Seasonal Plume

I hadn’t written more than 700 words the two previous days, but as Singapore is on a holiday today, I tried to catch up. I did pretty well, I think:

NaNoWriMo 2007

words: 20,299 / 50,000 (41%)

That’s almost half of the goal by the eighth day, which isn’t bad at all (this might still grow within the day, as it’s only 9pm). Unfortunately, I’m still not half into the 2.5 years that my memoir is supposed to cover. Granted, there shouldn’t be too much after the first year, but I’m unearthing a lot of things from my journals as I go along that I never really know.

There are two things that are bogging me down from going through the events:

1. Research. There’s a lot of journal entries to wade through, both relevant and irrelevant to the memoir, but things I need to go through anyway.
2. Processing. This does chronicle a trying time in my life, and going through my journals is painful and troublesome.

I’ve come to the conclusion that creation itself is also scary. It’s not just the pain that going further in the memoir is going to give me, but also the general reluctance and fear that comes packaged into translating something into writing. Already I’m running into decisions that I’m putting off until the second draft: decisions and questions like, should I be as faithful as possible to what really happened or can I combine certain conversations together in order to conserve space? and how do I filter out effectively all that’s not needed, or how do I compact these into shorter, more concise scenes?

Already, I see that whatever my output for this month is, by the second draft, it’s going to be cut by half. I’m going to have to wade in with a highlighter and highlight important scenes and ideas and emotions, and find out how to make it more concise (see Questions Number One, above) and cut off the rest. I also see that I am going to need a printer, and lots of scrap paper. Oh joy.

So today I think I overreached myself a bit; my Excel report card told me I would finish by November 13 if I kept this speed up. That’s because I’m now at:

NaNoWriMo 2007

words: 10,466 / 50,000 (21%)

I stopped myself from writing more this afternoon mostly because I don’t want to suddenly inexplicably burn out, and because while things are getting “interesting”, I want to think about things a bit more. The first painful part of the story is “over”, although I feel that I wasn’t able to treat it correctly: not objective enough, not emotional enough. That sounds rather contradictory, but I’ve yet to find that balance.

I’m writing the memoir mostly in chronological order, although I’m ending up going back to a few previous scenes again and again to add/modify a few things as I remember them. I currently don’t have any chapters whatsoever, and sadly I’ve also needed to combine a few conversations or jump a few events just for the sake of moving the memoir along. Even so, I feel that I haven’t given things proper focus. As the writing progresses, I feel that I’m going to go back to the start and tweak with things, as well as add a few more things here and there, to minimize the sudden jumps (i.e., “The next week…”) and to provide a bit more insight into feelings. I’m going through it so quickly that I think it reads almost like an adventure story, although it really should be more about emotions, motivations, and the like.

The challenge here is the source. I’m basically going through my journals to grasp how the events moved along, but as I had not written about it for the longest time, I’ve had to rely on a few chance mentions and memory, both of which aren’t very detailed or clear. I do write at length about it once I had started, but right now my memoir is dealing with that point in time when I’m not writing much about the situation.

I feel that once November is over and the actual draft is done, I’ll be spending December editing the hell out of the memoir, and removing whole chunks of text, rewriting a few things, and rearranging how the story is told. At the moment I feel that a lot of the start is dragging, and that I should find a better way to “show” how things are without going on and on about things practically a day at a time. 10,000 words and I’m only at the third month in a timespan of almost three years. That’s not really easy reading. (Not that it’s meant to be easy reading.)

The second day of NanoWriMo has come and gone. I’m off to retire, but I wanted to write a bit before I did. I’m going along rather splendidly in terms of the word count goal. I stopped as I hit some faintly problematic stuff in memoir-writing: that is, research into the exact sequence of events and things. It’s still a little slow going.

NaNoWriMo 2007

words: 4,278 / 50,000 (9%)

One thing to note, however, was that I changed the point of view of my story in the middle of writing it. Since this is a memoir, I’ve been writing it in first-person perspective. Unfortunately, a few problems came up, namely:

• limited knowledge; or, inability to provide a bigger perspective of each scene, and
• it increasingly felt a little too close for comfort.

The second issue is due largely to the fact that I am writing about a certain time in my life: it’s currently a bit too “close” to me. Since the point of this exercise is also to do some post-processing of that situation, I decided a more objective, distant voice would better suit this scenario.

Hence, now I am writing in third-person omniscient, and I have a chunk of text greyed out in my text that needs to be converted over to that POV in time, as well as expanded. I kept it in since it’s really part of the story, I just need to do a rewrite.

The Wikipedia entry for Point of View actually has the exact same scenario that I am using (although it’s an advantage in my case):

The disadvantage of this mode is that it creates more distance between the reader and the story. A variation is where the narrator is a character in the story; a small amount of the story might be told in first person.

I kept the first part of the memoir in first-person; the introduction/prologue, if you will. I will probably expand this in time, but for now it will have to do — I don’t want to go in and edit it since that might bog me down.

So NaNoWriMo has officially started. Well, it’s technically the second day of NaNo for me, as it’s 12:05 AM at this very moment. I started a bit after midnight last night, as I couldn’t sleep, and wrote for an hour. Not bad for the first session:

NaNoWriMo 2007

words: 919 / 50,000 (2%)

Sadly, I haven’t written more today, mostly due to getting home late and other sundry duties, along with a reprise of the wallpapers I did for NaNo last year. I hadn’t redone them this year, as I didn’t know there were others who would like to use them again this year–but I was wrong! I feel quite fulfilled that others remembered my wallpaper and liked it. :3

Again, the wallpapers come in both large and small versions, and with black/white backgrounds:

Feel free to grab the wallpapers from wallpapers.indisguise.org :)

Now I’m off to do a bit more writing. This really isn’t too healthy, I should try to start writing earlier and sleep earlier…

It’s that time of the year again — it’s National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. If you don’t know what it is… where are you been, seriously?

It’s also that time of the month where I always set myself up to fail, apparently. I’ve joined almost every year, but after writing about a few couple thousand I slack off rather horribly. This year isn’t different, as I have signed up again for the 50,000 word challenge.

However, what I’m going to do will be slightly different. Starting November 1, I’ll be working on a memoir chronicling a certain time in my life. There are three things that I’m hoping to “hit” with this:

1. do some internal processing of the events and emotions that are related to the subject matter,
2. for memory’s sake, so I have something to look back on that will hopefully be a little more coherent than my journal entries, and
3. if my journal entries on the subject are any indication, I should be able to win NaNo this year!

It should be good as both a writing exercise and a way to process the events. I probably won’t be posting much snippets from the novel, as it’s obviously something that’s highly personal in nature, but I do hope to be blogging about the experience of writing the memoir itself.