Noveling November
So November is over, and so, it seems, is my altogether excessively long fieldwork season. That's just as well, because while there is something slightly exotic about doing archaeology in the snow with a headlamp, it's not exactly an ideal weather - although, amusingly, by far the most excruciatingly cold project is still the one in September, and actually, so long as there was no wind, one could actually get quite comfortable. Alas, that does require putting on some five layers of clothing every morning, and that gets quite tiresome after a while.
Speaking of November, there's also the small fact that I finished NaNoWriMo, with relatively little principle-bending, so, er... yay for that, eh?
I'm still a bit unclear on how I should feel about that whole thing. I suppose my attitude, going into it, was rather... careless; after all, am I not the veteran of a decade of Eternity tournaments, which often require more writing in less time, not to mention having to edit while you write, read other peoples' writings, and keep stuff consistent with the frame narrative? Next to that, you'd think cranking out a mere 1700 words per day should be a walk in the park.
Well, it's not that simple...
NaNoWriMo is a lot of fun, but more than anything, it has left me with a genuine, heartfelt longing for the Eternity tournaments. Interaction with other writers in NaNo is largely illusory; the shared excitement it generates is one of co-sufferers, not collaborators. This matters more than one would think. The pressure to write, and write well, for that matter, is far lesser in NaNo than in a tournament.
Of course, you could think of this as a good thing - NaNo being more of a leisurely long-distance jog over a month, compared to the mad, sleep-defying, sanity-bending ultramarathon of Eternity. What it lacks, though, is the amount of external stimuli. In Eternity, you had other writers, of course, with characters that you can bounce posts with, but beyond that, every couple of days you'd get a whole new location, with a set of NPCs and a situation to involve yourself in. To be sure, you'd often hear, "I have no idea what to do in this round", but, in fact, that's an excellent starting point. The advantage of a clearly defined problem is that they invite solutions. In NaNoWriMo, you lack such a defined problem - all you really have is the terror of the blank page.
Still. I was having quite a bit of fun with NaNo, and it ought not have demanded a lot of work, all things considered. There were three considerable obstacles, however. First of all, it turns out that it's surprisingly difficult to find time and energy to write when you're off doing fieldwork, that being a rather... all-encompassing affair. It's also quite exhausting to be out in sub-zero weather for a good eight hours at a time, and often, sleep begins to seem a preferable alternative to writing the night away.
Secondly, the "novel" I was writing was actually based on a long-time pet project of mine (concerning, as it were, a group of young ladies living in a fantasy Bronze Age shrine), and the idea was that writing it as a long prose piece would allow me to take a look at the material from a different perspective and refine the narrative. On this point, I was actually fairly successful - the problem, though, is that I have a strong feeling that the narrative as a whole is in some ways un-novelable, in the same way some novels are unfilmable. In that sense, the whole exercise is almost, though not quite, self-defeating, and in some ways well and truly weird.
There's also the fact that when you're adapting another work - albeit an incomplete one - there is little room for changing things on the fly. Instead, you're stuck trying to keep things coherent with your overall vision; instead of just writing scenes however you feel like at the time, you end up worrying, "yes, but is this what I need to happen at this juncture", which slows writing down considerably. In a way, it almost defeats the point of NaNo altogether, which is to bypass ordinary barriers that prevent people from writing.
Thirdly, I wrote the piece in Finnish, which presents several difficulties - the most immediate being that Finnish just so happens to be a very dense language with a great deal of compound words and few prepositions, to the effect that a Finnish sentence may well have half as many words as an English sentence saying the same thing; so actually writing 50 000 words in Finnish is around 70 000 in English.
In addition, there's the fact that I haven't actually written any long piece of prose fiction in my native tongue in... oh... must be about ten years! This leads to a few interesting problems. Insofar as I have a developed narrative 'tone', it seems that it exists mainly in English, and cannot be readily transformed to Finnish; certainly not when it comes to fantasy. You see, one of the things about English is that it has has become (if I may say so) a somewhat neutral, anonymous language - it is possible to write English in a way that doesn't scream a particular historical or cultural context, which is arguably an advantage if you're writing about an alien or fantastic context.
The same is not true of Finnish, which has a relatively short history as a written language, and a local one at that. It's difficult to write Finnish in a way that does not evoke a specific context - choices of tone and vocabulary always produce strong associations to something, whether it's the Bible, folk tales, rural dialects, and so forth. There is always an aspect of trying to find the correct tone for a particular subject in prose fiction, but in Finnish, a "neutral" tone doesn't exist; instead, it is necessary to produce an amalgam of tones that do not clash excessively with the subject matter. Now, in my case, the tone of my Finnish prose - and I'm honestly not even sure why - is close to early 20th century literary fiction. It feels odd, and it's almost like I don't really know what to do with it.
Well! That said, though, I'd call NaNoWriMo a very decent way of having spent a November. In all honestly, the actual text I produced doesn't really stand up to Eternity stuff, in terms of any real writing quality, but still, at least I was writing something related to an original project, so I'll take what I can get! Besides, I did end up with many scenes that I like, resolved plenty of plot tangles, refined the setting a great deal, came up with characters I really liked and developed others in ways I didn't entirely expect. Beyond that, writing the thing in Finnish certainly did absolute wonders for the setting-specific vocabulary, since having to see the pretentious terms in one's native tongue does encourage one to remove the worst types of fantasy cliches. So, er... I guess it's a net win!
