Status Report: Week Thirty-Nine

I should start by touching on two points on my last status report. Firstly, my prediction for Week Thirty-Eight (Seven Days of Zero Words) was incorrect. On the nine hour ferry ride from Santorini to Athens I tried to write. Due to the circumstances “writing” meant longhand in a 99 euro-cent notebook I’d bought especially in Fira (I was getting withdrawal). By my count I wrote 1,907 words. Not a very good return for nine hours, but it wasn’t the most conducive environment. And I know it says in my own rules that only words typed into a computer should count towards my tally, but I went through the effort of counting them and I don’t see the difference between my abortive efforts then and my abortive efforts in Microsoft word today… so I’m counting them.

I was tried rewriting the opening pages of Novel A while I was on the ferry. In my last status report it was still up in the air which novel (the imaginatively named A and B) I would throw myself into upon my return. I thought I’d cracked it as I lay in bed my last night in Santorini. I had the voice for the narrator of Novel A, the unique way to open the novel. I planned out the first page in my head, crafting the sentences, reordering them. When I came to put them down on paper on the ferry, I remembered it all, but it wasn’t actually a page, it was half a page. When I tried to fill the rest of the page, it began to unravel. I tried another angle. And another.

Somewhere in the Aegean Sea I decided to jettison Novel A (for now) and finish Novel B. For those of you playing Count The Flip-Flops, this brings the 2008 tally to 298.

Anyway. Novel B is going great. Slow but great. I think my self confidence hit 11 on Tuesday. Everything in the most recent file before I abandoned Novel B last (early May) was well written and I could see where it all fit in. There were gaps where I could start writing straight away, and the voice came right back to me.

On Wednesday I went back and looked at some earlier drafts from Jan-Feb 08, just to check I hadn’t jettisoned a scene or even a phrase that needed resurrecting in the definitive version I was now working on. But these older drafts were awful. I mean, unreadable awful. It was like I had written these drafts five years ago. Like I didn’t care about sentences. Didn’t care about characters. Didn’t get around to having a plot.

I how could I have been so off the mark in February, and so sharp in April? How could I have abandoned the novel in May? Some of the answers are probably embedded in this blog. One day I might read over this and see if I can isolate certain behaviours (reading certain authors, blogging too much or too little, thinking too much about publication) which mess with my quan.

Then again. I’m happy to write off all of my earlier rubbish as ‘Getting Into The Voice’ and just power on with what I hope will still be a happening project a month from now.

Week Thirty-Nine – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 17,700 words
Average: 2,529 words per day (compared to target of 3,001)
Most productive day: Tuesday 23 September, 3,892 words
Least productive day: Saturday 27 September, 882 words
Year-to-date: 617,777 words (125,392 words behind target)

So the deficit is now looking like the population of a Caribbean island. In peak season. It's official. I chose the wrong year to shoot for one million words. Too much travel. Look at this graph:
Only 46 sleeps till Estonia and Latvia!

Status Report: Weeks Eighteen and Nineteen

Weeks Eighteen and Nineteen – The Stats

Fortnightly word count: 31,266 words

Average: 2,233 words per day… but if you exclude the four days in Paris you get 3,127 words per writing day

Most productive day: Tuesday 6 May, 4,371 words

Least productive days: 2nd, 3rd and 4th of May, 0 words

Year-to-date: 343,085 words (17,571 words behind target)

That last graph, well. I had been noting down a score out of ten to describe my level of optimism. But when it came to today, “optimism” didn’t seem like the right word.

I didn’t really think about writing while in Paris, so rating my optimism regarding my own writing seemed pointless… but I think the dotted line tracks the growth of my Self Belief over those days away quite well.

Being in the pessimistic mood I am today, I can’t resist observing that I have more self-belief when I’m not writing than when I am.

What’s got to me today? Numbers. And not the deficit. I’m beginning to harbour an affection for the burrowing worm. No. My problem is how large some of the numbers are getting. Like 61,000+ words expended on Novel B. Surely that’s something to be proud of, or at least encouraged by, right? Not when the definitive file is only 3,500 words long. This is about the seventh definitive file. Each time I start from some other point, some other angle. Each time it feels right. “This could be the one” (to quote my own characters from a wee story I should submit somewhere on the internet before I forget it exists). Speaking of forgetting, that’s one of my strengths as a writer/fool. I keep forgetting how far I actually got with my previous definitive versions (a.k.a. false starts). I opened one up today and was shocked to find it was 45 pages long. And there I was languishing on eleven.

