages produced during about 30 hours spread out over the course of a month while teaching 20 hours per week. Feeling good and strong.
6. PhD dissertation (while teaching 3/4 time, roughly equivalent to 30 hours per week):
   

• As of December 2010, 90 pages of prospectus (half, approx., to stay in the dissertation, as it turned out) had been approved.
• In a two-week period in March/April, I wrote 65 new pages in 2 weeks and 1 day. Personal record.
• As of last week, I deleted 55 extraneous pages I knew didn't fit but had been saving up and edited the other 230 remaining pages of text. Then I finished writing the final 30 or so pages, finished adding 140-some references for my primary data, and handed in 302 fully edited pages (including references and appendices) this past Monday.
• Best dissertation day: wrote 16 new pages and edited 120 pages to final form in one day.

If you were to have told me 4 years ago I'd be able to produce 370 pages and edit it down to 302 in such a short period of time, I'd have looked at you like I feared you'd had--or were about to have--one too many books dropped on your head.

But it's true. While my physical muscles have grown rather sad and pre-spinach-Popeye-like from sitting in front of this screen this past year (a condition I hope to fix this summer), my writing muscles have grown strong. I've gotten much faster, not only in pages per hour but in pages per day and pages per week. And for that, I'm thankful. One of these years I might actually be ready for NaNoWriMo.

Reflections on the Diss Handoff (Pt. 1)

So the reason I've been absent from the Internets for so long is pretty predictable: I've been too busy writing and editing to write. The dissertation project was huge and nasty, and it's not entirely done until it's successfully defended, formatted, and deposited.

But yesterday I passed a huge milestone in this pursuit: I turned in a full dissertation draft to my doctoral advisor, a full 4 days ahead of the end of the window we'd talked about.

I've worked tremendously hard in the last couple of months, especially in the last week, to get ahead of schedule so that I could shoo away this little dark cloud that's been following me everywhere for the last year like some sort of cartoon menace. I've given up days off. I've stayed up repeatedly until 5 a.m., giving myself only a few hours of sleep.

But it was worth it, all the pain. The cloud isn't gone, but it's moved over a few feet, allowing for the sun to peek through. And the draft feels good. I won't know whether I truly successfully communicated until my advisor tells me I have (followed by my committee), but this feeling, the feeling that I've discovered new insights and was able to put them on paper in the right sorts of ways--this is my "crack" that keeps me coming back again and again to writing, no matter what kind.

It's interesting, because of course there were huge chunks of time during this process when I absolutely hated it, when I despaired of ever moving the black cloud even an inch, when only having one of my dissertation support group (brilliant invention, by the way--thanks Pamela for starting it!) come over and make me write worked to keep me going. But the payoff is worth it.

Anyway, more thoughts on this soon--there are many churning around in my head about the dissertation writing process that I need to, well, process. For now I'll say farewell, and promise that this blog will become more active again this summer, because now that I'm done with the bulk of my writing I have time to write again.

Down to It (Once Again)...

Remember that paper that was originally due May 20 and is now due on June 15? After a week of doing practically nothing, I wrote 12 pages of it yesterday. I also started on the article I'm writing for next week's catapult.

Since I'm leaving town early Sunday morning, it was sort of important that I get going on these things, so I'm glad it's finally starting to flow properly.

So I've got to do another 10 or 12 pages on the paper today (which will leave me with a hopefully fairly good rough draft), plus finishing the rough draft on the catapult article before packing for my week away.

Saturday is for revision.

The most encouraging thought is that I still took a lot of breaks and spent a lot of time procrastinating yesterday. So if I cut back on that today, I might be able to plow through this in better time and get done with one or two other things I need to get done, while also sleeping both nights I have left.

After all, it's a long solo road trip next week, so being rested is important. Sleep is good.

Oh, and word counts: 3438 on the paper so far and 125 on the catapult article. Not bad for one day.

To Sleep, Perchance to...Well, Sleep, Hopefully

Okay, 5:30 a.m. and all is well. Conference paper done and sent off. Total new words for the paper (including last night's 1800-something): 4252. I ended up deleting 5 pages of the original 10 entirely and replacing them with new words, so on top of that I get to add 1000 new words to the total for the revision of the other 10 pages I'd written. Total page length for the paper: 19 pages plus 2 pages of references.

