I can't believe I've never heard of National Novel Writing Month before. What a great, great idea. Go read up about it. Here, here's a sample, from the FAQ page:
If I'm just writing 50,000 words of crap, why bother? Why not just write a real novel later, when I have more time?
There are three reasons.
1) If you don't do it now, you probably never will. Novel writing is mostly a "one day" event. As in "One day, I'd like to write a novel." Here's the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It's just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists. The structure of NaNoWriMo forces you to put away all those self-defeating worries and START. Once you have the first five chapters under your belt, the rest will come easily. Or painfully. But it will come. And you'll have friends to help you see it through to 50k.
2) Aiming low is the best way to succeed. With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere. With high expectations, everything you write will sound cheesy and awkward. Once you start evaluating your story in terms of word count, you take that pressure off yourself. And you'll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and a ingenious plot twist there. Characters will start doing things you never expected, taking the story places you'd never imagined. There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst the crap, there will be beauty. A lot of it.
3) Art for art's sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and "must-dos" of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.
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I'm gonna do this and I encourage anyone who ever thought "I wanna be a writer" to do the same.
My participation may mean, in terms of this site, there will be really, really bad novel excerpts posted beginning November 1st. However, it'll all be over November 30th, so deal.
A nice little vampire song to get you in the mood.
Crowd of Drifters
Sometimes the road is too long
You meet all kinds of people
Some of them cast no shadow
They have no reflections
Take a look in your photobook
I'm not there anymore
I was a traveling salesman
I got lost on the backroads
Fell in with a crowd of drifters.
Sometimes the sun is too bright
And it burns you like acid
You get to love driving at night
The moon is so close you can kiss it
I used to remember you smiling and waving
I don't think I can anymore
I was a traveling salesman
I got lost on the backroads
Fell in with a crowd of drifters.
We come, unnoticed, at sundown
At the start of a blackout
We set bonfires all over town
And it's over by morning
Sometimes we bring the rat and the wolf
And sometimes the worm
I was a traveling salesman
I got lost on the backroads
Fell in with a crowd of drifters.
--The Magnetic Fields, from the album Charm of the Highway Strip
Happy birthday to the one who would sing duets with me, a round like Don McLeanís ìBabylonî or the Harry Belafonte song on The Muppets:
We come from the mountain
Living on the mountain
Go back to the mountain
Turn the world around.
Happy birthday to the one who read The Hobbit and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to me at bedtime because she was taking a class on Childrenís Lit.
Happy birthday to the one who got a stuffed unicorn for Christmas (?) when I was five, a unicorn I would steal from where it sat on her pillow every night until she simply didnít bother retrieving it anymore. Happy birthday to the one who, in 22 years, has not asked me to give the Queen Unicorn back.
Happy birthday to the one who answered a deep philosophical question I was asking about life with ì42!î and a giggle, who thus introduced me to the astonishing genius that was Douglas Adams.
Happy birthday to the one who sang a fragment of ìThe Lion Sleeps Tonightî in a parking lot and thus inadvertently introduced me to The Nylons; happy birthday also to the one who bought me my first two Nylons tapes and watched really bad movies with me just because The Nylons were on the soundtrack.
Happy birthday to my sister, the person who, the more I think about it, could have had a more profound effect on my life only if sheíd actually given birth to me.
by the way--you have to read this out loud.
Crossing
STOP LOOK LISTEN
as gate stripes swing down
count the cars hauling distance
upgrade through town:
warning whistle, bellclang,
engine eating steam
engineer waving
a fast freight dream:
B&M boxcar
boxcar again,
Frisco gondola
eight-nine-ten
Erie and Wabash,
Seabord, U.P.,
Pennsy tankcar,
twenty-two,three,
Phoebe Snow,B&O,
thirty-four,five,
Santa Fe cattle
shipped alive
red cars yellow cars,
orange cars, black,
Youngstown steel
down to Mobile
on Rock Island track,
fifty-nine,sixty,
hoppers of coke,
Anaconda copper,
hotbox smoke,
eighty-eight,
red-ball freight,
Rio Grande,
Nickel Plate,
Hiawatha,
Lackawanna,
rolling fast
and loose,
ninety-seven,
coal car,
boxcar,
caboose!
--Philip Booth
I'm posting this excerpt here for the benefit of those of you who do not compulsively check atu2.com every day for the latest U2 news (and why the heck don't you, might I ask?)
Back in September of 2000, I wrote a piece called Politics: The Art of the Possible. It concerned the then-novel sight of Bono in Congress, talking with the people in power with and without cameras present. The question then was "Why is Bono effective? How is he getting people to listen to him?" I predicted the next few months would be interesting to watch as Bono's political activity would collide with U2's promotion of All That You Can't Leave Behind.
"Months" proved a gross underestimation. It is now October of 2002 and Bono is still on the campaign trail. If he were after a political office it would be his by now. Unfortunately for his work schedule, his goal isn't anything nearly as easy. His goal is to cancel the debts owed by the poorest countries to the richest ones, halt the spread of AIDS in Africa, and make the most poverty-stricken corners of the world thrive through trade. Incredibly, his crusade has not prompted howls of cynical laughter from the media; if anything, the media has helped raised expectations of his effectiveness absurdly high. Newsweek ran a story in January 2000 headlined, Can Bono Save the Third World? Time Magazine upped the stakes with their cover question in March 2002: Can Bono Save the World? These are questions that I will not attempt to answer. I'm interested in one more fundamental: Why is Bono still doing this? What is his motivation?...
