NaNoWriMo Wrap Up and why you won't be able to read my memoir until The Boy is 40!
A few days ago paragraphs asked what we learned from NaNo and I’ve been giving the question rather a lot of thought. Then earlier today valancy_joy posted her thoughts and that has spurred me on a bit.
First off, just to get it out of the way, I did not make my goal and I did not play fair and neither of those things bothers me at all. I wrote some 27K of an only slightly fictionilized college sexcapades coming of age memoir with no real plot to speak of other than the fact that I survived. Which really wasn’t a given when you were fucking around in the early ‘80’s and mixing a few speedballs in with the Lithium Carbonate. So. Not enough words and not a novel, and good god even if I polished this up (it’s pretty much finished and making it any longer for the sake of length would be stupid) there is no way, no how I would EVER want to shop it around because it is real and honest and I am not at all willing to actually be public about this yet. Maybe after my Mom dies. And my Mother in Law. Or the Boy can find it and read it when he is forty. It’s all sort of horrific when I think about it being public but damned if I didn’t make it sound amusing.
But in a very important way I COMPLETELY MADE MY GOAL. Which was to write, to write for fun, to write what I know, to write everyday. I skipped a few days in there but overall I have developed and nurtured a daily writing practice. I’ve discovered what works for me and what doesn’t (setting aside the same time daily=good; fussing about word count=bad) and I rediscovered that the old chestnut BIC, Butt in Chair, is every bit as valid as Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird as a writing mantra. Just sit down and shut up and do it already resonates for me, for the whole family, actually.
Which is the other way I made my goal. I modeled a reasonable writing practice for The Boy. He saw me write, talk about writing, think about writing, celebrate that writing was going well, and he saw me not fall apart when it was not going well. I let him read a few passages of my Shitty First Draft. He saw that it was, indeed, a file called SHITTY FIRST DRAFT. Since he tends to want everything that he types to be as polished as the lastest Scott Westerfeld novel he’s reading, and to hate on himself when it isn’t, I hit on the SFD idea pretty hard.
He, by the way, was also doing NaNo and, like his mom, he didn’t quite finish. His English 1 teacher gave them a choice between NaNo for kids (9k or about 300/day) or their standard outside reading/book report for this six-weeks period. When he signed up I thought they would have a chance to write some in class but it turned out to be all outside work. The teacher was checking word counts on a weekly basis and if you fell too far behind you got cut from Nano and were back on the book report. I am not at all clear how I feel about this policy but recognize that as a teacher dealing with thirteen and fourteen year olds who are participating as a graded project she needed some sort of control and cutoff. I am pleased that The Boy did not internalize his lack of wordcount as a failure. Turns out about half the class dropped out the same week he did (and this is a class of Magnet Middle School students who had to both self-select and test into this High School Advanced Placement class). I don't think you can discount the fact that 300 words a day is about between thirty and sixty minutes of writing for most teens, even when it is flowing well. That's a pretty big time commitment when it's on top of 1.5-2 hours of daily homework plus any music or athletics practice. I'm not surprised so many dropped out.
In the end he has about 6,000 words of a hilarious near future story about super-powers and politcs and a colony on Mars. Sure it has too many ideas wedged into it and a few transparently self-insertion characters and the plot sort of rockets along unsteadily but it is BRILLIANTLY FUNNY and no one else on Earth could have written it. He struggles so to get the words out (don’t we all?) but he has such a personal voice that it’s really quite wonderful. And he let me read it. And he’s proud of it. I really couldn’t wish for more.
Or, well I could but I didn’t even know to wish for it: We spent time writing together. Not everyday but nine or ten times now we’ve made ourselves comfy and collected our iced tea or coke zero and settled in and done timed writing. Together. And it is wonderful and we will do it more. That’s what I’ve learned from NaNo: That I can share this with my son. And also that when we stop saying “bird by bird” to each other and start saying “turd by turd”, it gets a laugh every single time.
So. Writing with The Boy, following ya'lls ups and downs, inspiring Dave to make his newsletter deadlines for once, and a salacious Shitty First Draft about sex, drugs, mental illness, AIDS, and love . It's been a hell of a month.
