Almost one week into NaShoStoMo so far. I’ve written two and a half stories and I’m hoping to finish the third story tonight, so I’ve got to write three more to catch up. I have a feeling I’ll be playing a lot of catch-up this month.
I have to say, by the second day of the month I was this close to giving up. I figured that NaShoStoMo was an unnecessary extra stress in my life and besides, fiction isn’t even useful, and there were so many other more worthwhile ways to fill my time and blah blah blah yadda yadda. Luckily I realized that that was Resistance talking (see Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art). I managed to muscle through it, and I’m really glad I did. Story ideas are flying at me from all over the place. It feels so good to be writing fiction again.
But man, writing middles is hard. And endings are even harder for me. I can handle beginnings just fine, but as soon as I get to the middle, it’s like every bone in my story goes limp, and it’s kind of hard to end properly when you’re flopping about with your invertebrate middle.
And that’s why I’m doing NaShoStoMo: to learn how to write middles and endings. Thirty stories is going to be really good practice for that.
Also, keeping my stories short is proving to be difficult. Writing a story short enough that I can finish it in a day (preferably a single sitting) would seem to be easy, but as soon as I get going, it’s like I go into novel-writing mode and I’m spinning out the first chapter of what’s going to be a much longer story. So my other goal is to learn how to clamp down and tell each story with more economy.
And yes, all three stories are kind of pathetic, but you can’t expect much more from that from rough drafts. I do plan to revise some of these lumps into something nice and shiny someday.
Last night I came across NaShoStoMo (National Short Story Month) via my friend’s blog. Basically, you write thirty short stories in April, one a day, 200 words minimum.
I’m doing it.
I haven’t written much fiction in the last nine months, but I miss it, and this’ll be a great prod to get me going again. Most of the stories will be quite short and most will be horrifically bad (figure I may as well get that out there), and there’s a good chance that no one other than me will ever see any of them, but you can’t become a good writer if you don’t write. A lot. Time to get back into the habit of spinning stories.
It’s a project calendar for keeping track of (a) which projects I’m working on and (b) when I’ve worked on them. That way I can easily see where my time is spent and possibly where I need to adjust things. (“Looks like I’m neglecting my writing. Time to fix that.”)
I started out using the back of my Field Notes notebook, since it has a handy grid, but I ran into a problem: when I finish the notebook, I no longer have my project calendar with me.
Enter Google Spreadsheets:
The grey boxes mean that the project has ended. Each month is its own sheet, which keeps things tidy. (Projects that end don’t need to be on the next month’s sheet.)
And the best part? It’s super easy to maintain. I can just copy and paste the black boxes, and when I start a new month, it only takes a few seconds to clear out the boxes and change the days of the week.
Speaking of tracking things, I forgot to blog about my writing log (which I used to use back when I was writing more frequently):
I’m also planning to make a grid-based log for scripture reading and family history and other church-related things I want to do more diligently.
I went up to campus this afternoon for a few hours, and while I was up there I decided to try sticking around for Orson Scott Card’s “1001 Ideas in an Hour” session at LTUE.
The most interesting part to me was at the very end, when one of the attendees asked, “How many revisions do you do?”
Card said, “When I type the last word of the last chapter for the first time, I send it to my publisher.” That’s right. No revisions. He went on to say that he will start a piece over several times until he gets it right, but after that it’s a straight shot without any tweaking.
His rationale, he said, was that the first draft is always the most alive, even if it’s a little ragged. But so many people polish and smooth their drafts until they’re sparkling little gems which are absolutely dead.
It’s an interesting thought, one that took me rather by surprise, but I can see where he’s coming from. I’ll have to try it with my own work and see if that’s what happens.
A month and a half ago I went to my first New Play Project performance, in the courtyard of the JFSB here on campus. It was fairly low-key, with just one row of audience members. I wasn’t expecting much. But I was surprised. The plays were short — roughly ten minutes each — and yet they still made a difference. The short story of theatre, if you will. After the performance they passed around a clipboard asking for people to write down their email and whether they were interested in volunteering, whether that be with playwriting or directing or acting or what have you. I decided then and there to write a play. And nothing happened. (This is not uncommon in my life.)
A month later, I went to their “Roots” festival, and again I felt compelled to write something and submit it. That was a Friday, and the deadline for the Religious Plays submissions was the following Tuesday. Saturday morning, an idea popped into my head, and right away I sat down and wrote out a six-page draft.
After getting feedback from friends and revising it pretty much every day over that weekend, I sent in my latest draft and crossed my fingers. Now, since this was my first play, I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, I was kind of hoping they’d reject it, because I didn’t really know what to do if they did accept it.
Shortly after that the script selection committee met and decided to provisionally accept it, which meant they’d give me two weeks to revise it; if it was good enough at the end of those two weeks, they’d produce it. So I took their feedback and started rewriting.
At the end of the first week, I went to their workshop (they hold one every Wednesday night) with my newest draft and prepared to be flayed alive. I didn’t really know anything about playwriting, after all — I’ve watched scores of plays, but that doesn’t make one a playwright. But I was pleasantly surprised. We read the play aloud (they had me cast my actor-readers) and then spent an hour discussing it. Even though my play needed lots of work, getting the critiques wasn’t really painful at all, and I came out energized and excited for those revisions.
After that, I had till last night to make my revisions so that the script selection committee could make their final decision. Up until the second-to-last draft, I wasn’t sure I was even in the ballpark — it felt like every change I made was making the play worse. After all, eight drafts had burrowed me so far into the play that I felt I couldn’t really get out and see it objectively.
But I’m pleased to announce that an hour ago I got an e-mail saying I made the cut. The play will be performed October 11, 12, and 13 at 7 p.m. each night in the Bullock Room at the Provo City Library. (It’s part of a set entitled Thorns & Thistles, and the other plays are really good, too.)
As it happens, auditions for all four plays are tonight and tomorrow night from 7 to 9 p.m., so if you’re interested, please audition! (And if you know anyone who might be interested, pass the info on.) Tonight’s auditions will be somewhere on campus — once they get a room, they’ll post it on the board outside the Nelke Theater in the HFAC. Tomorrow’s auditions will be in the Bullock Room on the third floor of the Provo Library.