Sleep now--hopefully I'll be able to, since the caffeine kicked in quite well from the 11 p.m. pot of tea. I don't have to be anywhere until a social outing in 9ish hours, and my Monday paper revisions (knock on wood) shouldn't be quite as extensive, so I can work on those starting at 6 p.m. when I get home, finishing, one hopes, by midnight or earlier.

Then: Sunday: rest! And, next week, only one 20-page paper to write all week. I'm actually looking forward to writing that one--I've already got a page or two of abstract and lots of thoughts and research to go off (another dissertation-related paper--woohoo!).

For Those of You Keeping Count...

1810 new words last night on the paper due by the end of the day today. The paper's now at 15 pages and still quite discombobulated, so I'm assuming there will be some severe revisions, plus at least 3-5 total new pages added before midnight-ish tonight. But first I get to go to my assistantship for five hours, then fact-check some stuff at the library before heading to write new words on the paper.

Oh, and if you've been wondering where the word count has been in the last few days, it had been absent only because I hadn't figured out whether to add in words for grading or not (apparently not). I graded a whole stack of papers (only one stack more now to go--and it's a less complicated one--plus the final to give and grade at the end of next week). I wrote and edited two PowerPoints and an abstract by which I informed my classmates in all 3 of my classes of the excellent projects I'll be writing and editing next week, and prepared to teach my review class yesterday.

Then, after attending the last seminar of the last semester of full coursework (only one left in the fall) last night, I sat down and wrote those 1810 new words (after resting and caffeinating a bit). I've lowered my expectations for this paper I'm turning in by midnight, by the way--hoping for relative coherency at this point rather than brilliance. I think it's starting to hang together better in my head and in the first five pages, but once I get home about 5 I'll have a lot left to do.

Woohoo! Tomorrow should be a bit more laid-back, thank goodness--the paper due Monday is just revisions, really, so tomorrow a bit of revision, at least half of that other stack of grading, perhaps start myself on actually writing that 20-page paper due a week from today, and--get this--I may actually leave the house to go to a social event for a few hours in the afternoon. Woohoo! A quieter day... But for now, I must make myself a strong pot of black tea.

Speaking of Olympic Feats (2): NaWriMo 2 Word Count Update

ANNOUNCER (FROM OLYMPIC SPEED-WRITING CONTEST): And now for an interview with our sponsor, PhD student Deborah Leiter, who is caught in an end-of-semester graduate student speed-writing event that's sure to prepare her for the types of Olympic contests you see on our coverage here at Scribe Stadium. How's your contest--er, semester--going, Deborah?

DEBORAH: Yes. Mostly well, thank you. At least I turned in the first of three final semester papers just a few minutes ago. As it turns out, today in about 6 hours I not only revised 22 pages, which as you'll remember in the NaWriMo 2 scoring system counts for the equivalent of 2200 new words, but in the editing process the paper swelled to 29 pages for a total of 8816 new words, which is an addition of another 2000 or so entirely new words to the paper that will be exactly calculated at a later date.

ANNOUNCER: Wow, that's quite the new word count for a relatively short revise-and-polish period. So does this excess of new words bring you any closer to your word count total?

DEBORAH: Sadly, since it was all used up in one paper, the excess gets me no closer to my academic goals of finishing the semester. However, I am quite excited that I've gotten to the point in my academic career where I'm no longer grasping for words to say--seems I've got plenty of them to pour out. Now I'm just hoping I can only keep this up for 1 conference paper, 2 more course papers, and--these two are new tasks added just in the last couple of days--the revision of one book chapter by May 15 and the writing and revision of another one by May 20.

ANNOUNCER: Were there any deleterious effects from the quick outpour of words you've seen lately?

