NaNoWriMo 2016 Aftermath – the novel

I wrote 50,091 words. It might be telling that as soon as I noticed I had reached the mark, I stopped writing mid-sentence. It’s not that I don’t believe in this story, but at 11:30 pm after playing trivia at the pub and drinking three 25 ounce beers, after being awake since 3 am and writing regularly throughout the day (5,109 for the day), including a poem, I was a bit tired.

My approach to this novel was entirely exploratory. I wrote three characters I could not normally relate to about subjects literally outside of my experiential scope. I am a 55 year old white male and I wrote about women’s rights; I wrote about a white, privileged, authoritarian, right-winged, American male and I consider myself a white, lower-middle-class, introverted, centrist truth-seeker; I wrote about a woman, a mother, who had sacrificed her career for money, who had sacrificed her dignity for her husband’s empire. for her family’s standing, but who worked through the years to escape the binds; I wrote a high school senior, a girl, who preparing to enter the adult world learns there are adult issues and that being a woman is in no way equal to being a man nor is it fair, but she does not see any reason it cannot be. I knew these people as well as I knew people on the news.

I know them better now, but I don’t honestly know them. I am happiest with my father and daughter stories. I am not so happy with mom’s. I won’t detail the issues or the stories, but Mom’s is rather hyperbolic. Her story pushes my boundaries, and my boundaries are quite malleable.

It is a story told from the three perspectives. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible are both on my near-term reading list, both because of they follow similar structures. One of my issues is the interaction. Each character has their own story instead of being a single story. Dad and daughter interact closely, and Mom and Dad do as well, but Mom and the daughter not so much. I expect a lot of pondering, reflective writing (which this blog is), and planning over the next few months. I hope to attack it again in February, but I may never revisit this story.

The writing is mostly active. It is not particularly literary or deep; though at times I dig into more imagery and reflective prose. It borders more on YA than it does adult literary. It’s another decision I have to make: who is its audience? All of the above?

Anyway, here’s a fairly innocent example of Dad (and a conflict already raises its ugly head: he knows from experience he has to walk alone, yet he has rarely done so¿).

Why can’t that woman make a decent pot of coffee? Made fresh and tastes a week old. All you need to do is pour in the pre-packaged grounds and flip the water switch. Does she not clean the pot first? The regular coffee brewers are all in training, and Carl knows from too much experience with difficult clients that he needs to get away from his desk and think, get away from the office and let the insane outside world temper his disdain.

Carl wonders how his city looks so strange in the mid-morning, and thinking back over his career at Harris and Saunders he cannot recall simply walking the streets alone if it was not lunch time or dinner time. He has always been accompanied by his mentor Keith Saunders, his current aging partner, Keith’s brother Peter Saunders, a senior manager, or a client.

He feels lost. He knows the streetlights but only from the view from behind his windshield, raised, perpendicular and parallel, not these angular perspectives. The shops are strange. A Subway shop. How long has that been there? A foreign restaurant. Indian? Egyptian? Turkish? Its letters remind him of when he tried to teach his young kids how to write. Lauren caught on pretty quickly, but Michael took a few years. Boys and girls, they are so different. Carl looks for a coffee shop but can’t find any. Where do all these young hotshots go on their break? He comes to an intersection, looks left, and sees a large, brown coffee cup swinging in the warm breeze.

NaNoWriMo 2016 Aftermath – the poetry

Aftermath has been one of my favorite words ever since I purchased the Rolling Stones album Aftermath in the mid-1970’s. But as I write these words, I realize I may never have used it before; though I must have, somewhere.

November was a busy month. Not only did I start my seventh novel, but I also wrote 33 poems in Robert Lee Brewer’s Chapbook Challenge 2016. I remind myself that such events at not about quality; that quality writing is achieved by much rework. I know from experience that creating a good novel takes at least two years of steady work. I am also learning that published poets can take as long or longer to become satisfied with their poems. I am trying to feel neither good nor bad about either. Simply watching a local MFA poet work and rework her poems every Sunday morning and never seeming to see lights in her tunnels tells me I have to rethink my poetry writing processes.