I’ve struggled before, but never so prolifically. 61,000 words to get 3,500… it just doesn’t seem right.

I am working on too many things at once.

I am thinking too far ahead of myself too often.

I will regret writing with so much candour on this blog tomorrow.

Do you know what? I’m thinking of returning to Novel A. The last time I touched it was a 3 day spurt 20-22 Feb. And before that it was 18 Jan.

What is Novel A? It’s a complete rewrite, refocus, resetting of my MA thesis/novel written in 2006. It was about an indie rock band composed of four members, all of whom were opposed to becoming famous as it would destroy their credibility as musicians… but then something happens to each individual band member and they need to become famous to achieve something in their private lives. A comedy of cross purposes, a satire of musical affectation, a cautionary tale about seeking the limelight.

It had its upside. But it had its downsides. I look back now and I can see I didn’t quite know what I was writing. Or: I couldn’t decide which of four books to write so I wrote all four of them as one. Even as I tried to rewrite Novel A in Nov-Dec-Jan-Feb I think I was still muddled by the possibilities. I wasn’t ruthless enough.

I am prepared to be ruthless today.

The only problem is, I’m not sure what will be left when I’m finished sluffing the deadskin, and what I will be able to add that is new.

But I look at the some of the scenes and characters I had in previous drafts of Novel A and compare them to Novel B (which is better written, but you’d hope so when every for every word there are twenty discarded ones) and think: this is the stuff I love to read. Novel B is the stuff I like to read.

The like/love distinction. The number of false starts. The three-weekly crisis of confidence.

It’s all telling me something.

Why I need to share this, I don’t know.

Perhaps I’m just doing this to add suspense to next week’s status report.

Will he or won’t he work on Novel A?

If only creating a climax in fiction were as easy as making a pie chart…

Status Report: Week Eleven

So this week I cracked 200,000 words. This did not give me a sense of achievement or increase my happiness.

Why?

Where are these 200,000 words now?

A fair chunk are suspended in amber on this very blog. Occasionally someone will google “George Harrison All Things Must Pass” or “Rorschach Tests Steven Hall” and read something I threw words at. But.

I really really really want to dive back into a novel. Not Novel A. I’m done with that for now. I vow not to touch Novel A again in the 00’s.

[Serious Question: what will we call the decade 2010-2019? The Teens? No thanks. The person who comes up with the best alternative may just be suspended in amber on Wikipedia… I think this is something to aspire to.]

Which leaves Novel B. Or Novel C, which does not exist, even as an idea.

I watched ‘Awakenings’ (1990) on TV yesterday and it got me interested in Novel B again. There’s brain damage in Novel B, you see (but no parts for Robin Williams or Bob DeNiro).

I also read that Jermaine Clement wrote a cover blurb for Duncan Sarkies’ new book. This made me feel like writing a book was an okay thing to do in 2008

But.

I find it hard to write long, continuous narratives while working a day job. My new job is good, relative to other day jobs I’ve had and could have, but still. Good jobs take more energy than bad jobs. I can’t think about brain damage and the Wellington Visual Arts scene while I’m occupied (damn occupations).

I admire writers like Nigel Cox who had day jobs and never begrudged the world for the financial realities of being a novelist. I don’t want to begrudge the world. I just want to write another novel. I don’t even care if it gets published (I don’t clench my teeth nearly as much now that I’ve let that balloon drift out of sight… Another balloon man will come in time).

I am a book-shaped person in a credit card sized world.

That’s all.

I am going to Norway for Easter. Before then I am going to get books by Oliver Sacks M.D. out of the library. After Norway, I am going to blog less, review less stories on Zoetrope, write less flash and short fiction, and work on Novel B.

For serious.

Week Eleven – The Stats

Weekly word count: 16,920 (lowest weekly haul to date)

Average: 2,417 words per day (compared to 2,662 last week)

Most productive day: Sunday 16 March, 4,254 words

Least productive day: Friday 14 March, 316 words (this is not a typo… work drinks etc)

Year-to-date: 213,417

The Mute That Wasn't

I am still feeling my way into ‘Novel B’ -- the one about alternate realities without being the least bit science fiction.

