Life and How to Write It

Before I begin... happy birthday, Phil! I owe you a beer the next time I see you.

It's official: I'm doing NaNoWriMo yet again. Apparently I have a masochistic streak that manifests itself as a need to try to write 50,000 words of absolute crap in a ridiculously short amount of time. (It's not as easy as it sounds, really.)

This will be my fifth year participating, and hopefully will result in my second "win" in a row. (There's no such thing as a loss, since there really are no prizes except a pretty purple bar on your profile and access to a downloadable certificate and winner icon. Even if you "lose" and finish the month with only 500 words written, it's 500 more words than you'd written before. We're writers; we can rationalize anything.)

The first year I bit off more than I could chew. I attempted to write the Great Amercian Novel, complete with framing stories and different fonts to represent my main character's levels of consciousness. I made pages of color-coded preliminary notes, wrote out plot points on well organized 3 x 5 cards, and proceeded to crash and burn in a pool of tears and red wine at about 20,000 words.

(First lesson learned: Don't try to write the Big Novel. Also, don't write about a main character having a nervous breakdown when your own sanity is hanging by a thread. Yeah, it wasn't pretty.)

Year two: I decided to write a road trip novel with touches of science fiction ingrained in the plot, using some of the same characters from the Big Novel. After 20,000 words, I found myself mired along with my characters in a small Nebraska town that didn't exist on any map, unsure of how to get out.

Year three: I decided to "cheat" and go back to work on the Nebraska story. I wrote some good stuff, spent entirely too much time plotting out a game of Scrabble between the main characters (every word related to the plot, so I had to reconstruct it for accuracy). On a dare, I attempted to write a sex scene, which was going along fine until my characters decided they'd rather talk about prophetic dreams instead. (No, I don't know what's wrong with them either. They're stupid. That's why they're still stuck in Nebraska.) And then I started openly ripping off The Stand... yeah, didn't win that year either.

But I am rather proud of my Scrabble game. And the karaoke scene was fun to write.

Year four: Taking the advice of one of my fellow writers at the Meet and Greet, I sent my Nebraska characters on a much needed vacation and started fresh with a new set of characters (that admittedly bore a striking resemblance to the previous ones). As I had no idea what to write about, I just started making things up. I ended up with a gigantic mess of a plot involving generations of psychic Irish women, chick lit angst, side trips to Hocking Hills State Park, yellow teapots, shadowy villans that all looked suspiciously like Agent Smith from The Matrix, and a narrator that kept jumping in (a la Lemony Snicket) and apologizing for how stupid everything was turning out. This gigantic mess, however, broke the 50,000 word mark, resulting in me running around the apartment drunkenly yelling "WHOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOO!" at a late hour in the evening. (I'm sure my neighbors loved me for that.)

I discovered the secret, you see. Coffee is a given, of course. But, at least for me, the secret to getting the words to come out? CHEAP RED WINE.

So here we are at year five. I'm starting to stock up on wine and coffee. I'm getting the house in order so I have as little to think about housekeeping-wise as possible. And I've been kicking around plot ideas. I pondered the idea of writing a sequel to last year's fiasco. I thought about combining some ideas from some short stories that I wrote back in the late 80s/early 90s. (If I knew you back then, chances are you ended up as a character in one of my stories. Doubly so if I dated you for longer than 10 minutes.)

And after much thinking and brainstorming last night, I am happy to announce that I HAVE A PLOT.

This year there will be no framing stories, no narrating cats. My main character will not be pursued by men in dark suits, will not be able to read minds and roll pencils across the table with her thoughts, and will not be looking for secret entrances in caves located in parks I've never been to. SHE WILL NOT GO INSANE AND NAME ALL OF THE BONES IN HER HAND WHILE LISTENING TO BEN FOLDS FIVE. (Don't ask. That was a weird chapter.)

This year will be straight chick lit. As things stand now, it will end up being a much-less-funny version of Pamie's Why Girls are Weird. (I could never write anything as funny as Tiny Wooden Hand.) As usual, a lot of the plot will be semi-autobiographical, but the main character will hopefully be much more interesting and well adjusted than me. (And hopefully not too much of a Mary Sue.) I will be stealing a few scenes from the old 80s short stories, as flashbacks are involved. An old character is being revived and dusted off.

There will be a happy ending.

And contrary to what I'd said a few weeks ago to a fellow NaNovelist, no one is going to die. At least, I don't have any plans to kill anyone off. (That was just me being bitter and working through some internal issues.)

And for now... that's all I feel comfortable in revealing. I'm still working things out in my head, trying to figure out how to squeeze 50,000 coherent words out of this without pulling the author-as-intrusive-character thing again.

And plans may change. I may be back to writing about angsty psychic redheads by the 10th.