DEBORAH: Not, so far, from today's outpour. After Saturday's contest in which I poured out 20 new pages, though, my back was a mess of knots--and I was exhausted--from Sunday morning straight up until last night. Other speedwriting academic athletes, take heed when attempting such huge feats at home. I'll say one thing, though--all of this is certainly preparing me for the large amounts of quickly-written texts I'll have to pour out during my Big Nasty Tests in late August/early September. If all goes well there, maybe I'll actually be trained up enough to take on the NaNoWriMo challenge for real this coming November. We'll see how it goes.

ANNOUNCER: That's wonderful. And now, back to the Olympic event we've been covering...

A Successful Tsunami Surfing Operation

So I now have a total of 6716 words in my paper (which works out to 22 pages). 917 of those words existed before I started (3 pages), but I cut at least half of those out and heavily revised the rest, so I'm counting this as 6516 new words.

I didn't actually start writing the paper until 1:30 p.m. (after writing 507 more words as an outline and thinking it through before I started). And I took a couple hours' of breaks after that for dinner and such as rewards for my productivity.

Ultimately, that means that I wrote an average of 2 1/2-3 pages, or 746 new words, per hour. That's darn good paper-writing speed to be sustained over that amount of time. I'm thankful I was able to get through it without losing steam.

I finished everything but polishing, the addition of a few quotations and a bunch of citations, and the addition of a 1-3 page conclusion. But I can easily do that on Monday, since it's my at-home day and the paper's not due till Wednesday.

[evil tent-y fingers] I love it when a plan comes together. [face becomes more serious] Especially when one discovers oneself able to break through the brick wall formed by the 12 rough-draft-academic-pages-a-day limitation experienced in one's previous graduate career.

It's fun to get better at surfing that tsunami. Apparently one DOES get better at this with lots of practice, it seems. And now I get to have a whole day off schoolwork before revision strikes on Monday, along with those other stacks of grading...

Day 40: Whew! Time for a Hard-Earned Rest...

Wow, I can't believe I did so much today. First, I wrote 6 new pages on my first of three final term papers, then revised the whole thing and turned 'er in, completing the first of my three classes for the semester an hour before my (extended) deadline. Woohoo!

Second, I came back and whipped out the first five pages of 15-page Term Paper #2, due at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, in an hour and a half flat, in just enough time to spend a few hours at a holiday gathering before...

Third, writing the catapult magazine article for Friday's issue--it was due before tomorrow morning.

I love it when imminent deadlines coalesce with properly researched and simmered ideas to create more than 4000 new words in a single day. Now, if I can just keep up the pace tomorrow and finish at least the rough text of Term Paper #2 after working for a few hours at my assistantship, I might be on track for handing in that final paper at least a day early.

We'll see.

By the way, the archival workshop went well on Saturday. Oh, and I didn't win agent Nathan Bransford's first paragraph contest, but as Eliot says, "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." Tomorrow, back to my assistantship work, to finishing these papers, and to a bit of preparation for the course I'm teaching in the spring--those are the tasks at hand.

First, though, I get to sleep 6 glorious hours...

Articulation and Authenticity

I've been thinking a lot lately, as the deadline for my first grad paper of the semester approaches (on Friday--short one, but still the first paper of the semester) about the pressure of articulation. It seems, sometimes, as though with all this communication swirling around us, there's less patience than ever towards inarticulacy, unformed-ness and messiness of things.

Ironically, this is at the same time when the world has begun to accept and praise messy and less-organized written forms. The pressure, I think, is to be articulate even in our first drafts, because the pace is fast, the forms are informal, and there's much other writing that we could turn our attention to at any time. More so in grad school, where the pace is fast, but the forms are formal.

How, I wonder, to continue to be consistently articulate in this climate, while being at least somewhat authentic at the same time? It feels like a high-wire act at times...

Sigh. I'm sure I'll find something to say in my paper. It's only 3-5 pages, after all. It's not so much this one, but the weight of all the ones that will follow it this semester and next that I feel, swirling in their now-chaotic, un-thought-out state, the not-quite-right words flying around me in their yet unordered state.... Like Eliot says so eloquently in Four Quartets:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. ("Burnt Norton" ll. 149-153)

I've always hated the beginning part of the process. It's the middle and end for me. (Of course, talk to me again in a month or two and I'll tell you it's only the end, at least when it comes to the writing associated with the semester.)

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?