On being predictable

I like being unpredictable. A dark horse. A black sheep. A wildcard. By which I mean my opinions are sometimes an unusual shape, and that shape is well-formed and I like it that way. But when I ask you who you think my favourite poets are (which I know you ask yourself all the time, right), I am being rhetorical. Now my horse is a soft grey and my sheep a very dirty white. 

I want to couch these names in a paragraph so you don't inadvertently read them. But you did anyway, didn't you? I own both the single and complete editions of Sylvia Plath's poetry and her only novel The Bell Jar. And the only poems whose lines I know by heart (my memory is probably more woolly than my sheep) are Emily Dickinson's: "Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me / The carriage held but just ourselves / And immortality..."

I discovered Dickinson first, as a hardcover Christmas gift, the corners of the pages of which are now dirty with thumb prints. I opened the book (then probably smelled the pages) and fell into step with her poems. "Tell the Truth but tell it slant / Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth's superb surprise." 

Later, in Grade 11, we were assigned to collect different works (prose, poetry, biography, etc.) around a theme of our choice (copyright be damned). I decided to choose works and then find the theme that tied them together (which, yes, means I couldn't think of anything). So I did as asked and, upon reviewing the texts to try to find my theme, found that every piece I had chosen was written by a woman and most were about some aspect of the female experience.

And that was how I discovered Sylvia Plath. I can't remember the exact poem I chose, but her poem Stillborn describes my current frustration with my creative process: "These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis. / They grew their toes and fingers well enough, / Their little foreheads bulged in concentration."

Reeling, I tripped over Virginia Woolf and her essay A Room of One's Own. (Remember that I'm a dinosaur and this was before the ubiquity of the internet, so all this research was done, like, in a library and *gasp* by hand.) I lifted the opening paragraph of the text, without (I confess) reading the entire essay: "All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point -- a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved."

A few years later, I spent a few wintry afternoons reclining in the sun, lost in a paperback of The Waves (which smelled like all books should smell), which was up until then the greatest novel I had ever read. Dickinson mastered stream of consciousness, using it to erode boundaries without losing clarity -- I'm thinking of characters here, because characters were all I cared about back then; plot be damned! 

So, what's predictable about these writers, you ask, predictably? 

What's predictable is that these poets and writers have been adopted ad nauseum to illustrate the feminist cause. They've been held up as examples that women are worthy, as successful women in a 'man's world' -- which almost immediately became a women's world! (Writing poetry and novels was seen as a 'man's work' until the early twentieth century when women authors 'corrupted' the profession, feminising it.) 

We adopted them and their work until they became passe and ignoring them became an equally feminist action. Now, being a lover of the works of Dickinson, Woolf and Plath is a phase you go through, like dying your hair some outrageous colour or ... being a feminist. 

In this, I'm prepared to be predictable, my livestock (to stretch the metaphor to its breaking point like a frayed elastic band) the purest white. 

Nanowrimo: the countdown

What month is it? Yes, November. Yes, a countdown to religious holidays involving fake trees and gold tinsel. I bet you didn't guess correctly! Oh wait, if you didn't guess from the title of this post, please shut down your browser and never come here again. Yes, it's Nanowrimo!

For the (majority of) people who don't know this is an acronym, it is. It stands for: National Novel Writing Month. Because we are all one nation on the internet? No, because we aren't, unless you are a first-world hipster looking at everything through rose-tinted Google Glass. You can keep reading, but only if you take that headset off, because you look less like a sci-fi hero than a real-life dork and not the cool kind.

I am guessing it started as an American campaign and went global. Lack of foresight, but the alliteration works. The campaign encourages people to write by creating communities. Every November, aspiring authors log in to their accounts (most have forgotten their passwords and need to reset - not me, of course. Of course. No, not me) and fill in the details of their project: title, summary, extract and cover.

There are a couple of rules:

1. It has to be a new novel, not one you have already started.
2. You cannot copy and paste ten times to reach the word count (this seems obvious but if not, time to, yes, shut down your browser).
3. You 'win' when you reach 50 000 words. You win, I win, we all win. Like a marathon where we all get medals for finishing, at which point I'm wondering why I am putting myself through this.

