Decompressing

I have taken this past week and have been decompressing and I have to say that I miss the pressure cooker atmosphere of NaNoWriMo. I know that I feeling back to normal because my inner critic came back from vacation and told me that he thought my novel sucked! I missed him so. Anyway, I am going to slowly go back through my novel and start editing.

I was thinking about the what haves and might have beens and have been thinking that I should have went to grad school in Colorado when I had the chance. That was the whole reason I went out there, and I didn't even bother! Which brings me to my next point: I wasted a lot of time on stupid stuff, including not writing, when I was younger. Let's hope that that is over with. I also have to be pragmatic in thinking about the past. I have realized just because you are living in a different place or have a different job, you are still the same person. You can't run away from it. Who knows if I even would have liked grad school? I had a traumatic experience with a creative writing instructor in college. She knows who she is. I was looking into minoring in it at BGSU, but the woman was so horrible, she couldn’t believe that all I was worried about was graduating. I ended up minoring in English and graduating on-time.

I also had a traumatic experience with an English teacher in high school. She wasn’t very nice and was extremely critical about my two-page essays. Maybe it was tough love? I don't know, I was too busy being a brat.

Creative writing workshops

In a previous blog posting, I mentioned the lack of creative writing workshops for non-students in the Toledo area. There was a reason I brought this up. I once read an article on Chuck Palahnuik, who wrote the book on which that most excellent movie, Fight Club, was based, and he said that he attended writer's workshops, hosted by Tom Spanbauer (a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer). It was there that he honed his craft. I don’t have that here in Toledo. There used to be a group at Owens but I don't see any evidence that it still is in existence. As an aside, a friend of mine used to go to it, but he moved away.

I have been enjoying the other side of 50,000 words, but I know that the novel needs some tweaking. I am going to give it a week or so before I go back into it. Let it sit for a bit.

I won!

I won! I won the NaNoWriMo! This is the first time I entered and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. I liked the discipline required. I liked the creative, free-flowing aspect of it where the inner critic was turned off. It was really a great creative exercise. And I got this really great avatar:

Writing problems

I said in my first post, this blog is about my desire to write and the want to have a separate space to work out my writing problems. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer. I think ever since I read my first Nancy Drew book. Not just a journalist, like I am now, but a novelist. I just think that would be the greatest thing ever. I can wear an ascot and visit salons, talking about the very essence of being and how it relates to man’s struggle for meaning. And I can sleep in and travel whenever I want to.

I have had articles published, but it isn’t the same as having a novel published. And the regional and trade presses aren’t the same as the national press, of course. I like fiction because I can manipulate facts to suit me. In journalism, they frown on that sort of thing. I think it’s that pesky adherence to the facts that makes it so stifling.

I have been chronicling my NaNoWriMo journey on myspace and I am surprised that I haven’t participated in the event before. I have been trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes me so scared of writing. It’s hard work, of course. But I think it is much more than that. I always worry I will run out of plot. I don’t know if it is the journalism training, but I can’t drag out a scene with a bunch of extraneous words when one or two will do. Consequently, there is not a lot of description in my books. It just seems forced to me when I write it. Everyone else’s descriptions are great. I write a lot of dialogue to make up for the lack of description. I guess that I would like you, dear reader, to color in the scene in your own mind. For example, I can say:

“Mr. X jumped into his messy car, speeding away from the scene.”

Which is how I would probably write it although it is not very effective Everyone knows what a messy car is although no two people may not agree what a mess constitutes. Another writer may write this:

“Mr. X jumped into the front seat of his messy car, landing on fast food wrappers, empty paper bags, and soda cans. In the back seat, hampering his view, was his laundry, piled high and piled dirty. And shoes, more shoes than one cares to imagine. They were wedged under the emergency brake and gas pedal. They hampered his escape.”

OK, Maybe the second blurb is much more interesting than the first. But see? How would I have known if I hadn’t written it out?

That type of thinking outloud is what you are going to get from me on this blog. I am way out of school and there are no creative writing workshops around where I can get feedback, and I don’t have anything 100% prepared to send to a publisher, so I am going to sound it all out on here. And I would like comments.

New blog, new word

As the inaugural post of my writer's blog, I feel I must address the title. Wordful? Really. Yes, really. Part of the joy of writing is to create your own reality and that is what I have done: I have created my own word. Googie may be a made up word, too. It's a family nickname. So, two made up words. I am creating reality all over the place!