fling93 loves fishies

NaNoWriMo

Been taking a bit of a breather, in case that wasn’t obvious. That last monster of a post had been taking up a lot of my time the past few weeks. And I’m not going to have much of a break until NaNoWriMo starts.

Wot’s dat, you say? National Novel Writing Month, where the challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in a single month. It doesn’t have to be great. It can be utter crap. It just has to be 50,000 words. The idea is more about motivation and the artistic process than the actual result. I guess it sounds kinda like an extended stream-of-consciousness exercise, but my impression is that it’s much more than that.

Of course, this could pose a problem to me, being somewhat of a perfectionist. Most of my blog posts tend to be essay style where I spend a lot of time outlining and gathering notes and links, and then painstakingly piecing the whole thing together, re-editing and re-organizing and even performing extra research meticulously as I go. And then after that, I spend at least an hour or two of proofreading and tweaking. It’s a completely different creative process. Now, it’s against the rules to write anything that goes into the novel before November starts, so to help get me used to that flow, I’m going to try and move away from that model for a few posts and try to just write freely a little bit more. Indeed, I did that a little bit when I wrote my quick post on the first debate and that rambling post on the Bridge to Bridge. And of course, I’m trying it again here, so bear with me.

Well okay, not exactly, as I just spent some time re-editing that last paragraph. Bad me! Anyway, I used to write fiction pretty regularly, but it’s been at least five years since my last story. But before I get into that let me back up a little bit and explain how I came to find that writing was my calling. It all started in high school. I was a math and science whiz (which is why I eventually went into engineering), but I never particularly liked writing. Like most everybody else, I dreaded essays and term papers, and would pad my page count using the usual B.S. techniques that everybody else uses. Well, I went to these summer camps for nerds, called CTY (Center for academically Talented Youth) run by Johns Hopkins. Yes, for kids so geeky they want to take extra classes in the summer and not get credit for them.

I think most people picked classes in their main area of interest. Me, I decided to take the opportunity to address an apparent weakness, and signed up for Writing Skills I, and the next year I took Writing Skills II. I don’t recall the specific techniques I learned in the class, and I don’t think I even noticed the difference right away, but in hindsight, I went from trying to fill papers to the required minimum to writing so much that I usually trimmed down the apparent size of my papers by decreasing the margin-size.

I’d been meaning to write about CTY after seeing Jacob Levy mention it. It was definitely a memorable experience. And as often happened in my youth, I had my requisite crush each time where I merely admired from afar but never actually did anything about it. Actually, that part of me hasn’t changed all that much; I just now have the excuse that I’m already married.

Anyway, I didn’t really do much with this newly acquired skill at first (and I do believe it’s a skill that most anybody can learn), but in college, I signed up for what I thought was just another Star Trek fan club. It turned out to be more of a fan fiction club. It was called “Starships of the Third Fleet,” and the way it worked was that people in the club were grouped into ships that were supposedly in the same Starfleet as Captain Kirk’s Enterprise. Everyone created their own fictional character who was an officer on the ship, complete with a biographical profile. My character was a Vulcan named Semnik who was the transporter chief on the U.S.S. Exeter. Every quarter, someone would write a prologue involving these characters, and everybody else would write a short story finishing the prologue. They’d mail it in, and then the Captain of the ship would create a booklet and send it out to everybody.

I guess that was a bit of serendipity, for it was that experience that made me realize I was meant to be a writer. Of course, my stories started out not so great (but not nearly as bad as I expected), but I learned little things here and there along the way. My first few stories revolved merely around a single idea where I just randomly wrote around it. Then I started evolving a technique where I would brainstorm up a bunch of interesting and funny moments and tidbits, and then I’d work my way through them, one by one, crossing them off one at a time. Kinda like how I’d write term papers. I’m not bad at coming up with neat ideas, so this would actually result in something somewhat entertaining.

By the end, I was coming up with full plot structures, including ongoing character storylines that transcended each individual story. It was actually an interesting exercise, finding a way to tie these longer story arcs into each story’s separate plot. I suppose it’s a lot like what Joss Whedon and the rest of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer writers did every week. Semnik turned out to be a Vulcan who rejected his own heritage in favor of Earth’s, which he found much more interesting. Indeed, he was a big sports fan and was a jazz drummer. Given how I’ve pretty much eschewed my own Taiwanese heritage and pretty much attempted to fully assimilate as an American, this was actually quite autobiographical (although I’m not much of a drummer). I very occasionally read through them, and am still pretty satisfied with how most of them turned out, and I’ve actually long thought of posting them on the website — but the problem is that they’re all in Lotus AmiPro 3.0 format, and I have yet to find a way to translate them to MS Word (tips and suggestions are definitely welcome).

