November 26th, 2008
So Monday night I typed until my fingertips were sore and the little word counter on my writing application said “50,011″ and raced over to paste the text of my novel-shaped item into the official NaNoWriMo meter, whereupon it cheerily congratulated me on having written 49,850 words. I don’t know if that means I used a lot of hyphenated words that my counter counted as two and theirs as one, but… even though it was just after 1 a.m. and I had parent teacher conferences scheduled for 8:30 Tuesday morning, I figured I could punch out 150 more words, and ten bleary minutes later I was retrieving my proud little NaNoWriMo badge for my blog. I announced my count on Twitter, and went to bed, and I was grateful to wake up Tuesday to lots of 140 character congratulatory notes (I love Twitter!).
Tuesday was busy, with back-to-back conferences with teachers for three sons taking up three hours of the morning, a dentist appointment for all four boys in the afternoon, and, for my evening’s entertainment, the horror of a bathroom that had seen only cursory cleaning for weeks (did I mention four boys?) and needed attention before my parents’ arrival today (despite their regular averrings that I don’t need to clean before their arrival, I have my standards, after all). So I didn’t wander around from room to room feeling pointless and empty without a word count to meet, which, actually I had worried might happen, but I also didn’t feel the elated relief I remember from last year.
It wasn’t that the writing wasn’t enjoyable, it was just that the first time came with this disbelief, that I was actually capable of applying myself for thirty days to one thing and finishing a draft. And I never wanted to read it again after that. This year, I had that under my belt, and it was a question of whether I could put together something I liked. And even though I completed the story, and in fewer days than last year, I have more of a sense of unfinished business.
And I’m thinking about what this means, what the differences are between last year and this year, why I don’t feel so triumphant. What I’ve written this year pleases me more than what I did last year. I was more public about declaring my intentions, and thus having my internet support lines who could cheer my growing wordcount and offer encouragement. I learned that 2,000 words a day is something I can do between the time I put the kids to bed and the time I go to bed without getting too miserable. Still, this was lonely. I wasn’t a good online friend, was often preoccupied, and not the best mother I could be, and, on the days when Raven actually was in town, not the most companionable wife. I didn’t see as much of my friends in real life, and I missed my blog, missed just putting out ideas and getting feedback. I fear the cost of the exercise was too high for everyone else in my life, but I don’t know how to balance my needs and theirs, waver between thinking this was a little selfish, a little vain, and feeling like writing is the selkie-skin I keep in my hope chest, having to go and longingly stroke every once in a while just to remind myself of who I really am. I didn’t write for years and years and only arrived back at it after months of drowning in post partum lostness. The idea of NOT writing makes my lower lip tremble because then I would only be an empty shell of a person.
I’ve been thinking — not too much, and without a lot of defensiveness, actually — about the Twitterer who said he was tired of hearing about NaNoWriMo and thought novel-writing should be left to the professionals. I do so many things as not exactly a dilettante, but not as a professional either, the music with the kids, the occasional art class — the blogging. And I do them sort of the way I do exercise, because, they feel like part of a balanced life, they’re more gratifying than watching television or washing the dishes. This is something more. I think I stop feeling defensive about the time I spent writing non-professionally to others when I stop feeling defensive about it to myself. Without feedback — without even having gone through and read the thing in one sitting, I have no idea what it is I typed or what value it has. I don’t have any perspective on any of it yet. But even though I am not walking around elated, and have no sense of the writing-as-product, the process felt very much worth it, loneliness and all.
At some point, maybe when I’ve had a full night or two of sleep, I’ll think more critically about what “professional” means to me, and what sort of credentials are worth believing in, what systems of credentials mean. Tonight I just realize I cannot take myself writing seriously, I cannot take myself writing unseriously, and I find the whole thing a little bewildering.
November 15th, 2008
Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened. (Amy Bloom) via the unreliable narrator
I go to leave a comment and it mushrooms, explodes, this is all wrong, memory, I was going to claim, was the story we tell ourselves. Or maybe that is only what memory becomes, having had a moment when it was experienced like a replay and then encased it in words, words which bear the same resemblance to the experience that a tiny green square on a map does to a landscape filled with cows and a piling up of clouds on the horizon and buzzing and ticking insects and the smell of cut grass and the squelch of mud around boots and gathering heat so you feel a dribble of sweat trace down your chest.
I have the tape recorder that plays back conversations in my head, and I think there are distortions, I wear the tape thin on the thing I said that might have hurt, might have sounded stupid, been misconstrued. I tell myself that neither the worst nor the best of what I think of myself could be true. I work so hard to compensate for my own distortions, I am overwhelmed imagining the distortions of other people with their own rememberings.
