Sure, I had lots of excuses and distractions and I did make a pretty good effort of it. In the end, I have over 25,000 words of a story that I’ve been trying to get out of me for years. But it’s still a failed attempt. And I’m OK with that.

I’m not going to beat myself up over it because I came out of the experience with a few new and reinforced ideas and tips for anyone who is thinking about doing it again next year (including myself).

1. Writing is goddamn hard.
   Remember that. Balancing storytelling, craft, concentration, and (in the case of Nanowrimo) a focus on writing as many words as possible in a sitting — that’s difficult work. And for the most part, when I sat down to do the balancing act for two or three-hour spurts, it worked out OK. I just needed to do more sit-down sessions.
2. Writing is rewarding.
   When I did it, it felt great. When I wasn’t doing it, I was thinking about it. If it hadn’t been for a few weeks of career woes in November (one of those aforementioned excuses/distractions), this positive feedback loop would have kept me at it. So, feel good about it when you’re doing it, no matter how crappy the work is.
3. Know your capacity.
   One of the things I was most curious about when I started the project this year was exactly how many words can I write in an hour. The last time I did Nanowrimo — back in 2002 — I used a spreadsheet to keep track of my progress and in general it took a couple hours a day to do my daily goal of 2,000 words. Being that was 8 years ago, I wondered what, if anything, had changed in that aspect. Generally, I was able to write around 1,500 words in an hour. What does that tell me? Well, when I do sit back down again and tackle the rest of this work, I should have a pretty good idea of how much of a time commitment I’m looking at it.[1]
4. Feel your story.
   I say “feel” because I have a tendency to over-think my stories. It’s easy to get into “this has to happen” or my story must have such-and-such element to it. But that can end up putting the story in too tight of a box. And it can also make you inflexible and stifle your imagination. Things I was very clear about before the writing began ended up being put to the test as I started getting deeper into the story. I actually brought a dead character back to life in the middle of the story.
5. When the “real world” calls, answer.
   Yes, I’m disappointed that I didn’t complete the project. But I’d have been even more disappointed if I hadn’t dealt with the conflicts that arose. Maybe the most important thing I learned is that I don’t have to make my self-worth and esteem dependent on the outcome of a writing project.

Now that I look over this small list, I’m not sure how useful it will be as a set of tips for Nanowrimo, but it certainly helped me look at the bright side of failing. If I can’t learn something from my failures, well, I may as well just give up.

[1] I have discovered this is a useful bit of information for me. It’s often the unknown that keeps from fully committing to a project. If I tell myself, in order to finish this novel, it’s going to be X amount of hours over Y days/weeks/months, that’s the kind of data that helps my analytical side shake hands with my creative side. I need both sides to win.

The article was apparently a an advance volley from a book that just came out of his new book called “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.”

I particularly like Boldtype’s review of the book, to wit:

Murakami’s tough-love take on writing seems bracing in the context of an unending stream of “craft”-oriented tomes. Whereas a classic writer’s book like Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird deals in trade-based tips — “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth” — Murakami jettisons such undeniable (but not particularly helpful) truisms in favor of stressing the importance of elbow grease. Or, writing as sport.

Not particularly helpful, indeed. I think Murakami’s wisdom may do more for me in the long run. Who knows, maybe he’ll be able to tip my scale and get me out there on the road to running, and writing, a hell of a lot more.

Turns out I’m not moving, but I am keeping my end of the bargain anyway. I would never be able to live it down if I gave up on the book. Plus, I really do want to pound out a feverish book and then wallow in its murky first-draftiness. It’d be the perfect way to spend a humid New York City summer.

What writing project are you working on? And how is it going?

Truth be told, I haven’t been listening to much music lately.

What? A black guy not espousing the joys of music to write to? What of the jazz, the bump of James Brown? What the funk has the world come to? I jest, but it’s true that I don’t listen to music all the time. Sometimes it distracts me. Sometimes it diverts my attention.

Given all that nonsense, I do believe there are a few musical things in this world that I cannot do without:

1. John Coltrane’s saxophone
2. Miles Davis’s audacity (i.e., turning his back to audience, etc.)
3. The way Sting says “shock??? while playing Police tunes live
4. flamenco
5. Antonio Carlos Jobim
6. Lennon/McCartney
7. the funky drummer
8. the 12-bit sampler
9. All things Muppet
10. Mainstream radio from the 1970s and 1980s

As far as what music is good for writing, it changes all the time. I went through a period lately that anything from Erik Satie really set me off into the land of creation, and at the same time I was digging the experience of deep diving into the jazz catalogs of Riverside, Prestige, and Impulse. That’s just one example. One person’s taste.

Music is mutable, maybe more so than literature. If John Denver floats that boat, I’d love to buy a ticket to ride to the other side of the river. Who knows what may come of it?

Toward the end of 2007, daily life was completely taking over all sides of my brain and I wasn’t thinking much about After the MFA. Thankfully, Armand stepped in to open his heart about his own misgivings of the writing life.

Now, a couple of months from my last post, it’s time for me to open up and figure out how to get back to business. Is there a business to get back to? While I’ve been toiling away at personal and professional pursuits, I’ve noticed that the academic aspects of the post-MFA life are slowly dissipating from my consciousness. Is it relevant to call this collection of words on the web “After the MFA” anymore?

I don’t want to misrepresent what I’m trying to do here, but I don’t necessarily want to change the focus or turn it into a vanity website that no one cares about except friends and family. When I started this site, I was actively trying to sort out my life after my MFA. At the time my thoughts were very much like this:

“I want to teach. Why can’t I teach? I need to get published. I want to get published. How do I get published? Are my former classmates getting book deals? Why can’t I revise this stupid story?” And so on.

