NANOWRIMO failure...again.

I made a valiant attempt at NANOWRIMO for the third year in a row.

I always lose it in the third week.

The main reason... that will ALWAYS BE the main reason is work. As a technical writer, I am not writing for eight straight hours a day, but I usually am doing a lot of writing sort of thinking all day. At the end of the day all I really want to do is hug the dog and watch crappy television and avoid having to use language period.

I reread a little of what I wrote last night. Ugh. I really am a terrible fiction writer. I feel the urge to put down every thought and action that my character has or does… like I was documenting a process. Maybe I should be pre-post-modern and try to meld the world of the novel with the instruction manual?
Now there’s an idea…

I am born. Wait… that’s been done before. How about…

Procedure for Human Birth
Procedure Time: Nine months after conception.
Procedure Environment: Clean sterile environment.
Tools Required: Basic medical supplies as would be supplied in a hospital or home birth setting.
Technical Skill: Moderate to Skilled

Step 1
After dilation to approximately…..

Yeah….well, maybe not.

But in all honesty… that’s not too far off from what my fiction reads like. My characters breathe in… raise their arms… walk across the room. I have no idea how to write as a fiction writer and not like an observant bystander. I think it’s po-mo or bust for me…

I hate to admit it… but my secondary concentration in the “Program for Writers” wasn’t fiction…it was poetry. I’ve always been better at it than fiction. Short stories are the hardest things to write… you almost have to have the entire story in your head before you start. But poetry can be narrative, or jump from image to image. It can be a list, a letter, a song; it can rhyme or use language so jarring that it’s difficult to read. It can have shape...or be one line.

I won’t regale you with any of my poetry. Especially anything I did as a teenager… which was usually all about being worried that someone would drop the bomb… and that I’d never finish college. But as much as I enjoyed the classes as I was taking them… I also realized at the time… like I do now… how useless they were.

Oh sure… art for art’s sake. But when your mother cleans toilets for a living and you’re rationing your student loan money in order to eat regular meals… ART FOR ART’S SAKE is a really fucking stupid idea. College for me was a business transaction. I really wish I could say it was more… that I wanted to be a Renaissance woman or some such drivel… but what I really wanted was a four year degree… ANY four year degree… so I wouldn’t have to scrub toilets for a living too. (Which I did in college… to help pay for my tuition. So I know what that’s like.)

As a result, I actually feel like I didn’t get as much out of the whole experience as some people who actually went to school because they like school… or because they’re good at it did. I was never a straight A student. I don’t consider myself that bright. I have a knack for writing things down as I think them… thought to hand… and it’s not even that knacky of a knack. (Not fishing for compliments… but there’s a grammatical or spelling error in here somewhere. Wait for it…)

I keep thinking I want to do something different with my life… but then I look at the education I have… and what I’d like to do… and realize that I might need more education… and there’s my pause. Every time grad school has seemed like a good idea, I remember being in college… and think to myself how damn glad I am not to be in college anymore. It was HARD. Homework… trying to cram stuff into my brain on a timetable that was too short for my limited ability to absorb new information. Ugh. I’m a terrible student. Even now, I’m taking Norwegian Classes one night a week and can’t get my homework done on time… and I’m not even getting graded!

But people tell me that they think I’m smart… and full of answers. I’ve never felt smart. Ever. Because I think real smart people don’t have to expend any effort to learn what they’re studying… or to do what they’re doing. I’ve been struggling for weeks to write a white paper for work… sweating, swearing… even went on a crying jag in my car when I got really frustrated. I procrastinated for an entire week… and now I have one crappy page written. And it’s crappy… but at least it’s down on paper. Because my first rule of writing is:

1) Give yourself permission to write utter crap. Shit. Verbal dungheaps. Bad grammar. Sentence fragments. Don’t spellcheck. Don’t look up word meanings or punctuation rules. Just get a draft.

Because if you agonize about what you’re writing… and whether or not it’s perfect… you’ll never get it on paper. Or the screen. It’s like being so afraid of getting in an accident that you never get behind the wheel of a car to practice. Sure, you’ll never get in an accident…but you'll never learn to drive either.

That's my main rule. I have more rules… and I really should post them in my cubicle but I'd hate to let on to the rest of my coworkers that I need a reminder list on how to do my job. So, I’ll share them with you here… this is what a college degree and 15 years of professional writing has taught me:

2) Set aside time to write, without disturbances… and with coffee.
3) Write in your OWN WORDS and do not try to be Kafka… or sound like a technical paper. You can always fancy stuff up later.
4) Know your audience. In technical writing… I also ask:

o Do they need background info on your subject?
o Do they need any of your language defined?
o Is English their first language?

5) Avoid jargon…buzzwords…marketingese…and synergistic keystone strategies for leveraging concise dynamic and impactful mindshare opportunities to interface with your metrics and methodologies and facilitate extensible infrastructures of innovative communications…and avoid clichés unless you’re trying to be cute. Yeah, everyone knows the early bird gets the worm… and that the early mouse doesn’t get the cheese… but there’s a simpler way to say it without using a cliché... and it's going to sound better.
6) No stressing about spelling, grammar and formatting…yet. See rule #1.
7) No writer is an island. Someone else needs to see your work before it goes live… no matter how good you think you are. Even here on my blog… I rely on my other personality to proofread.

I also have a few tricks I use. I’ll begin at the end… speak into a tape recorder in my car… write part of a blog post as a warm up… pick up my work and move to another area. Work at home. But they’re just gimmicks. Really it comes down to rule numero uno... and a lot of revision.

So… that’s it. Writing wisdom from a professional writer who can’t complete a crappy novel in a month of NANOWRIMO…. Who really, really needs to take her own advice once in a blue moon.