Today I want to open a window into the process of writing a novel -- this particular window being one week since I started writing sentences as a narrator rather than a guy with an idea (or a conglomeration of ideas).

However, I feel conflicted about putting too much of this project out there before its written. I remember reading a book by the New Zealand playwright Roger Hall about, funnily enough, writing plays. Hall advises all writers not give the slightest mention to anyone of what your are currently writing until you finish it. I have never followed this rule -- it would be impossible to write a novel in a workshop situation that way -- though every time I “speak too soon”, I think of Roger Hall waggling his finger.

So, forgive me if this is terribly vague, but I’m trying to satisfy both parts of me, the documentarian and the superstitious writer.

I have been referring to one of the main characters in ‘Novel B’ as “The Mute” throughout my notes, for want of a better word. He is, in fact, more than mute. All his senses appear unresponsive to the normal stimuli of our world. He is a kind of a local celebrity-cum-oddity (like Wellington’s Blanket Man) and it is the locals who, until today, have been misleadingly referring to this man as “The Mute”.

However, in the course of a labyrinthine Wikipedia session, I began stumbling across multiple “mute” characters in fiction, particularly New Zealand fiction. The biggest, I guess, is Simon in the bone people. I remember getting this out of the library for Marisa when we lived in Wellington and I think she read the whole thing. I picked it up once, skimmed a little, but it was not this kind of book you can read if someone else is reading it.

So I haven’t read the bone people, one of the best known New Zealand novels OAT (soon I will post about acronomics, which I use with tongue firmly in cheek, but for now: OAT = Of All Time, but you say “oat”).

Then, I guess the other well known mute in a New Zealand setting is Holly Hunter’s character in Jane Campion’s film, The Piano. Again, I have seen bits of this film, but have not watched the whole thing.

(I don’t think this is a cultural cringe thing – these works just fall outside the sphere of my usual tastes.)

Anyway, I know enough about these two examples to predict that if I wrote a novel set in New Zealand with a character called “The Mute” – and it got published (!?!) – there would be reviews which drew parallels between this and other mute-d works.

So, first question: Is this a problem?

Well, NZ is a small country. Successes like the bone people and The Piano are rare. I’d rather not appear to tread any ground already trodden. Especially when I haven’t read/seen them fully and came up with all these ideas completely without their influence.

Perhaps I should mention/admit/confess that the idea for the “Mute” character came, in part, from the character of Enrico Fermi (based on the real physicist) in Lydia Millet’s Oh, Pure and Radiant Heart, which I read about this time last year and really enjoyed. Millet’s Fermi was not mute, but he certainly was taciturn. The writer in me swelled with admiration for the way Millet crafted Fermi from so little, and this withdrawn, quiet man became the emotional heart of the novel (no pun intended) for me. It got me thinking about what it takes to make a character sympathetic, and how the less there is of them, the easier it is for other characters and the readers themselves to write over this quiet character.

I filed this thought away, and undercover of darkness this thought started associating with other filed thoughts. The result: well, it could have been yoghurt, but it was actually this character referred to (until today) as “The Mute.”

As I said at the top, my “mute” isn’t just a mute, he’s completely untethered from reality. A better comparison might be the Chief in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (which I have seen – i.e. the film – though I haven’t read Kensey’s book), except he’s not faking it (I think).

This whole comparison thing is a mine field, I tell you.

And it happens with any piece of writing. You name a character Colby, then you discover Donald Barthelme’s story ‘Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby’. (This happened to me; I’d named my character after the cheese). Or you write a novel-length manuscript about a rock band involving misappropriated lyrics and then Johnathan Lethem releases a novel about a rock band and misappropriated lyrics. (Yup, me again).

The irony with this last one is Lethem’s essay in Harper last year, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, which is composed almost entirely of other people’s words, often unattributed. The essay was one of the best things I read in 2007, fiction, poetry and greeting cards included.

Despite Lethem’s argument, I do not want to pick up and run with someone else’s ball.

