Observations Thus Far

Observations I've made Thus Far:

First of all, it's very hard. As the title of this blog suggests. Not because I'm one of those writers who sits for two hours, chewing her pen, and then puts it to the paper and liquid gold flows out. It's more like I write a bunch and meet my quota and realize that it's macaroni noodles glued to construction paper with tooth paste, and no one will eat my mosaic because it looks bad. This is not me being self-deprecating. It's just a fact. I once read the first book in the Twilight series. I read it in a day but that's beside the point. The point is I didn't find it to be very good writing. I feel throughout this entire process that I write sentences like Stephanie Myers' and my inner child cries a little.

Second thing I've noticed is that it's very good to have a Regular Schedule. This is something that writers talk about. You have a time, you sit down, and you write. I guess I do that. Recently a slew of visitors came through town (New York, New York!) and I didn't work for about one and a half weeks. Cue caffeine abuse and Philip Glass on repeat.

Third thing I've noticed is that you have to make decisions. This is difficult! I'm sitting at my desk writing about pretty clouds and yellow daisies and realize I haven't accomplished a fig newton in terms of plot or character development. I've taken my Crayola water colors and spilled them all over my smock instead of the nice canvas in front of me. Things have to happen in a novel. Like, what is the protagonist's deal? Is she walking down the street? Does she go into a coma where she can hear but not see? (man I wish I thought of that before). It's hard to catalyze action in a novel because you won't be sure why you wrote what you did until after the fact. Which is, despite meeting word quota and all that, why writing is hard. You'll be on a roll and regular schedule and then realize your last 2000 words were headed in the wrong direction, and you weren't actually writing what you thought you should write. The novel is going in a direction that you're not. It's a belligerent Pinnochio.

(I joke with people that I feel like a puppet master when I write. Power! bwa ha ha. Not true. Things happen and I obey the whims of these small people running around and thumbing their nose at me in between the pages).

Every now and then I think I hit a stride. I've heard writers talk about these as well. From what I understand about writing all these paragraphs I find beautiful will all go out in the first draft. ("Kill your darlings," says Faulkner. "They're already dead," is my reply).

Because I know by now there will be several drafts. I've got about two years' worth of work before I finally complete a book that is 50 rungs below Stephanie Myers (she may be the wrong example to cite, considering that objectively she is extremely successful as a writer. I choose her as a subjective personal canon because once again, I didn't find her writing to be very good and I find my own work falling short of that. Just to clarify that I don't mean to offend or make controversy over this example).

But let's move onto the positive aspects. The positive aspects are this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I've got to suck it up and just write. It's a very good lesson in discipline. No more undergraduate, staying up all night before and wiping the night sweat off the title page as you hand it to the professor, type of writing. Also, I tend to be one of those head in the clouds people who wakes up banking on the royalties from a screenplay she is going to write from a dream she had the night before, and then brushes her teeth and forgets what the idea was in the first place. So the discipline is good because it is exactly what it sounds like: discipline.

Also I'm just writing more in general. I respond to emails faster. When I respond to my mother's emails about her border collie I feel like a cross country runner doing sprints.

I half apologize for anyone reading this who finds it boring. Although I always say, as a reader I reserve my right to skim read. Which is probably why I always know everything about the romance portion of a novel and little about the politics (hello War and Peace).

Next post: the very mundane technical details of writing a novel! (I'm trying to aid you in your skim reading!)