Writing: The Fast and the Furious (Part II) (EXTRA CRITICUM)

Omigosh. How did so much time go by since I last posted???

Well, it’s not like I haven’t been busy. Aside from a particularly hectic time at work, there have been a lot of things going on. For example…

• I headed back to NYC for my very first book signing! My play Women Behind the Bush was published alongside the wonderful work of my colleagues from En Avant Playwrights (including my dear friend and Extra Criticum contributor, Kathleen Warnock). To celebrate, we had a big book party at Barnes and Noble at Lincoln Square, and there was a reading of an excerpt of the play with members of the original production. (It was always a dream of mine to sign books at that particular B&N, since we live just blocks away from the store in NYC). It was a whirlwind! An absolute blast! And now, United Stages’ book “The Best of En Avant Playwrights” is on shelves at the Drama Book Shop in NYC; it will soon be available on barnesandnoble.com.

• My play, Twisted Love, was performed in Fullerton, CA, in a lovely and very smart production directed by Tira Palmquist.

• But the big news is: I finished the NOVEL!

Now I know this is a theater site, but I want to write about this gigundo prose project anyway because (A) some of you writers out there may find it helpful if I share some of the process of writing, and (B) I do think that some of what I learned can be applied to any writing project (or indeed any big project – theater related or otherwise).

So when we left our hero (or, at least: ME, your hapless writer)…

I had 13 days to go in the National Novel Writing Month project, and I had still had some 20,000 words to write. At the same time, I was starting to feel about 20,000 of leagues under the sea, artistically.

The book is called “Peacock Hall.” It’s a metafictional whodunit, of sorts, in which the stock characters of an English-drawing-room thriller slowly become away that they’re characters in a mystery book. (Imagine Agatha Christie makes out with Pirandello on top of the board game “Clue.”)

Metaficitonal or not, any whodunit requires more specificity and plotting than I was prepared for. Trust me: as someone who’s been writing drama for a long time: prose is HARD! Really, really, really hard. In my playwriting life I haven’t had to describe someone’s appearance, or a landscape, or the specifics of which room is next to which other room in a long, long time.

Out of my element, I was starting to ask some counterproductive questions: Why are you doing this, again? What is the purpose of this? Why isn’t this turning out well? And: don’t you know this will NEVER be published – so isn’t this a waste of time?

There were I admit, a number of days in which I didn’t get to working on the novel at all. There always seemed to be other stuff to do: calls, emails, scripts for work, cleaning the house, getting the car washed, walking the dog. (OK, I don’t have a dog. But I invented an imaginary one so I could waste time walking him.)

But I kept pressing forward, even though the work seemed Quixotic. By the end, after having skipped some days, I had to crank out, say, between 2,000 and 8,000 words a day to make my 50,000 word quota.

I’m not sure why I was so driven to do it – partly because I had committed to doing it publicly, both on the NanoWriMo website, and also to friends and family, who I had asked to nag me about my novel. And partly because I really wanted to be awarded the certificate at the end that said I had completed 50,000 words. I know it’s goofy – but that meant something to me.

And… I did it! I actually finished the novel! 50,000 words, with a beginning, middle and end. (To be exact: 50,151 words. But who’s counting?)

So you may be wondering: how did it all turn out? Well…

It’s a disaster, artistically. Oh, the beginning and the end are pretty okay - it’s just those 46,000 words in the middle that are a problem. (Snort.)

Seriously: characters materialize and drop out… voice, tense, and POV veer back and forth madly… and a number of the characters who get knocked off do so with little or no fanfare.

In addition, there are long paragraphs where I write “Why am I doing this?” and “How many words to go till I get to my daily quota?” There are other paragraphs where characters burst into song, or make shopping lists. (And YES, they DO count towards my 50,000 words, too - I was amused to see on the NaNoWriMo blogs that many writers were sniffy about writers who pad their first draft with songs or shopping lists. But I figured, hey, whatever gets a first draft down on paper.)

So, yeah, I couldn’t go out and publish this thing right now. I haven’t looked back at it yet – haven’t had the heart to – and I do have my doubts as to whether I ever WILL be able to make anything of it. I am certain that it can’t go out into the world without major rethinking and re-editing.

Am I glad I did it, though?

You bet. Absolutely. While I was in the middle of it, I didn’t think I’d be this happy about the sheer fact of completion. Completion counts for a lot, I think.

And there are a few things I learned along the way, which may be applicable to any other writer. Indeed, any other theater artist may find these helpful, too, especially “Thing I learned # 1.” Here goes! For me:

1) Every now and then, it’s healthy to take on a monumental project – even (especially?) a project which you recognize may fail.

2) You can get a LOT done by working in small increments every day. Just 1/2 hour a day = about 3 pages! Say you write 10 minutes per day. That’s about a page per day – which means you have a 365 page draft of a novel in just one year!

3) Find the most productive writing time and work then. (Speaking for me, only: first thing in the morning is the best writing time. Then I felt like I COULD write more during the day, if I wanted to, but I had fulfilled my quota and didn’t have it hanging over me.)

4) Have some overarching goals: the specific “50,000 words, 1 month” time and length goals really helped me. This way, I wasn’t lolling about saying, “Oh well, I can finish this whenever the Muse strikes me…. Oooh, wait – ‘Top Chef’ is on!”

5) Set smaller, daily goals as well: breaking the big word count into smaller increments helped. (1667 words per day was the minimum to get to 50,000 in a month.)

6) Tell people about your big project, so when you quit, you feel you have to stick to it and get it DONE.

7) Get a sloppy dirty first draft down, no matter what. Most first drafts are crappy anyway – you can always go back and edit it later.

Two more that occur to me:

8) Write the thing that makes you FEEL the most – write with your fascinations. (I wish I’d spent a little more time meditating on what I wanted to write before immersing myself in this project.)

And….

9) Jumping into the pool and starting to doggy-paddle is perfectly fine. There’ll be a lot of flailing, but you’ll learn to swim (probably!). But if I tried this again, I’d learn to outline and plan a bit better.

I hope to apply what I learned to my playwriting and screenwriting projects in the New Year. And yes, I may even set a time to reread this big stack of paper and re-edit it to see what’s there. Above all, I’m proud of that stack and hope I can make something of it.

I’d love to hear from you: have you undertaken something massive and insane – and maybe misguided? How did it turn out? Are you glad you did it, in the end? Would you do it again? Please feel free to drop me a line.

And look for a new post from me, sooner than last time since now I’m not in such a word tunnel.

Happy Impending Holidays! I hope you’re all well.

Best,
Ed