Writing Update

I have spent much of 2011 continuing with the progress on writing that I started to make in 2010, and I have managed so far to achieve two of the goals that I set for this year. The first was to complete a draft of a novel by the end of June. I was well on the way toward this goal when we left for Kansas City at the end of April for my brother’s wedding, but I spent longer getting toward the end than I would have liked, once we got back. I did manage to get to the end, but there were some hiccups along the way, and—as usual—I’m not entirely happy with what I have. I plan to pick up where I left off at the beginning of 2012, with one of my already-planned goals for the new year being to have a second draft of the same novel completed—using the Scrivener software to help with organization—by the end of March. This is half the time I allotted myself to complete a first draft this year, but I should not be writing the second draft completely from scratch (though with my track record, this is a distinct possibility).

I hope that using Literature and Latté’s Scrivener software will help me to stay focused on my primary theme and keep things moving along. Ever since Apple decided to pull the plug on AppleWorks, my word processor of choice, I have been using Bean, a free application that is a stripped-down word processor that just gives you space to write. The upside, apart from cost, is simplicity—you have to tweak a few things in the preferences to get the program looking the way you want it to look, but there isn’t a whole manual’s worth of things to learn, like there would be with Word or, say…Scrivener. The downside is that organization is left entirely up to you. I’ve never been one to outline, because I have always been afraid that doing so would destroy some element of the spontaneity of writing—those “accidents” I have been talking about in recent posts, the irrelevant things that I referenced from the Joanna Scott essay in Black Clock. Having said that, though, it has become abundantly clear that I need to have some kind of organizational system in place—not an outline that tells me where to go with each new section or chapter or part, but rather a system that gives me the tools to gently steer me in the right direction when I start to go astray—when those irrelevant things invade my thought process and take the writing off in a direction that I don’t want for it to go.

Scrivener’s project templates provide just this type of system, and the bonus is that the software was designed specifically for Macs. The days of total incompatibility between Macintosh and Windows machines are long gone, thanks to the advent of an open, Unix-based Mac OS, and the switch to Intel processors; but even though that is the case, I am still a little bit isolationist when it comes to software. I generally find that software designed for the Mac works better than other software, although the most recent version of the Safari browser is a notable exception (and one of the very few annoying Apple software products that I have ever encountered). I have only begun to scratch the surface of everything that Scrivener can do, but part of the goal of completing the second draft is to get myself familiarized with Scrivener in a crash-course kind of way. I like what I have seen so far: when you fire up the program, you select from a menu of templates, like Blank, Fiction, or Scriptwriting; then you get an interface that is reminiscent of the Mail interface, with a Binder (where the sections and parts and whatnot are stored in a hierarchical manner, like file folders in a list view) on the left, toolbars at the top, and a writing space in the middle; and from there you can add new “files” to the Binder, as you move from section to section, as well as view your writing spaces in a corkboard view or an outline view. The preferences are no less daunting than those in Word, and you have to spend some time getting things set up just the way you want them; but Scrivener is designed for creative writers, unlike Word. It’s also cheaper, and updates are generally free of charge. They’re on version 2.1, and the only time they have ever charged for an upgrade is when they released 2.0—and that upgrade was only $25. I plan to get to know Scrivener at the same time that Scrivener helps me to get a better handle on the novel and make the second draft a much better piece of writing than what I have right now.

For the second half of 2011, my goals were to work on short stories for contests during July, August, September, and October, and then dive into National Novel Writing Month in November; and with this in mind, I took out yet another subscription to Poets & Writers. I have subscribed to Poets & Writers off and on over the years, and I have sort of a love/hate relationship with the magazine. I’d have to go back through the issues I have saved up to make a complete list of writers I might never have heard of if not for profile pieces or cover stories about them in the magazine—a short list would include Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, and Donna Tartt; there have also been illuminating articles about writers I already knew of, including Jonathan Franzen, Toni Morrison, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jay McInerney; and even when the articles are on writers who don’t do all that much for me, there is always something in there about the writing process, and I find that kind of thing endlessly fascinating. The listings for contests and prizes takes up over a third of the pages in the current issue, and all of those listings are vetted by the editors, so you can feel comfortable submitting to them without having to worry about whether or not the contest is legit.

The hate part of the relationship comes into play when there is a long article or (ick) whole issue that focuses on the business end of writing. If I have ever had a dream, it is to make a living with my writing; and I understand that to do so means that I will have to dirty my hands in the nuts and bolts of the business of writing, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like reading about it. Every three or four issues, you get one that has a group of editors or agents on the cover, and you read over and over again about how hard it is to break into publishing, or how much of an advantage it is to get an MFA and then teach at a university while you work on your writing at night; and, once again, I understand that this is information that writers need to know, that forewarned is forearmed and what not…but that kind of stuff can be very dispiriting. It’s the commodification of something that comes from the soul, damnit, and it just feels dirty. If I ever manage to find an agent, whose business is the business of writing, who feels the same way about the thing, then I’m going to be set.

Every now and then, though, I get a subscription offer in the mail from Poets & Writers, and sure enough, one showed up earlier this year, offering a year (six issues) of the magazine for $9.95. For any magazine other than weeklies (which are always cheaper to subscribe to), I look at the subscription price and try to decide how often I would buy the magazine on the newsstand over the course of the next year; and if the money I would probably spend at the newsstand is more than the subscription price, I consider subscribing—if I think I would actually read all of the issues. Poets & Writers is $5.95 on the newsstand, so the one year for $9.95 meant that I would spend more money at the newsstand if I bought only two of the next six issues. I don’t buy the magazine at the newsstand all that much, but I can’t really imagine that a calendar year would go by wherein I would only buy one issue; and since one of my goals this year was to get some stories out to some contests, it was a no-brainer to send in the subscription card.

The funny thing is…I only wound up entering one contest that I read about in that first issue of my new subscription. I knew that I wanted to submit to that contest as soon as I came to it in the listings, and I spent part of the four month period allotted to stories writing the one for that contest. (I also spent a large part of the time period working on a story for a contest I had come across before I started taking Poets & Writers again.) But the remainder of the list I made of contests from the back pages of that first issue failed to yield anything that suited me; and yet in spite of that, I managed to write three stories and submit them to contests, well before the start of National Novel Writing Month. I also had a second story published in the third issue of Ichabod’s Sketchbook, but I’m not sure that I’m going to try to come up with anything to submit for the fourth issue. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which are…um…I don’t know, not politically correct? Certainly not diplomatic, at any rate.

That gets me pretty much up to now. I don’t know for sure what I’m going to do for National Novel Writing Month just yet, although I am pretty sure that I am going to work on what will be one-fourth of what I would like to be a very long novel about Irvington. I have a couple of other ideas that I have kept set aside for November, but a series of happy accidents a couple of weeks ago while Jackson and I were out for a walk while Amy was at choir practice made me start to think more seriously about this Irvington novel, which I have had percolating in the back of my mind for some time. It would, I think, be the most challenging of the several ideas that I have had for NaNoWriMo this year—and that makes it both scary and exciting. We’ll see what happens, I guess, starting one week from today.