NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 27

Well, tonight ought to see me complete the first and rough as hell draft of Pieces, and it's been a curious journey. I had started out with a rough idea about a love triangle, and notions about characters being complicit in their own victimhood and to their own ends, and some nebulous stuff about a dangerous mumbo-jumbo taking over the United Kingdom included only to serve as some kind of backdrop to the present day events. By the end of this draft, though, the backdrop has stepped very much into the spotlight (broken metaphor, there) and all sorts of other business is now at work in the narrative - small actions having massive repercussions, the meaninglessness of freedom of will, disconnections between intent and effect, and more and surprising occurences of the jigsaw puzzle motif. Very late in the day I decided that if a weird brain-melting cult had taken over Britain, then there ought to be a resistence group, and given that the disbanded love triangle involved the narrator, who had nothing to do with either, it was pretty obvious where the other two ended up.

I'll be sitting down to chart out what I've written, see how it can be massaged to bring out and emphasise the stronger aspects of the story, and what other parts of the story need telling. So many of the late emergent elements need to be introduced earlier. Also, I'm going to have to cut the thing into 102 pieces that will each make a sort of sense on their own (though I have the beginnings of a strategy for that), and build a hideously bloated bit of JavaScript to put the whole thing together. I was tempted earlier today to devise 100 subtly different endings for the story, but that might be a bit too much. And as if to egg me on, I was in a bookshop the other day and saw Perec's Life: A User's Manual in the bestseller's section. Ah, nice.

Oh, and if the whole mess isn't too ghastly once I'm done, I shall be approaching a certain fictional anthology with a view to getting it published. I envision a box including a jigsaw puzzle and 102 bits of paper. Now that would be something. Oh, and a disc for the disinclined.

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Emergent Themes

1. Non-verbal communication
2. The diffences between intention and effect
3. Betrayal
4. Small acts with large consequences
5. The acquisition of a moral highground by casting oneself as the victim
6. Choosing captivity
7. Delaying progression to maintain a less-satisfying but sustained status quo.

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 10

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 9
Originally uploaded by Simon Scott

I'm off to Dan's today for as much scribbling as I can manage. The last time we did this was day 1, where I made a fantastic start, but had all my plot before me which makes it rather easier. This time may be different. As I think I've said elsewhere, I have realised my plot is far too thin for 50,000 words and so have had to embellish it, which is something I find tricky in that it has to be embellished in a way that contributes to the story as a whole. I think I've managed it, and made it much more interesting and exciting as a result. I've made the decision to have the end of the recounted story's chronology come right slap bang up to the start of George doing the jigsaw, which I hope will function well enough. I love those moments in novels where two different situations suddenly inflict themselves on one another. What this means, though, is that (come December) I will have to rework my opening. At the moment it sounds as though George has just come in from somewhere, which isn't quite right now. Easily changed, though, and what better way of convincing oneself that one is serious about revision if the first thing one is going to dicky around with is the opening!

Last night, as I left work, I felt a small amount of discomfort in one of my two feet (you know I have two feet, right?). I put less pressure on it and waited til I got home, assuming I had something in my shoe. Said somethings, and the discomfort, vanished when I removed my shoes so I assumed that whatever it was had fallen off and gone to join the kibble. But padding barefoot across the kitchen the pain returned, so out came the tweezers and a strong light and from mine own flesh I extracted a tiny tiny sliver of glass, no bigger than a piece of glitter.

Behold the serendipity, for glass is broken within the novel and here I was fishing a piece of the stuff out of my body. Coincidence certainly, but the act of removal has somewhere to go in the novel, and brings in some of the weirdness that is finally starting to creep into what I'm writing. I have a character called Elsa who to whom I wanted to give a maintenance task involving my main character, George. Initially she was to shave off the salt and pepper moustache he wears that adds a country decade to his face. This I may keep in, but I realise that the removal of a piece of glass from his foot is much stronger and, because of certain resonances already set up, will add to the suggestion that George and Elsa's friendship is healing him of something. One of my favourite things about writing, and NaNoWriMo specifically, is the way in which you are forced to play magpie with your own life. There is something almost transformative about taking the events that happen to you or to those around you and placing them in a story, to load the chaos that surrounds us with meaning and structure, even if it is an illusion, and its beneficence is merely temporary.

What? I'm Not Allowed A Night Off?

Horrible journey home, got back much later than usual, and the blank screen was too much to bear, so instead I am going to lie around the flat in the clothes I just bought from Uniqlo and read Donald Barthelme stories. I only wish Barhelme was available in Japanese. And that I could read Japanese.

(and don't worry - I have been through my schedule and bumped up my Sunday targets, so all should still be well)

That'll Be The First Wall Then.

It's been an odd couple of days. Despite having much of the plot mapped out, I started getting to stuff that I hadn't thought about in any great level of clarity. Some of this was stuff I didn't really want to write about any way. There was a trial which I ought to have relished, but it was one of those complicated year-long trials and covered stuff I wasn't prepared to look too deeply into considering how incidental to the plot it was. It's paramount that one of the characters goes to prison, but the means by which that occurs is immaterial, and might as well be a footnote for all I care. Anyhow, I was beginning to find real difficulty in getting the words out without leaping forward to stuff I really didn't want to write about just yet.