So at this early, early stage, I am taking extra care to finesse out elements which others may misconstrue as derivative or cliché or au fait. In this instance, it’s as simple as coming up with another name the local’s give the character formerly known as The Mute. Perhaps he should be known by a symbol a la TAFKAP? Suggestions welcome.

Looking over what I’ve written, I see the added benefit that if people do start berating me for writing about another mute, I can try and win them over with my (by then, historical) honesty.

Take that, Roger Hall!

Routine Report from the War on Words

At least that’s how it has felt lately: like a war against words. I am also fighting a simultaneous war against cardboard cuts (like paper cuts but wider and easier to reopen) from excessive filing.

But I may have turned the corner on the writing front.

Some of you may have noticed I haven’t blogged as much as usual this week… no rambling treatises on time/travel… no (very niche interest) essays on elegiac poetry…

Well, that’s because something has come along. This something will be referred to as ‘Novel B’ in the pie chart breakdown of this week’s word count.

Yes, a new book-length fiction project (or BLFP, pronounced Blifp!, like when the television turns off suddenly because someone has knocked out the plug).

Something fresh to throw words at.

And throw words I have. Indiscriminately, in fact.

The biggest problem at the moment is the method of narration. I’ve tried third and first person. It means a lot of writing the same thing twice. Good for daily word counts, bad for making quick progress – but I feel like the voice will fall into place tomorrow.

‘Novel B’ (feel free to submit alternate working titles) is about ‘alternate realities’ without being ‘science fiction’.

The genre is fabular-meta-hardboiled-baroque-thriller.

The main character is male and was born in Palmerston North.

The other main character has no distinguishing features and will not have a single line of dialogue.

The final word on the final page will be enchilada.

Some of the above is true, while the rest is not untrue, exactly… unlikely is the best description.

Just thought I’d check in. Y’know, commemorate the moment when I still stood at the foot of an Everest (God rest your soul, Sir Ed) that could have been a fabular-meta-hardboiled-baroque-thriller, since the whole reason I’m keeping this blog is to track my progress. If you’re reading for very niche essays, I’ve got half of one on Monster Magnet’s 4-Way Diablo. Watch this space.

Writing Poetry Instead

It’s dirty little secret time.

I’ve been writing poetry instead of powering ahead with the enigmatically named Novel A (it has a real name, I’m just being cagey in my weekly updates).

Of course, poetry alone is not enough to keep up with the targets, so I’ve plodded away at short stories, long short stories and memoir-ish stuff not fit for the light of day. But generally, I’ve been in a funk for the last string of days. The word counts are there or thereabouts, but it’s a slog.

Except for poetry that is. Even if it’s very straight forward, prose-like poetry (see example below), it seems less like work. It’s a bit worrying that I’m sick of writing sentences about made up stuff this early on, but… Well, there is no But. It’s worrying.

I think the thing holding me back from working on Novel A is that I badly want to get it published. Publication is also the ultimate aim with the short stories I write, but the obvious difference is: it’s a lot less work, blood, sweat and teas (not a typo, I’m a chain tea-drinker all of a sudden) to finish a story than a novel. It’s easier to accept a story being filed away than a novel.

This is the voice of experience. I have two novel-sized manuscripts filed away. They are in the back of my head when I work on Novel A. It’s worse because Novel A bares a striking resemblances to one of the failed & filed manuscripts.

It feels sometimes like I’m one of those foolhardy restaurateurs frittering money away until Gordon Ramsay comes along to save the day. Except, I’m one of those ones who go back to making the same mistakes when F---ing Gordon and the F---ing cameras leave and there’s this quaint epilogue at the end of the episode: Novel A was filed away two months later.

Anyway, there’s a glimpse into my neuroses.

They come and go.

I think it’s worse now that I’m working and have so long to think about writing whilst not writing (I did filing all Thursday and Friday and feel a “Tips for Temps and Employers” entry coming on).

Here’s a poem I wrote which kind of needs to be posted on the internet for it to operate as it hopes it might.

Condolence

I heard your mother died

but the message had passed

through too many mouths

for me to feel comfortable going

straight to you with condolences.

Words are frail but they are all

some of us have –

limited by physical or emotional distance.