Anyway, I eventually figured I’d learned most of what I could learn from this format, and decided to quit the club and write my own stuff. By this time, I’d also written a Star Trek: The Next Generation short story for a fanzine, entitled “Yesterday’s Warrior” (about Worf’s home planet in the alternate timeline of “Yesterday’s Enterprise” — you can probably find it via Google). So I figured I should try to write a Star Trek novel, especially since I’ve read published Star Trek novels that were so bad that I was sure I could do better. So I started one, but I soon realized I was on pace to use up all of my ideas within the first three chapters, so I abandoned that effort pretty quickly.

Instead, I decided to try and get an original science fiction short story published in a magazine. I did, in fact, manage to finish writing my own short story and submitted it to Asimov’s. It got rejected, and, unfortunately I didn’t resubmit it anywhere else. I later put it up for critique at Critters, and only got two responses, both of which identified many structural issues with the story. The thing is, it’s a long and very convoluted story about a time loop (sorta like the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Cause and Effect,” the one which guest-starred Kelsey Grammer). And it was more about a neat idea that I had than about plot or character, and, of course, it runs into repetitive issues even though I took pains to rewrite looped scenes from scratch instead of copying and pasting. I was planning on going back and fixing it, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I’m wondering whether it’s even salvageable.

And sadly, that was the really the last time I did much writing at all, not having the club anymore to motivate me regularly. My wife tried to get me back into it, which is how I discovered Critters, but that involved too much reading for me to really have time to devote to writing. That, plus when I review or critique something, I tend to do a really, really thorough job. You may have already noticed that tendency in my reviews, but this goes many-fold when I’m writing critique for the purpose of helping the creator. So once I acquired enough critique credits to submit my one story for review, I pretty much quit it.

And that was pretty much it — until the blog. I’d participated in message boards debating about investing and politics (mostly at the Motley Fool), which I supposed honed my debate skills a bit, but that wasn’t really writing. It wasn’t until my dear sister suggested it that I even knew what a blog was, and of course, I think it’s been an excellent outlet for me. Of course, I tend not to use it differently from most other bloggers, but it’s gotten the creative writing juices going again. Like I used to do when I was writing Star Trek stories, I often found myself using free time (driving, in the shower, etc.) coming up with new blog ideas and points to add to my posts that are in progress.

My wife, who’s read all my short stories and thinks they’re pretty good, has told me I’m actually more suited to the essay format than to fiction. So I had thought of just sticking to this. But I started having second thoughts after hearing a lot of my fellow SFBayBloggers and a few other people I know talk about their plans to participate in NaNoWriMo. Plus I recently read a recent article on how nonfiction writers can learn a lot from writing fiction (and vice versa).

And now that I’ve gotten an invite/challenge to NaNoWriMo from Elke, I’m going to do it, even though I have a Wednesday economics class and a blog which had been taking up a good chunk of my free time. I figure I can work around the class and take a temporary break from the blog. Most participants aim to write 1,667 words a day for thirty days. Since I figure I’m going to lose four days of the month due to the class and maybe four more to homework, and then maybe another two due to Thanksgiving, that cuts down my writing days to twenty, which works out to about 2,500 words a day. Being a perfectionist, I’m going to shoot for a more typical novel length of 70,000 words, which means closer to 3,500 words a day.

This is a pretty daunting figure, given that my average blog post takes several hours and is about 1,200 to 2,000 words long (yeah, that last one was over 8,000 — but that took much longer than usual). But since those pieces are heavily researched and edited, hopefully it won’t be so bad. I figure having such a high target means I should have no problem hitting the 50,000 mark. But this is basically why I’m trying to write more posts that are more spontaneous and less heavily edited and researched. Like this one.

Let’s see, this post was a little over an hour’s worth (written mostly at a South Bay NaNoWriMo pre-write-in at Orchard Valley Coffee, coincidentally), and it’s over 2,000 words, so I guess that’s not too bad. So hopefully I end up with something at least worth reading (and if so, I’ll need help proofreading and editing the thing, so if any of you are interested, do let me know by commenting here or via e-mail). If it’s not publishable but still interesting enough, maybe I’ll post it up here or something. Since I probably won’t be blogging much in November, I might even post the first couple of chapters here, depending on how good they come out. So stay tuned!