When I started out I had hoped for four major strands to work on, so I could flit about between them to keep the wordflow going. However, only two of the strands have survived such scrutiny. I had put off the school strand because it was a bit clouded in my mind and I wanted to give it more thought before I got to it. The joy of writing about a character thinking back over his life is that he needn't do so in order. However, after a lunchtime spent brainstorming (or whatever the word we're supposed to use now is) I felt I had a strong enough storyline to get started on. That night I managed to eat up half of it in about 1,700 words, meaning one of the four strands it aint. With a fair bit of jiggery and pokery, however, I believe there is enough meat in the main two to keep me going, and some dainty vignetting around the edges that will hopefully come in handy when I start on the December work. Also happily, the next section of the school story took longer than I'd expected. I've still probably only another 2,000 words or so to get out of it, but it's a little less bleak than the first 1,700 words suggested.

What has been fun, though, is trying to establish the motivations of the characters. It seems virtually the entire cast is a shower of arseholes! But in that frail human's picking their way through moral mazes in the pursuit of a happiness that is all too fleeting kind of way. Also there's an enjoyable repeating patterns of behaviour thing happening, and that should help along the December machinations when I get to them.

And I've still not got to any of the sex yet!

NaNoWriMo - Day 3

Well, I've not started on my day's output yet, but after a marathon day on Thursday and a coasting-along-quite-nicely-thank-you Friday I am at 8,217 words. Last year my approach was pretty much to scribble out 1,667 as best I could each day, with the occasional wobble and panicked catch up. This year, I'm basically trying to capture as much slack as I can going along, so I'll have room to maneuvre when the terrain gets trickier later on. My secondary target is to take the 30th off, but to have already finished by then.

The ultimate destination for what I'm writing is helping me a little in forming the structure of the story, and allowing me to not take too seriously the peculiar order in which I'm telling the tale. There is a distant past childhood memory section that I have no intention of starting on till I've got the dreadful part about love and betrayal out of the way. My worry is that I'm assuming the childhood section will stand up to the same level of scrutiny as the stuff I'm writing now and it may well not. Plenty of time to find more story to tell, though.

I've brought in a state-run cult for the "present day" vignettes, the challenge of which is to blur the lines between something we would recognise as a cult and something that is the feasible unintended outcome of a government drive. But that kind of problem solving is what NaNoWriMo is all about. Not it's not; it's about words.

I'm also having some fun taking the metaphorical ideas about jigsaws and coupling them up with the narrative, which helps a great deal in rationalising why the book is about a guy doing a jigsaw puzzle, beyond the structure alone. There are also some straggly bits that I want to include but I'm not quite sure yet what they're for. I worked for a day or two at a commercial espionage company as an audio typist. The job involved transcribing phone conversations between agents posing as clients and various people such as sales staff, or scientists, or whoever. I wasn't told that's what the company did, but it really could have been the only purpose of the recordings I worked on. I desperately want to give this job to George, my main character, and use it to crank up his paranoia a bit. Can't write about it too much here, though, because as we all know, you only get so many words a day to use, and I don't want to put them all in here. It's not true, but it does feel true.

I have uploaded the opening to Pieces to my NaNoWriMo profile. Please note that the first few sentences start with "And". I did this firstly to suggest that events happen prior to the start of the "action", which seems fitting for a story that is memory; secondly I did it to annoy English teachers the length and breadth of the nation (pretty big guys, some of those English teachers).


And on. And on.

Adjusting My Jacket Tails

I'm still not thinking of elephants.

I've waved NaNoWriMo about a bit amongst friends and forum buddies, and managed to convince a few to have a stab at it, which will help me immensely with my own work.

Also, the plot of the novel is beginning to emerge out of the mists of my unthink. I'm torn between writing in the first or third person. The story involves someone sitting in small apartment doing a jigsaw puzzle, while ruminating about his distant past, a less distant Terrible Thing, recent developments, his world view, and his immediate situation. Because of the focus on a single character, I feel a first person narrator would be more appropriate, but I don't want the character to be an open book. Also I need to write 50,000 words in a month, and I feel a third person narrator would allow for the inclusion of things that I wouldn't be able to bother with in the first person. But then there's a lot of reminiscence that I don't want to broach by a spray of harp strings and the picture going all misty. I did have the idea of fudging it and have the third person narrator be revealed as the central character talking about himself in the first person which would be a great deal of fun, but might be too distracting considering what the December dissection will be about and what little I have of a plot doesn't quite go with it somehow. If I were to use the device, it would have to be in a story where the revelation actually meant something. I think the first person narrator is getting the upperhand...

As to the plot, it seems to be evolving into a confrontation of guilt, with lots of ambiguity thrown in, and malevolent darkness burning the edges of the paper. One of the other things I want to do, which I did to some extent last year, is weave in the current events of November (in various scales) into the story. The realtime of the novel takes place at the end of November, with immediate reminiscences taking place throughout the month, and leading up to the end. There's a fair amount of unreality that's likely to occur, though, so the November events might fall by the wayside. What has also been interesting is the way in which this new rendering of Pieces is comparing to what I had of the original. I'm totally starting from scratch in terms of set-up and story-line, but there are distinct thematic links which I'm sure can only be a good thing.

Oh, and I have my ending, but I'm not sure what it means or how I'll get there. Should be fun finding out though.

Also, I have just this second decided to write a couple of 1,667 word stories, just to remind myself of what I'm letting myself in for. Nothing too strenuous, though - just a couple of stretches at the starting line.