E. P. Beaumont

The next project–yes, I’m thinking about the next project, even as I am pausing on the current one–is a space opera. It doesn’t have a name yet, but there’s quite a bit of it written already.

I last touched it using my electric typewriter, some time in the spring or summer of 1979.

It has the potential for massive plot-sprawl, but at the time I began it, I didn’t have the long-form chops to handle that kind of thing. I had no concept of planning on paper; all I find in my paper files is a few cryptic notes in between assignments for high school algebra and world history.

Oh yes, and in those files there’s a history paper about Catherine II of Russia, written in the persona of a fictional British diplomat. The moves I’m doing in Cleopatra’s Ironclads I have been practicing for a very long time.

It’s the dark of the year, here in the northern hemisphere, when we approach the gateway of the winter solstice that opens onto a succession of such doors, year after year into the past as far as I can see. That’s the time of year when I look through papers from the past. This year marks my fifth year doing the National Novel Writing Month challenge, and the point at which I begin to turn full circle to confront the writing I did when I was very young. Cleopatra and her world were my obsession at age nine and ten and eleven. Now I am writing an alternate-history version of her.

Back in 2004, before I’d even heard of National Novel Writing Month, I did 52,000 words of narrative, about a young woman who was the belle of her province in eighteenth-century Ukraine. It wasn’t at all intended as a novel, but character backstory for the antagonist in an adaptation of Nadezhda Durova’s memoir–her mother, who is known to history only by her daughter’s account, a handful of descriptions collected almost a century after her death, and a few census entries.

Out of these few mileposts in the darkness, I conjured an entire character and a world. Granted, I did a huge amount of research to pull that off, but the real work wasn’t there–it was the moment when I stepped into her skin and lived her life, scribbling away in a composition book in ball-point pen and looking up to blink in surprise at the electric light.

I sent it to my dramaturgical consultant to review, and cringed in expectation of a rebuke; even if I was paying him by the hour to review and comment, it felt like I’d just committed a human rights violation shipping all of that off to him. Not only the story of Durova’s mother, but her father, her horse, Czar Alexander I …

He wrote back and said that he’d been sucked in, utterly mesmerized, by the lives of these imaginary people. It read just like a novel.

And so it was, and it gave me something to look back on when four years later I left the job from hell and launched on a sabbatical year dedicated exclusively to my own work. No problem, I said, tallying the word-count for all those stories; I did this all in November and I can do it again.

As if it weren’t enough of a blow to be proceeding at merely average pace, I spent yesterday out sick from the day job. I slept, because whatever this thing is, it sucks energy like a vampire. Today I got back in the saddle and knocked out about 3300 words of NaNo novel, including some mordant observations on the use of severed heads as hospitality gifts. (“Here are the keys to the city, and the head of your sworn enemy. We hope you enjoy your stay.”)

Oh yes, and there was the election, too. I voted before work, came home, and then went to bed early to fight the whatever-it-is bug, in spite of my fear that I would be waking up in dystopia. (If so, I would need my sleep, or so I reasoned at the time.)

So this won’t be one of my better NaNo years or one of my better NaNo novels, but I’ll count it as a major skirmish in the ongoing battle against perfectionism.

I make a custom of date-stamping all of my draft writing with the start time and end time. In the wake of NaNo last year, I transferred those dates to a spreadsheet and to my Google calendar. What I learned was surprising: where I thought that I had spent three or four hours writing at a write-in, the record showed that I did 30 minutes of writing alternating with 30 minutes (sometimes more) of talking or reviewing work. During the work week, I managed 30 minutes, sometimes less, at nearly every lunch hour at the day job, and then occasional morning bouts, usually only 20 minutes.

Doesn’t sound like much, but it got me through 85,000 words of NaNo novel and 15,000 words of NaNoFeed blog posts.

Years ago, my mentor in the visual arts said to me, “We are not factory workers. We’re more like gardeners, and you don’t pull up the plant to see if it’s growing.”

By which she meant that artistic process, like biological process, is nonlinear. I’ve since added some words of wisdom:

• Beginnings are slow.
• Your feeling about the work is independent of the quality of the work.

That 30-minute bout seems to be the magical container size for me, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. Learning how you actually work is key, and NaNoWriMo is a wonderful practice ground for proposing the outrageous–the Lost Weekend with 50,000 words in four days; the 10,000-word Day One, and other glorious experiments. Succeed or fail, you learn something with each try.

For me the most important lesson is this: Each project has its own rhythm, and each has its own method. Asking this year’s novel to be like last year’s is asking for trouble.

Saturday, in despair, I said to one of my writing buddies, “I’m willing to turn this into a pile of raw materials and call it a novel.” I didn’t do the 30-day character questionnaire, my usual stand-by, so I always have that as an out. If I can’t figure out what happens in a scene, I can do a quick version of that interview at that point in the plot.

(Oh yes, and the answers do change. “Introduce yourself, in great detail” might have a very different answer depending on whether your character is at zenith or nadir.)

The worst enemy is perfectionism. Last year I had a great NaNo, and I’m watching myself because there’s a real trap to nostalgia. I’m rereading my 2011 NaNoFeed pposts and being reminded that it was no bed of roses, not with posts like “Day One: eyes like fried eggs” or “Day 21: not feeling it (but writing anyway).” The nostalgia is our good old friend, emotion recollected in tranquility (tr. with completed manuscript in hand.)