Still, now that I have nostalgia goggles on, I'm really craving some of that old-time Eternity action, though...
Speaking of November, there's also the small fact that I finished NaNoWriMo, with relatively little principle-bending, so, er... yay for that, eh?
I'm still a bit unclear on how I should feel about that whole thing. I suppose my attitude, going into it, was rather... careless; after all, am I not the veteran of a decade of Eternity tournaments, which often require more writing in less time, not to mention having to edit while you write, read other peoples' writings, and keep stuff consistent with the frame narrative? Next to that, you'd think cranking out a mere 1700 words per day should be a walk in the park.
Well, it's not that simple...
NaNoWriMo is a lot of fun, but more than anything, it has left me with a genuine, heartfelt longing for the Eternity tournaments. Interaction with other writers in NaNo is largely illusory; the shared excitement it generates is one of co-sufferers, not collaborators. This matters more than one would think. The pressure to write, and write well, for that matter, is far lesser in NaNo than in a tournament.
Of course, you could think of this as a good thing - NaNo being more of a leisurely long-distance jog over a month, compared to the mad, sleep-defying, sanity-bending ultramarathon of Eternity. What it lacks, though, is the amount of external stimuli. In Eternity, you had other writers, of course, with characters that you can bounce posts with, but beyond that, every couple of days you'd get a whole new location, with a set of NPCs and a situation to involve yourself in. To be sure, you'd often hear, "I have no idea what to do in this round", but, in fact, that's an excellent starting point. The advantage of a clearly defined problem is that they invite solutions. In NaNoWriMo, you lack such a defined problem - all you really have is the terror of the blank page.
Still. I was having quite a bit of fun with NaNo, and it ought not have demanded a lot of work, all things considered. There were three considerable obstacles, however. First of all, it turns out that it's surprisingly difficult to find time and energy to write when you're off doing fieldwork, that being a rather... all-encompassing affair. It's also quite exhausting to be out in sub-zero weather for a good eight hours at a time, and often, sleep begins to seem a preferable alternative to writing the night away.
Secondly, the "novel" I was writing was actually based on a long-time pet project of mine (concerning, as it were, a group of young ladies living in a fantasy Bronze Age shrine), and the idea was that writing it as a long prose piece would allow me to take a look at the material from a different perspective and refine the narrative. On this point, I was actually fairly successful - the problem, though, is that I have a strong feeling that the narrative as a whole is in some ways un-novelable, in the same way some novels are unfilmable. In that sense, the whole exercise is almost, though not quite, self-defeating, and in some ways well and truly weird.
There's also the fact that when you're adapting another work - albeit an incomplete one - there is little room for changing things on the fly. Instead, you're stuck trying to keep things coherent with your overall vision; instead of just writing scenes however you feel like at the time, you end up worrying, "yes, but is this what I need to happen at this juncture", which slows writing down considerably. In a way, it almost defeats the point of NaNo altogether, which is to bypass ordinary barriers that prevent people from writing.
Thirdly, I wrote the piece in Finnish, which presents several difficulties - the most immediate being that Finnish just so happens to be a very dense language with a great deal of compound words and few prepositions, to the effect that a Finnish sentence may well have half as many words as an English sentence saying the same thing; so actually writing 50 000 words in Finnish is around 70 000 in English.
In addition, there's the fact that I haven't actually written any long piece of prose fiction in my native tongue in... oh... must be about ten years! This leads to a few interesting problems. Insofar as I have a developed narrative 'tone', it seems that it exists mainly in English, and cannot be readily transformed to Finnish; certainly not when it comes to fantasy. You see, one of the things about English is that it has has become (if I may say so) a somewhat neutral, anonymous language - it is possible to write English in a way that doesn't scream a particular historical or cultural context, which is arguably an advantage if you're writing about an alien or fantastic context.
The same is not true of Finnish, which has a relatively short history as a written language, and a local one at that. It's difficult to write Finnish in a way that does not evoke a specific context - choices of tone and vocabulary always produce strong associations to something, whether it's the Bible, folk tales, rural dialects, and so forth. There is always an aspect of trying to find the correct tone for a particular subject in prose fiction, but in Finnish, a "neutral" tone doesn't exist; instead, it is necessary to produce an amalgam of tones that do not clash excessively with the subject matter. Now, in my case, the tone of my Finnish prose - and I'm honestly not even sure why - is close to early 20th century literary fiction. It feels odd, and it's almost like I don't really know what to do with it.
Well! That said, though, I'd call NaNoWriMo a very decent way of having spent a November. In all honestly, the actual text I produced doesn't really stand up to Eternity stuff, in terms of any real writing quality, but still, at least I was writing something related to an original project, so I'll take what I can get! Besides, I did end up with many scenes that I like, resolved plenty of plot tangles, refined the setting a great deal, came up with characters I really liked and developed others in ways I didn't entirely expect. Beyond that, writing the thing in Finnish certainly did absolute wonders for the setting-specific vocabulary, since having to see the pretentious terms in one's native tongue does encourage one to remove the worst types of fantasy cliches. So, er... I guess it's a net win!
Still, now that I have nostalgia goggles on, I'm really craving some of that old-time Eternity action, though...