We got here sooner than I expected. I signed up in 2010. I lost in 2010, 2011 and 2012. I didn't even try in 2013. I lost because a week into the marathon, I asked myself why I was putting myself through this.

Why? you ask. Why do you writers pretend writing is so difficult? We all write every day: emails, application forms, notes. Yes, you do (and may I point out, from an editor's point of view, that if you didn't have spell and grammar check, your 'writing' would be illegible. And even then people can't tell the difference between 'its' and 'it's'). I am all for you writing 50 000 words of emails. Please don't send it to me, but go ahead.

The Most Difficult Thing about writing is resisting the urge to purge the file or set the pages alight. This urge should take hold of you at about word 14. If as a first-time writer you make it to 4 000 words, I will actually read your (pending) 50 000 word email.

I have been writing, properly, for ten years. I still have to wrestle that urge and chain it under my desk. Like David Copperfield, he will free himself, but it gives me a headstart. I first tracked his movements by writing stream-of-consciousness style for 30 minutes a day. No lifting pen from paper except to turn the page (and unless you print and between words, but you get it). It takes about 20 minutes to start writing fluidly.

Where do you find 30 minutes a day? I don't know, it's your schedule. If you are serious about this, you will quit gym and write instead. And potentially die early of heath problems. Which would make you a bona fide writer. I used to write first-thing in the morning (Jessica Simpson swears by this), but I am not a morning person. Unless you count waking up at 11. So now I write in the evening.

Sylvia Plath (of whom I am such a fan that I hate Ted Hughes with a passion) wrote 1 500 words a day. She started the habit late in high school and published a number of poems and short stories in college. 1 500. That was the length of some of my essays in undergrad.

So ten years of wrestling the monster of writer's block later, I can write about 500 words per half hour, sometimes more if I don't edit. That's an hour to an hour and a half. Sorry, how long did you say it took you to write 4 000 words? Because it just took me two days.

In other words, writing is a discipline. Write the same amount of words at the same time in the same place. Be prepared to do this for years and years. Train yourself to wrestle that monster. In addition, you will need to do research and be prepared to burrow into the bits of yourself you wouldn't stare down in a lit room. Or maybe you get it right first time. It happens. I hate you.

We have bumped into Nanowrimo again. It is November, after all. One of the functions of Nano (apart from creating a community) is to train you to do all of those things above (I don't need to recap do I?). I have gone through periods of writing religiously (I mean that word seriously - if I had a single belief, it would be in words) and of letting the words build up until I am a little volcano. So Nano is definitely worthwhile.

But a week has always been my limit. If you do the maths, you need to write about 1 600 words a day to finish on time. Remember: an hour and a half. I used to work a lot. For various reasons that even therapy won't fully explain. Identity, self-worth, self-destruction. That is a bleak path, dear reader. Now I know better, although knowing isn't always understanding. So finding that hour and a half when you work at least 10 hours a day and don't eat lunch is difficult.

So my strategy had two parts:

1. Start strong: write as much as you can in the first week.
2. Continue strong on the weekends, when you have time.

I mentioned I never made it past number 1? Except for 2012, when I wrote 28 000 words, which is about 17 days. It sounds like the home stretch, but it isn't, it really isn't.

You can see this coming, can't you? Or you've already checked my profile. Eight days in and I average close to 2 000 words per day. A fist bump and a happy dance. That is more than 15 000 words. In one week. One week, my friends, just over an hour a day. One hour.

What did writing replace? Not gym. I don't do gym. I just make promises I haven't kept yet. Well, I went out on my own, business-wise, and am planning a little sum'ing sum'ing. Stay tuned for me crowdsourcing your wallet. Technically, writing counts as part of my work day. Since my work day is 10 hours, I am just retrieving a couple of them.

While I work, that monster has a seat next to me, but he is on the edge of it, watching the words spill on to the electronic page. Sometimes he helps me find a synonym. He also reminds me to eat lunch.

