The 100 Days Project

I've joined the 100 Days project.  The idea is to do one thing every day for 100 days, in an effort to better yourself.  Admirable!  You can follow the project at the website, on Facebook or Twitter, and with the Twitter hashtag #100days.

I could have chosen something writing-related, but I'm good at bettering my writing skills, occasionally to the exclusion of other interests.  So I will be taking one photograph each day (I can't promise just one, but just one for the project) that represents something about my life that day.

Here's #1.

It's my current scrap notebook, complete with scribbled notes about my WIP.  If you could read them all you'd probably know what happens in the end.  Don't try!

I'll be posting each photo to the "100 Days" set on my flickr site, and may also post them here, depending on how suitable the content is for a writing blog.  I may not upload them to flickr every day, but I'll be taking them every day.

Some years ago I tried the 365 project and dropped out in February.  But this one seems like a much more manageable goal.  I encourage everyone who enjoys a challenge and thrives with a goal to look into the project and consider if this is a good way to start 2010.  A poem a day, a page a day, a letter a day...?  Anything you like!

And hey, if you've just come out of NaNoWriMo, don't you need something else to occupy your every free moment?  Of course you do!

The Novel in brief

I don't write long books.  Sometimes I read them, but I don't mind if the last page comes in at under 400.  And if I read a good book and it has fewer than 300 pages, I'm impressed, because that author broke current conventions about what makes a novel.

Some of the best novels I've read have been short.  It used to be allowed.

• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (full text online)
  
• The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
  
• Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
  
• A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson
  
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach (full text online)
  
• The Jeeves & Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse (My Man Jeeves full text online)
  
• Many of Kurt Vonnegut's books...

Some people feel that they aren't getting their money's worth if the book is short.  Where did this idea come from?  Do they believe they're paying for the paper it's printed on, and not the story?  A mediocre book will waste more of my time if it's long.  And that's somehow better?

There are websites devoted to the short book.  They aren't difficult to find.  So I'm not alone in my admiration of the succinct.  But as far as modern publishing is concerned, there are only a few types of (fiction) books that are allowed to be tiny, such as romances and cozies, and they're usually paperbacks.  The message is clear: these are books to gobble and then leave at the library, and the speed you can read them denotes the importance they carry.  Fast food books in cheap paper wrapping.  Quick and unimportant.

On the other hand, the very-long novel is supposedly fine.  Stephen King produces Monsterpieces (I confess that one of my favourite books is It, 1392 pages.)  Science fiction and fantasy series can go on for a dozen thousand-page bricks and this is considered normal: Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series had a glossary in the back of each so you could keep track of the hundreds of characters you met from volume to volume.  And I've seen young people collapse in library aisles under the weight of Jonathan Strange and Mrs. Norrell.  Let us not forget the classics, but do you really know anyone who has read and adored War and Peace?  Paying by weight, you always get your money's worth with these guys. But how many times do you read a book and think, "It didn't have to be that long"?

Those short classics I've listed are unforgettable, their stories and characters staying with the reader much longer than the time it takes to pick up the next book.  I believe it can be the same of modern fiction, if we drop our prejudices.  Brevity does not denote a lack of anything, except perhaps lengthy sub-plots, extended bouts of description, and in extreme cases, poor editing.  Good short novels are stories boiled down to the most powerful.  Their themes are not reduced because they make their point in less time.  The Haiku of novels has its own kind of power.

Feel free to tell me some of your favourite short novels.  Or, tell me some of your favourite long novels instead, and why short novels don't cut it.

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Photo: Chinese Diary by rogergordon at flickr

Remembering the reader

When I first began writing I did not care about my readers.  It isn't that I thought, Readers will love my writing no matter what.  I am naturally awesome.  It's that I didn't consider any reader out there anywhere.  They didn't exist.  I had no audience except myself.  It was all about the writing.

Now I care.  I'm proud of producing work that I want to show to the world.  And boy is it exhausting.  Not caring about my readers seems like an old fairy tale, a childhood myth like Santa Claus.  That lovely childish certainty: The gifts will come!  It'll be great!  Without the adult reality: How am I going to pay for all this stuff?

The truth is that without readers, writing can be incredibly rewarding for all kinds of skill-building and therapeutic reasons.  However, if your goal is an eventual audience, it's no good pretending that knowing what they want to read is as easy as knowing what you want to write.  There are a lot of great books out there.  There is also a lot of trash.  Readers have learned to be discerning because they must.  Otherwise we'd all still be slogging through that copy of that classic that we figured we should read some day.  Or we wouldn't be reading at all because it would have become such a chore.  Sometimes being able to give up and put down a book is the best freedom in the world.