Now, I feel like I’m more consumed with earning a living at what I’m doing, finding small and consistent moments to write, and continuing to learn about different genres, styles, and modes of communication. I won’t go so far as saying that the short story or literary fiction is dead. Plenty of other people are generating good click-throughs making bold (and ultimately irrelevant, as something always comes along to prove such pontifications wrong) statements like that. But I will go so far as to say that the general format of short-story writing that I learned in my MFA program has proven to be unsatisfying for me in recent times. This article in Wired, claims science fiction is the “last bastion” of writing that really makes you think, and it spoke for a lot of what’s been going through my critical mind lately–not that I think science fiction is the answer, necessarily.

For now, I think getting back to business will be keeping the discussion flowing about the so-called writing life–learning from people who read and comment here. I have some interviews I should do with some post-MFAers who are doing unique things (if you think that describes you, please get in touch). And as my interest and eligibility to teach writing starts to wane, I imagine I’ll be talking about that less frequently. But there’s still plenty learn and earn.

Favorite thing about 2007: starting and finishing a one-hour television pilot script.
Least favorite thing about 2007: getting bed bugs (goddamn you, New York City)

I have to admit that I’ve been fairly lucky as a writer. From time to time, I’ve been favored by flashes of good fortune, but the possibility of not selling my book is starting to get to me. I’m beginning to question my writing skills. I’m questioning my timing. I feel like my short stories must be too long. I feel demoralized. I’m afraid I’m going to run out of agencies, contests, and publishers to submit to. I check my inbox all the time looking for some sliver of hope. I realize the short fiction market is small, but that’s little consolation. I feel stupid for not having written a novel instead of a short story collection–I mean why didn’t I get a clue? Nobody buys short fiction anymore. I wonder whether I wasted all those nights writing a collection of (I think) thoughtful and well constructed stories that will sit in a drawer (well, not even in a drawer but on an external hard drive) until I die.

I feel stuck between things: on the one side a homeless short story collection and on the other a novel that probably (if I’m good and productive) won’t be finished until 2010. Yep, I’m officially depressed about writing.

So I turn to the awesome After the MFA community. Any thoughts? Anyone feel the same way I do? Any suggestions? How do you deal with the constant flow of rejection? How do you deal with frustration?

Cheers
Armand

One of the reasons I’ve been light on the posts to the site is the old grind. Working for the man has been getting me down, down, down, you might say. That’s why I have to put in a plug for a new book from a very good friend of mine.

In fact, I just got back from celebrating the publication of Jeff’s book “Working for the Man.” I’m happy to see it in print, and I was happy to see a huge crowd come out revel in its desperately needed solutions for the plight of millions: working inside cubicle land.

One of Jeff’s most popular and brilliantly subversive ideas is “How to Write a Novel While You’re on the Clock“—a near and dear subject indeed.

Anyway, to end this shameless plug, I invite you to check out the book. Support a fellow writer and hand out a few copies at your office holiday party.

Carlson guides us through the writing of one of his stories, “The Governor’s Ball.” He describes where the initial idea came from and then walks us through the process of completing the first draft.

The book is only 112 pages, but in those few pages Carlson uses his obvious, and proven, storytelling skills to construct one of the most engaging explorations of the writing process I’ve read lately.

What makes the essay/narrative so effective is Carlson comes back to a number of specific ideas about writing. Here’s a few that stuck with me:

• Stay in the room.
• Slow down, be specific, don’t stop writing.
• Solve your problems through the physical world.
• Stay there until something happens next.
• Introduce a character by considering the least likely thing he or she may do. How can the character surprise us?
• “My job is to have been true enough to the world of my story that I was able to present it as a forceful and convincing drama.”

The idea that stuck with me the most, and I suspect the idea that Carlson was really trying to emphasize is, no matter how much you want to stop writing after that first good sentence or page or scene, keep going. Stay in the room even though your coffee is cold. Stay in the room even though the phone is ringing. Stay in the room to write your first draft. And maybe even more importantl, when you’re stuck, when you don’t know where the story is going, stay in the room inside your story. It’s there in the physical surroundings of your fictional world that you will find what you’re looking for. And Carlson goes on to prove all that using his own first draft as evidence.

At the end you realize it’s all so simple—yet we know that more often than not keeping your butt in the chair is probably one of the most difficult things to do. This book serves as a useful reminder how important it is to, no matter what, stay in the room.

This is what I’ll remember next time I want to get up and refill my coffee cup (or wine glass):

“All the valuable writing I’ve done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I’ve wanted to leave the room.”

While I respectfully disagree with the recommendations for Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” (to me, the chapter on dialogue felt like the only fruitful discussion on writing in the whole book), there are some good books being discussed.

And, of course, there’s the requisite discussion about how true artists shouldn’t need to read “self-help books” and other such pontificating. Sure, a great deal of writing how-to books are horseshit, but I can’t imagine how anyone who loves writing can’t get something out of reading about the process and the craft.

Read the list.

On this topic, Author Steven Poole’s got a lively post on his blog about giving up on Microsoft Word. Something I did well over two years ago. While I compiled my short story collection for my MFA thesis on Word, creating the table of contents and page numbers on it, I haven’t actually written anything using Word in years. For the stories in my collection I used a program called CopyWrite. Since then I’ve switched to doing most of my writing in raw text editors or a program called Scrivener, which Poole also mentions in his article.

Like most things involving technology it doesn’t really matter what you construct your work with, but it’s still fun and sometimes productive to reconsider your methods and ditch things — like Word — that just don’t work very well.

Read it all here: Steven Poole – Goodbye, cruel Word