...I have a theory. Bono likes to play chess.
No, really; that's my theory. Chess is a game of strategy, of planning your moves ahead, of trying to think like your opponent. All the pieces are useful in different ways, but toward only one objective -- checkmate. There are kings, queens, bishops and knights, but when the game is over it's affected nothing; no real power has shifted. What chess player, confident in his skills, wouldn't grab the chance to play a game where the stakes were high and the pieces had minds of their own?
The full article is here.
Boa Constrictor
Oh, I'm being eaten
By a boa constrictor,
A boa constrictor,
A boa constrictor,
I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor,
And I don't like it--one bit.
Well, what do you know?
It's nibblin' my toe.
Oh, gee,
It's up to my knee.
Oh my,
It's up to my thigh.
Oh, fiddle,
It's up to my middle.
Oh, heck,
It's up to my neck.
Oh, dread,
It's upmmmmmmmmmmffffffffff...
--Shel Silverstein, from Where the Sidewalk Ends
I'm about to freak my sister out, I think.
When I was seven, eight years old I walked in to the TV room when my sister was watching a movie. The movie was almost over and I bugged her about it as only a seven or eight year old can.
"What is this?"
"It's called 'The Prototype.'"
"What's going on?"
"That guy there, he's a robot, and the other guy is the one who invented him."
It was an emotional scene, a big goodbye. The inventor was reaching out his hand to the robot but the robot said "Don't touch me. You'll feel the metal."
"What's going on?"
"The robot has to destroy himself, and he doesn't want his inventor to get all upset."
"Why does he have to destroy himself?"
"It's too complicated to explain."
This has been in the back of my head ever since then because I just didn't have enough information to process it. I can still hear the voice of the robot so clearly, I would bet anybody that "Don't touch me. You'll feel the metal." is an exact quote--a line I heard once nineteen years ago. I've always remembered the name of the movie, too, probably because I had to have my sister explain what "prototype" meant; it would have been the first time I heard the word.
This evening I looked it up on the Internet Movie Database--imdb.com. Here is the entry if you're curious. I've said it before and I'll say it again--the internet is an amazing thing. Now at least I know why the robot (well, they say "android" here--my sister must have thought "prototype" was hard enough to explain) had to destroy himself...
A footnote: I had a dream about my basement not long after seeing this. In the dream I met a handsome fellow who looked astonishingly like Michael the robot from "The Prototype." He told me he was a monster and he lived in my basement. He said everything was okay, though; the monsters weren't out to get me. They wanted to live peaceable lives as much as I did. He promised me none of his fellow monsters would ever bother me when I played in the basement during the day. The basement did belong to them at night, though, so it was probably best that I stay out of it then.
Then, as so often happens with me, a story came into my head completely formed. It's one of the strange, almost magical aspects of my life as a writer that very often the first work of creation is done, as it were, "behind the scenes" of my conscious mind. Suddenly I will find myself waking in the middle of the night with something on my mind that needs to be written down very quickly before I forget it!
That was how it was with The Thief of Always. The story was in my head, all complete with characters and settings, without my really planning it. Even the first line of the novel--"The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive"--was part of this strange midnight gift. And when I began to write this book from those hurried notes I'd taken in the state between waking and sleeping, the tale unfolded before my mind's eye like a movie. All I had to do was to describe what I was seeing.
I wish it were always so simple. I'd like to think that The Thief of Always was a story that was simply waiting somewhere in the air, waiting to be found and told, and I was the lucky man who was there to find it and write it.
So here it is, my dream-story. I hope that it comes to life in your imaginations as it first came to life in mine. And that the pleasure it gives you stays, after the dream is done.
--Clive Barker, introduction to The Thief of Always
Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a piece entitled "On Despising Genres." Go read it, then come back here.
Are you back? Good. Did you enjoy it? For me it clarified a prejudice I hadn't really noticed before. Once she showed it for what it is--a simple and simpleminded prejudice, an easy habit of thought--I began to see it in many places.
I picked up a Salman Rushdie book, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," last night in preparation to see him at a reading this evening. The lady at the checkout smiled at my choice. "Oh, this is very good. It has a lot of magic realism."
"Magic realism" is one of those phrases I think differently about now that I've read the LeGuin piece. I thought to myself, "It's a fairy tale. Call it for what it is."
But of course, it's never called a fairy tale. It's called "A Novel" on the cover, it's shelved with Fiction. Now if you start reading it, you may think of "The Wizard of Oz" or "Alice in Wonderland" or "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights." It reads like a kids' book to me, but I don't think I've ever seen it shelved in a kiddie aisle. I suppose that is because Salman Rushdie is a Literary Person, and wow that's such a shame because ordinary folk tend to be in awe of Literary People and will thus miss out on the chance to read their kids this book and enjoy together its terrible, terrible puns (like there's a sort of fish Rushdie describes as sharklike, with many mouths, and is thus called the Plentimaw Fish, which a character sees and thinks "So there really are Plentimaw Fish in the sea!").
Tonight I was in line for the Rushdie reading and I had open my copy of "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." A girl behind me, standing with some friends, remarked that she had read it when she was little. I told her my anecdote of buying it and thinking "Don't say it's magic realism, just call it a fairy tale!"
There was this odd pause. "A fairy tale of a sort," one of the girls in her group allowed, and that conversation died out.
"Well, yes," I wanted to say but didn't. "It's a fairy tale of a sort. All fairy tales are of a sort. Why is the word making you so uncomfortable?"