Map and memory have similar distortions, will both pretend to be objective, but betray a point of view. I like thinking about the map my cat would make of our neighborhood, how she recognizes different boundaries than we do, I remember when the house next door was empty and a neighbor called because she saw her go in there. A cat’s map wouldn’t represent the road as possibility and destination and the siren call of away or even the convenient way to get there, it would be barrenness and death and obstacle.
We carry the map so past experience can help us navigate the future. We don’t think so much about the usefulness of memory when it is about experience dehydrated, folded small so you can carry it around with you, but you try to remember the things you are going to need.
I know this isn’t Ms. Bloom’s point. She says more about whether shame gives memory unspeakable shadows. (As I write this one son comes crying that a brother has said something mean, I ask the brother who gives an entirely different version of the story. I cock an eyebrow, or, no, I am not cool enough to actually cock an eyebrow — perhaps I lower my head and look over the top of my glasses, get a more complete version which should shame the unkind child. I don’t punch him.)
But the editing and the truth and the further distortion and fading of time. Thinking about the idea of voices in my head, I wonder if I think in words have non-verbal thinking, do I remember in words? Maybe that’s why the random encounter with a long-lost smell or angle of light or sensation of something I thought was lost seems like a gift, giving me access to memories not yet converted into tellings.
November 6th, 2008
Dear blog,
No, I haven’t forgotten you.
I thought of trying to explain to you why I wept as I did Tuesday night and decided that it was like trying to explain to my kids why I was crying. I was grateful they didn’t have to understand. I mean, they got that it was historical and all, but I couldn’t explain to them that regardless of what our new president does or is able to do, I was crying because we live in a country where enough people believed in him and believed in a hopefulness I had held myself back from feeling to vote so overwhelmingly for him, I cried because he was able to stand up and give an almost-Bartlett-worthy speech and call for things like humility and service and sacrifice and I’m grateful to think that maybe such virtues are not hopelessly passé. I was crying because even though I was experiencing this history in my own living room with two children asleep on the couch and floor and two nestled up against me, I was experiencing it through Twitter with acquaintances I may or may not have met in person, through Facebook with friends across the country, and as I listened to the happy parade passing a block away, I wasn’t alone.
I thought of trying to share my enthusiasm with you for Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends, my delight in someone saying “Hey, we read and we write for entertainment, and there is nothing wrong with valuing entertainment” my delight in his essays on Sherlock Holmes and on the His Dark Materials trilogy and on The Road (I have mentioned that I just finished reading the Road and I’d procrastinated reading it for a year and so was shocked at being a little blown away with it?)
I thought of trying to sort out my appreciation for Virginia Postrel’s TED Talk on glamour but she says it all so well, I don’t suppose I have anything really substantive to add.
I thought of sharing with you the catalogue of the pleasures versus the indignities of being corporeal that took up all of my morning pages this morning and my surprise at how I keep bumping up against things I find taboo (but I am so matter-of-fact and open-minded, I wail!) as I try to write even in the privacy of my own journal about them, and wondering at how taboo and modesty and shame seem braided impossibly tightly.
But really, I should be spending my writing time trying to pump words into my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project which is exhilarating and terrifying and exhausting and consuming and which I seem to be able to do only by focussing endlessly on the numbers and sticking my fingers in my ears and humming loudly whenever a little voice pipes up with judgement of what I am writing. I’ve now written 11,907 words towards my goal of 50,000 and every day I am sure I have only one day’s worth of writing more left. I have written enough to get things set up, to have a sense of where I am going but it feels like driving at night on a very dark highway and being able to see only the area directly ahead of me illuminated by my headlights, and quite honestly, I’m terrified of what may be lurking in the shadows.
Finally, I share this from Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth, which I started with the younger two boys last night. Milo has gotten trapped in the Doldrums and is having a conversation with the native Lethargians, explaining why thinking and laughing are against the law:
“At 8 o’clock we get up, and then we spend
“From 8 to 9 daydreaming.
“From 9 to 9:30 we take our early midmorning nap.
“From 9:30 to 10:30 we dawdle and delay.
“From 10:30 to 11:30 we take our late early morning nap.
“From 11:30 to 12:00 we bide our time and then eat lunch.
“From 11:00 to 2:00 we linger and loiter.
“From 2:00 to 2:30 we take our early afternoon nap.
“From 2:30 to 3:30 we putt off for tomorrow what we could have done today.
“From 3:30 to 4:00 we take our early late afternoon nap.
“From 4:00 to 5:00 we loaf and lunge until dinner.
“From 6:00 to 7:00 we dillydally.
“From 7:00 to 8:00 we take our early evening nap, and then for an hour before we go to bed at 9:00 we waste time.
“As you can see that leaves almost no time for brooding, lagging, plodding, or procrastinating, and if we stopped to think or laugh, we’d never get nothing done.”
This sounds disturbingly like my day as I note that I have only an hour left before I must retrieve my older children from school…
