Over the last couple of days, I have started working on some warm-up exercises—of which this is the third—for National Novel Writing Month, much like I did with a number of blog posts last October. Unfortunately, neither of the pieces I have started in the last couple of days has amounted to much—one of them got to about 500 words before sputtering out, and the one that I worked on for about three hours on Monday morning, after I put Jackson on the school bus, didn’t even make it to a thousand words. This does not fill me with confidence that I will be able to churn out 1700 words a day on a regular basis once November starts.
It’s possible that I have just not managed to find the right subject for a 1700-word essay. I suppose I could go all meta- and write about what I was writing about in those other two posts; but that would be even more boring than my usual ramblings, and would probably interest no one but hardcore writers (and maybe not even them, assuming that any of them have stumbled across my little outpost here on the magic internets). Now that I start thinking about it, though, I’m wondering if the general topic of poetry might not make for an essay that could get up toward that 1700-word mark. The problem there is that I don’t think the words would pour out of me the way that they would need to in order for 1700 words a day to be viable.
I have also thought about posting the reasons that I continue to support President Obama; but writing about politics is always dangerous for me, because I often let emotion get the better of me and wind up setting conservatives on fire. The risk is that much greater this time around because I would eventually have to write about Richard Mourdock, who is running for the U.S. Senate and who makes Indiana look even more embarrassing and hilljack than usual. It’s also starting to look like President Obama might well win most of the states that he won in 2008, with the glaring exception of Indiana, which is not remotely in play. This is disappointing, but not at all surprising—like making solid progress potty-training your child, and then watching him stand in the middle of the room and shit himself for no apparent reason.
And here I go again, running out of things to say well before I get to 1700 words. Writing fiction is different from writing essays, of course, but I’m still concerned. My schedule looks much different than it has in the all the previous years I have participated in National Novel Writing Month, due to the fact that I now have school bus duty five days a week. I’ve been batting about .500 when it comes to staying up and trying to be a productive member of society after I get back from walking Jackson down to the bus stop. The other half of the time, I go right back to bed; and that means that I wind up losing hours I could have used for writing—and having to wake up at 7:00 a.m. now means that I don’t have as much time to make up those lost writing hours at night.
It took me about an hour on Tuesday morning to write the preceding four paragraphs. Then I decided that I was going to go lie down and “rest” for a little while. I did not plan to fall asleep for almost three hours, but of course that was what wound up happening. When I woke up, I still had enough time to take the long walk around Irvington that I had planned for the day, but there was not much in the way of time to dawdle before starting on that walk. I still had not thought of anything major that I wanted to write about for 1700 words that I would pop off all at one sitting, but I knew that there wasn’t any time left to think about it, so I let it go.
And then I checked my e-mail. Some time ago, I signed up for the Poem-a-Day e-mail from the Academy of American Poets. For whatever reason, it took a really long time for them to start e-mailing me, but I’ve been getting them for about a week or so now. When I checked my e-mail, one of the messages was Tuesday's poem, and when I started reading it, I suddenly remembered the idea for a short story that I had had and then almost immediately forgotten about while I was at the old juke joint on Monday night. It was bad enough that I forgot the idea—but I also forgot that there had been an idea in the first place. I remembered the fact that I had had an idea on Monday night when I sat down at the computer Tuesday morning to check the weather while Jackson got dressed for school; but I could not for the life of me come up with what the idea had actually been—until I read the first few lines of yesterday’s Poem-a-Day poem.
What actually happened was that the first few lines made me think of what I had envisioned as the end of the story—and then I remembered the idea for the story itself. I even thought of something else that I think will work a little bit better as an ending. That whole episode, plus the rambling nature of this post, which has more to do with the genesis of ideas rather than any one idea in particular, reminded me of a couple of things I had read about having ideas, both of which were written by Stephen King. Thinking about that inspired the following three paragraphs, which, for some reason, I wrote down separately from the paragraphs that precede it in this post.
I believe in the idea that you can’t force yourself to have an idea. I also believe that a corollary of that idea is that you can’t force yourself to remember an idea that you have had but then forgotten. Stephen King has written about both concepts, though I don’t recall where I read what he said about the second one. He wrote about the first idea in the novel Misery. He says that, while you can’t just say that you want to have a good idea and then have that idea erupt into your head, you can engage in behaviors that stimulate the creative part of your brain and make you more receptive to the ideas that might suddenly emerge out of nowhere. He describes Paul Sheldon’s procedure of taking a walk and observing the world around him when he needs to have an idea. The writer can’t actively choose to have an idea—but he can do things to get himself into a creative state of mind, to prepare himself to receive any ideas that might manifest themselves.
That’s one of the reasons that I love to talk long walks around Irvington and downtown (and in Bloomington, too, only far less often). The combination of exercising a little bit and immersing myself in a place where my past and present collide (mainly Irvington, but to a lesser extent the other two places, too) often causes ideas to erupt in my head. (And that’s one of the reasons that I carry my fully loaded backpack with me almost anywhere I go. You never know when you’re going to have an idea, and you never know when you’re going to have to write that idea down.)
The corollary is that you can’t make yourself remember a good idea that you have forgotten. What Stephen King said about that is basically that good ideas will out. (At least I think it was Stephen King. I could be wrong about that, but I’m pretty sure it was Stephen King.) You don’t even really have to write them down. Once you have them, if they are, in fact, good ideas, they will keep coming back until you do something about them. If you have something that you think is a good idea, and then it slips away and never turns up again—it probably wasn’t that good an idea in the first place.
Very technically speaking, most of what is written here was written within a single twenty-four hour period between Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning. That’s not exactly within the spirit of banging one of these things out in one sitting, or in one day’s worth of writing—but it’s hella closer than I got the first two times I tried it in preparation for this year’s NaNoWriMo. The not so good news is that it’s only just over 1500 words. I don’t necessarily need to force my hand here and just start rambling in order to get past the finish line of 1700; that kind of writing just for the sake of writing and hitting a number can be saved for November, where the whole point is to hit the damn number, knowing full well that you’re going to be an awfully long way from final draft material at the end of the month.
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