I usually write my poems very quickly: take the prompt, try writing some lines until one sticks, build on it, and then make a few passes at it. This month as I wrote every morning I felt the urge to develop a poem-writing process. I have prose-writing processes, somewhat, and I will blog about them someday, but my poetry writing routine was too thin.

My searching first brought me to this interesting video. Some guy named Spectre walks us through his writing steps. He writes simple, straightforward lines. His first example is

My Video Games

 

It’s fun

I can beat it

Lt’s like a friend to me

It never refuses my progress

It’s not a poem but random thoughts, a random outline for a poem. He then beefs up each line:

Excitement for me

I triumph at it

It’s like a friend to me

That’s always prepare to go

And a bell went off in my head. This was around the middle of November, and since then, I’ve written such outlines for most of my poems and I am sold on this technique.

I was not pleased with Spectre’s randomness, though. If I take any subject and write lines as they come to me, I know very well I am going to miss things. I am only going to write what my active brain has access to. I have learned that prompting the brain can trigger ideas that such a focused exercise would never dream up. I searched for guidance and found it at this site. It is not so much poetry guidance a it is description guidance: a checklist for describing objects. I won’t go into detail here, but I began taking my chosen subjects: objects, ideas, situations, etc., and applied this checklist too them and wrote as simple sentences as I could.

One of the interesting side effects was that poetic lines would pop into my head. There is one truth I know about prose I did not freely acknowledge in poetry, and it is something I have already stated: the more you write about something, the more ideas flow on to the page, about the subject and about other subjects. I don’t know which poems they were, but on some days I’d end up writing about something completely different than my initial title. And it may not be a direct offshoot. Sometimes writing one thing triggers a second thing which triggers a third thing and so on, very similar to lateral brainstorming. And there is a host of brainstorming techniques that can probably all be applied to poetry writing.

I also read a now favorite poet I did not expect to become a favorite poet: Anne Compton. I read her Governor General Award winning Processional, and I loved it. I found her words and her style spoke to me, and I think some of my poems this month emulated her style. I can’t say much about her writing except that my enjoyment and sympathy came at the exact best time, as I was making forward progress in my own writing. Her book was gas on the fire. And I found myself exploring writing advice and processes online. A discovered a particularly important tidbit at Philosophy and Nonsense where the author suggests, begin and end each line with a strong word. I highlight his line because I think it is so true.

So I left November feeling much better about writing poetry: that I was finally starting to understand what I was doing and had created paths for getting there. I was largely happy with my poems for the month, and have been working at assembling a Chapbook to submit to Robert for his adjudication.

Here are a couple of poems I wrote which I used these new techniques to write.

Sin

It’s mine and will be, until I decide it isn’t. Regardless of what I say
I know you still love me. It’s what you do.

I didn’t join the club. I was a charter member.
We all join, sooner or later. He gave us all free passes.

It’s bound to happen. You don’t fold your hands.
You withhold your grace. Did you ever think of what I might have said?

Your wife is innocent. Be grateful for your love.
The girl is untarnished, so far. So much faith in righteousness.

The Sound of Money

He burlesques my musical ear
with his dollar store recorder
a pet rat under his hat
gives accusatory stares

You’re just a cheap bastard, but
I will play a song for you
I’ll pray a prayer, for us
for the offspring this world doesn’t need

He learned a new note
and it’s confused his song
can only play in tune on Saturdays
when the children are about

Here’s a free God Bless You
on your morning walk
salvation thrown away
halleluiahs donated

He’s almost the Jay-suhs prototype:
blessed are the destitute
ye who inherit
the inability to clean

I feel sorry for you in your suit
I’ve never worn shoes that would polish
Could you survive my grave and
play the sounds of money?

 

Next post: the novel.