Some, like me, cannot even send the words

to you direct,

we must file them away

or fire them out into the atmosphere

and imagine – for it is only in the

imagination that this could work –

that these words will one day reach you

when the pain has faded

but not the memories

and these words will not remind you of pain or sadness

but just that other people were thinking of you

in that time of pain and sadness.

Blast From the Past: Scaling Fish Island

The other day, Marisa asked if I could get her out Moby Dick the next time I visited the library. I tried to explain that it won’t be what she’s expecting, having grown up on cartoon versions of the hunt for the white whale. She still seemed keen, so who am I to stand between her and great literature?

When I bought her home a copy of the Everyman edition, she began flicking through, randomly announcing chapter titles as if continuing my argument that the book was more of an encyclopaedia than a novel.

I have quite an involved relationship with Moby Dick. Back in 2004 I tried to write my first novel. It was an ambitious proposition: on the surface it was a road trip from Wellington to Auckland undertaken by two flatmates, but underneath it lay a retelling of the Maori myth of Maui pulling up the North Island combined with Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick in Melville’s book.

It plainly didn’t work.

I still like some of the ideas in the manuscript, but it’s an absolute muddle, full of disjointed scenes and plain bad writing.

To open the book, I chose to echo Moby Dick by having an Etymology and an Extracts section, putting space between the front cover and the narrator’s first words (my version of “Call me Ishmael”). Reading over this now, three and a half years later, I can see all the ambition and verve I had when I set out to write Scaling Fish Island. I can also tell by the voice of my etymologist (who only appears in this section, the rest of the novel is much more 21 year old Kiwi male narration) that I was still very much under the spell of Vladimir Nabokov (words like ‘homunculus’ and ‘petty bureaucrats’).

Am I a better writer now? Hard to say.

The real question is, am I still as ambitious?

Just the kind of question to ponder on a weekend jaunt to Madrid.

*sardonic chuckle*

Anyway, here for your reading pleasure is the Etymology section of the never to be published: Scaling Fish Island.

ETYMOLOGY

The poetically named North Island of New Zealand is located approximately 1600 kilometres southeast of Australia. It is not easy to discover just who christened the world’s fourteenth largest island “North”. In fact, this humble researcher has failed in his endeavour – the namer appears to have slipped (wisely) into anonymity, sparing their family name an immemorial association with one simpleton decision (two if you count the naming of the South Island). Perhaps I am unkind in placing fault upon one homunculus – the North/South names could just as likely stem from a drawing room full of dusty maps, wherein a dozen petty bureaucrats opt for the least offensive names and hastily depart for constitutionals in Menton and Dover to stifle their escalating hayfever or shake the jejune cloud of the industrial metropolis.

Happened upon by Abel Tasman in 1642, New Zealand has suffered its fair share of taxonomic oscillation at the hands of Europe. One needn’t wonder long why the three main islands’ nouveau-Irish monikers – New Ulster (the North Island), New Munster (the South Island) and New Leinster (Stewart Island) – were short lived. Even the present scheme has not been static – though North has always been North: the South Island was initially referred to as the Middle Island and Stewart Island bore the southern title. But alas, the Middle Island was decommissioned, and we are left with North, South, Stewart – the two largest islands left referring to each other, swirling in a vortex of incestuous representation, inadvertently implying a body of water (the blustery Cook Strait) is the heart of the nation. It is unfortunate these handles persisted as the Maori already had numerous more descriptive terms for the islands they had inhabited for several centuries before Abel breezed past.

Aotearoa, nowadays widely applied to the whole of New Zealand, was originally a term for the North Island. Oft translated as ‘Land of the Long White Cloud’, there are a variety of other interpretations, many of which relate to the longer daylight the Polynesian explorers experienced: ‘Land of the Long Daylight’, ‘Long Bright World’, ‘Big Glaring Light’, ‘Continuous Clear Light’ – I think you get the picture.

Another enduring Maori name for the North Island is Te Ika a Maui, ‘The Fish of Maui’. According to the myth, the demi-god Maui (a key figure throughout Polynesian mythology) pulled up the island whilst fishing. When looking at a map of the island, one may be able to see the resemblance to a skate: the head situated at the southern tip, the mouth Wellington harbour and the eye Lake Wairarapa, the East and West coasts the fins, and the North Cape the long narrow tail.