This occurs to me because the novel I'm writing currently-- my NaNoWriMo novel-- is terrible.  And when I decided to stop worrying about my audience (not mildly, the way we must stop worrying just to get the words out, but entirely, as in "This novel will never be read by anyone") it got even worse.  Remembering my readers is a safety catch on the machine of Bad Writing.  It stops me from giving up when a scene is tough, or taking the easy way out when more conflict is required.  The audience makes me work, but it also makes me better.  I know how to write for myself.  I want to write for other people.

So I stop, remember, and get back to work.

Re-telling our stories

"What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before."
  - Mark Twain

According to some, there are a finite number of stories to be told.  Occasionally a writer or literature professor will try to break them down into exactly five, or exactly seven, or exactly ten: the hero's quest, tragedy and comedy, the fall and rebirth, whatever.  Some people would say there are fewer than that, perhaps just one, to represent humankind's eternal struggle with divinity, or humanity, or the meaning of life.

 
One of my favourite stories is a tale of rebirth.  Kisa Gotami lost her only child, and in misery and mourning she asked the Buddha to remove her suffering.  He said he would, if she would go into the village and bring him a mustard seed from a household that had never known that grief.  So she went door to door, but couldn't find a single home that hadn't known death.  With that greater understanding she no longer wanted to be divorced from her grief.  She was no longer alone.

Grief is something we all understand.  A story told about grief will be understood.  And whether we've had enough with one or ten or a hundred in a day, that story will never become useless simply because it's been told before.  Instead, the fact that it has been told before gives it power.  This is the cumulative power of human experience.

Like perfume that inevitably changes depending on the chemistry of the skin, the stories we tell are filtered through ourselves, our expectations and experiences, the palette we've collected, the words we know how to use (and some that we don't.)  And writing is a lonely thing, and so is reading, and yet the roles they fill-- communication and the translation of our thoughts and feelings into words-- are the opposite of lonely.  They are essential to the human experience.

"The bees pillage the flowers here and there but they make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme or marjolaine: so the pieces borrowed from others he will transform and mix up into a work all his own."
 - Michael Eyquen de Montaigne
   (translated from French)

"Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em."
 - Jonathan Swift

Pure understanding of NaNoWriMo

Seven years has passed since I wrote my first NaNoWriMo novel.  It was called Of a Demon, and it was about an organization of psychics who policed themselves, except for one (the main character) who they suspect killed his twin sister in order to absorb her power, but actually he was framed.  It was awful, in fact the worst, and this is not surprising.  I didn't expect to do anything with it.  I just wanted to finish a novel.

My best NaNoWriMo novel was the fourth.  It was called Stephen's Story and it was the expanded story of a character from another novel I'd written.  He was a member of an intelligence service and had a failed marriage and too many secrets to keep.  It's the only one of my NaNo novels I enjoy re-reading.  I have to wonder: is it the best because I was already familiar with the world and the character?  Was it the best story idea full stop?  Or did I peak there in 2007, and that's it?

This year's NaNoWriMo novel is more like my third: more experienced and coherent than the first and second, not nearly as inspired as the fourth, or even the fifth.  So maybe I did peak.  Great.

There's a competition in Canada and the US called The William Lowell Putnam Competition, administered by the Mathematical Association of America since the 1930s.  The median score is something like 2 out of 120.  It's what you might call "fiendishly difficult," or at least it takes a certain kind of mind and certain kinds of skills.

When taking Mathematics at university, you're told about the competition in 1st year, but it's 2nd year when you're most encouraged to enter.  In 1st year you don't have the skills, in 3rd year you know too much.  There's a pretty middle-ground where you know enough without all those facts complicating your pure understanding of the math.  Lovely.

Some people defy these statistics.  A professor of mine at the University of Victoria is known for doing well every time.  Somehow he can figure out these problems without letting his years of experience cloud his understanding.  It's a gift.

I didn't have that gift with the Putnam Competition.  And I wonder if this is what has happened to my NaNoWriMo output.  I learned what I could learn about producing a novel in 30 days, and then I learned too much, or I tried or expected or demanded too much.  So I can't get back to that pure understanding of what I was actually trying to write in that timeframe.  I've overcomplicated my skill-set.  I've un-learned my naivity.  Put me out to pasture with a Moleskine and a fountain pen.

Or maybe this is just an excuse because I've reached the notorious second week of NaNo, when the book can seem to fall apart beneath your sore and frantic fingers, all great plans for nought.  I should really just get back to writing.  The third week is bliss.

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Man interrupted at his writing (1635) by Gerrit Dou