There it is. I never planned to sign up for NaNoWriMo and did so only after losing a bet with Dave on October 30. The Boy signed up because he thought it would be better than writing another book report (6K vs. 400 words IDEK!).
I think we both won!
First off, just to get it out of the way, I did not make my goal and I did not play fair and neither of those things bothers me at all. I wrote some 27K of an only slightly fictionilized college sexcapades coming of age memoir with no real plot to speak of other than the fact that I survived. Which really wasn’t a given when you were fucking around in the early ‘80’s and mixing a few speedballs in with the Lithium Carbonate. So. Not enough words and not a novel, and good god even if I polished this up (it’s pretty much finished and making it any longer for the sake of length would be stupid) there is no way, no how I would EVER want to shop it around because it is real and honest and I am not at all willing to actually be public about this yet. Maybe after my Mom dies. And my Mother in Law. Or the Boy can find it and read it when he is forty. It’s all sort of horrific when I think about it being public but damned if I didn’t make it sound amusing.
But in a very important way I COMPLETELY MADE MY GOAL. Which was to write, to write for fun, to write what I know, to write everyday. I skipped a few days in there but overall I have developed and nurtured a daily writing practice. I’ve discovered what works for me and what doesn’t (setting aside the same time daily=good; fussing about word count=bad) and I rediscovered that the old chestnut BIC, Butt in Chair, is every bit as valid as Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird as a writing mantra. Just sit down and shut up and do it already resonates for me, for the whole family, actually.
Which is the other way I made my goal. I modeled a reasonable writing practice for The Boy. He saw me write, talk about writing, think about writing, celebrate that writing was going well, and he saw me not fall apart when it was not going well. I let him read a few passages of my Shitty First Draft. He saw that it was, indeed, a file called SHITTY FIRST DRAFT. Since he tends to want everything that he types to be as polished as the lastest Scott Westerfeld novel he’s reading, and to hate on himself when it isn’t, I hit on the SFD idea pretty hard.
He, by the way, was also doing NaNo and, like his mom, he didn’t quite finish. His English 1 teacher gave them a choice between NaNo for kids (9k or about 300/day) or their standard outside reading/book report for this six-weeks period. When he signed up I thought they would have a chance to write some in class but it turned out to be all outside work. The teacher was checking word counts on a weekly basis and if you fell too far behind you got cut from Nano and were back on the book report. I am not at all clear how I feel about this policy but recognize that as a teacher dealing with thirteen and fourteen year olds who are participating as a graded project she needed some sort of control and cutoff. I am pleased that The Boy did not internalize his lack of wordcount as a failure. Turns out about half the class dropped out the same week he did (and this is a class of Magnet Middle School students who had to both self-select and test into this High School Advanced Placement class). I don't think you can discount the fact that 300 words a day is about between thirty and sixty minutes of writing for most teens, even when it is flowing well. That's a pretty big time commitment when it's on top of 1.5-2 hours of daily homework plus any music or athletics practice. I'm not surprised so many dropped out.
In the end he has about 6,000 words of a hilarious near future story about super-powers and politcs and a colony on Mars. Sure it has too many ideas wedged into it and a few transparently self-insertion characters and the plot sort of rockets along unsteadily but it is BRILLIANTLY FUNNY and no one else on Earth could have written it. He struggles so to get the words out (don’t we all?) but he has such a personal voice that it’s really quite wonderful. And he let me read it. And he’s proud of it. I really couldn’t wish for more.
Or, well I could but I didn’t even know to wish for it: We spent time writing together. Not everyday but nine or ten times now we’ve made ourselves comfy and collected our iced tea or coke zero and settled in and done timed writing. Together. And it is wonderful and we will do it more. That’s what I’ve learned from NaNo: That I can share this with my son. And also that when we stop saying “bird by bird” to each other and start saying “turd by turd”, it gets a laugh every single time.
So. Writing with The Boy, following ya'lls ups and downs, inspiring Dave to make his newsletter deadlines for once, and a salacious Shitty First Draft about sex, drugs, mental illness, AIDS, and love . It's been a hell of a month.
There it is. I never planned to sign up for NaNoWriMo and did so only after losing a bet with Dave on October 30. The Boy signed up because he thought it would be better than writing another book report (6K vs. 400 words IDEK!).
I think we both won!