I think this is the year I am going to win Nanowrimo. I have no illusions that this novel is publishable. The story is going nowhere and comprised mostly of dialogue. I can't think of names for most of the characters and unravelling the pronouns would be a full-time job. But it is giving me more insight into my first (and real) novel. (Which is, oddly, the premise of that novel.) The novel will have six dedications and Sylvia Plath is the first and Nano the last.

In defence of Mss Woolf and Plath

Where there's smoke there's fire, conventional wisdom tells me. At first I drafted a rampage about the fact that many other things release smoke and recommended changing the idiom to: Where there's smoke there's combustion. (I even looked up the relationship between the two, discovering that smoke is just a change in state that is a by-product of a chemical reaction. Huh. That's why I am not a scientist.)

Then I realised a logical error of deduction: Just because smoke is a necessary condition of fire doesn't mean fire is a necessary condition of smoke. Which, on second thought means the idiom still doesn't make sense, since you aren't guaranteed to find a fire if you see smoke - you could come upon a heap of smouldering phosphorous, for example.

If you are already bored, I apologise. But you know how I like to the circle the point, in the hopes of catching it (and you) unawares. Consider this added value: a science, philosophy and English lesson, for the price of wading through two paragraphs of in search of a point.

On to my heap of phosphorous: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are two of my favourite authors - and have been since I was in high school. Through their writing, I saw women who felt as I feel. Women who wrote in the 20s and 60s, when society was still (arguably) unaccepting of a woman's voice. I saw strong women, with force of wills, who dared.

I think I also saw a promise, that I could be a writer, even before I knew I could. (In my experience, being a writer is not a choice. It is a physical sense, an innate means of experiencing the world. But that doesn't mean using the sense doesn't take courage. Try it, just once, and I dare you not to tear up or delete the first draft in frustration.)

The Waves by Ms Woolf is my favourite of her novels, and one of my favourite novels of all. A group of college friends congregate at the funeral of one of their party. They haven't seen each other since college, about five years prior if I remember correctly. Buried hurts and loves surface, buried identities too. As if merely being together has the power to swallow time. Regression. Suspense. Suspicion. Ruined love. Alliance. Written as stream of consciousness.

Don't be put off by the opaque ramblings of James Joyce! Or by the echoes of navel-gazing, Woolf-inspired movies.

The Modernists gravitated to stream of consciousness - artists, writers, even psychologists. Few did it well; most attempts read like the experiments they were (a la Joyce). Ms Woolf actually uses punctuation and paragraphs; she restrains her liberties to the character voices. Her novels have a languid sensitivity that her non-fiction does not; they do not have the buried rage of Joyce's - although both carve out the inner landscapes of their characters with fine chisels.

This is not a plot-driven novel. There are no meet-cutes, murders or betrayals, except in the past tense, and definitely no car chases or explosions. It feels like The Secret History, except that here the dead guy is already dead. All of these reasons are why I would give body parts to have written The Waves.

This post's smouldering phosphorous is made of the associations of reading Ms Woolf and/or Plath. Of worshipping them. Both authors have become symbols (with or against their wills?), of feminism and liberalism. What does that say of me? Not of me as I am but of me as you see me. I am a feminist and a liberal (give me a chance!), but I hate those words. They make me cringe as much as you.

I believe that I have the right to navigate my own path. I also believe that chauvinism is institutionalised (I have evidence, my favourite of which is the exclamation that I am 'a smart cookie'). I believe that humanity is as good as it is bad, that people just want love and respect (again, I have evidence). I don't kill anything, even insects, because who am I to take life?

Mss Woolf and Plath are the smoke rising from this heap.

That irks me - that beliefs should be reduced to superficial revolts like bra-burning and chaining bunny-huggers to trees, diminishing their power. That I should be reduced by this association and so disregarded. Granted, we need to make snap judgements all the time because the world is flinging stimuli at us and we don't have enough hands to catch them.

Yet, we are prepared to take the time to read a novel like The Waves and understand the characters - even empathise with them. We are ready to open their boxes but I must huddle in the one I have been forced into. Not a chance. Instead, I rant and rave, because if you cannot walk in line, you must heckle from the sidelines.