NaNoFeed: Day one!

Posted on November 1, 2011 by epbeaumont

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and I’ve been camping out at the cafe since 8:30am. At 2pm I was joined by good writing buddy Devin Harnois, and we’ve been alternating bouts of writing with reading to each other.

I’ve done 65,000 words of preparation and plotting. She’s done none, except for throwing over the original idea for a new one, pretty much what I did. We’re both writing like demons and rapidly falling in love with our stories… even more in love than we were before, which is saying a lot.

It takes all kinds to make a world, and a novel is a sort of world.

Planner or pantser? It just depends on how much framework you want for your improv. I have tons of backstory and I’m still discovering new and funny things about my characters. Elsa and Kirsten are best friends, and they are each other’s wingman. It helps that Elsa’s into boys and Kirsten’s into girls, of course–eliminates a possible source of sibling rivalry.

Elsa broke up with her boyfriend Georg because he referred to their household as the Island of the Amazons. (Elsa and Kirsten and Kirsten’s girlfriend Petra all live together in a sort of live-in studio and library that’s my notion of the earthly paradise.) Then they all laugh at him and proceed to nickname their apartment “The Island” ever after.

I don’t think I could write a “normal” menage if I tried.

Meanwhile my buddy is letting her character tell his story… check out the basics here. It’s a hoot.

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NaNoFeed: Between the Worlds

Posted on October 31, 2011 by epbeaumont

Today we’re on the eve of National Novel Writing Month, which coincides with one of my favorite holidays. In all of its faces, be it the Eve of All Saints, Halloween, Day of the Dead, or Samhain, this holiday celebrates the gate between the worlds, in a guise by turns macabre and comic.

A friend of mine from Mexico City told me the following story:

Once upon a time in the thirties, Leon Trotsky, on the run from Stalin’s assassins, came to stay with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo at the Blue House. His arrival coincided with the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). He came down to breakfast in the morning to find, next to his plate, a sugar skull with his name on it. Given his particular circumstances, he did not take it in the spirit intended.

My friend said, with a puzzled expression, “The Russians don’t have a sense of humor about death.” Nikolai Gogol, among others, might dispute that assertion, but most certainly it’s a different sense of humor.

She told me about Day of the Dead picnics in the cemetery down the street from her cousins, one of whom observed wryly, “It’s a view of the future.”

I grew up down the street from a cemetery myself, in Toledo, Ohio, though in a culture and family rather less open about mortality. So, not coincidentally, my literary work is shot through with ghosts, time-slips, time travel, and visitations from other worlds and times. It’s a marvelous coincidence (or maybe not coincidence at all) that National Novel Writing Month begins when we cross midnight from the Eve of All Saints into the Black Month, the time of storytelling in front of the fire. Looking back over my notes from four years of taking up this challenge, I see that my real planning on my November novel typically begins near the autumnal equinox, one of the great quarters of the solar cycle. The writing launches in earnest on the cross-quarter, what my Celtic ancestors called Samhain.

From Halloween to New Year’s is the eighth of the year that belongs to the dead. I’ve talked to many other writers here in the Northern Hemisphere who find the dark of the year their most productive time, where dream and writing most nearly coincide. As a writer of the fantastic, this time of year is my native ground.

So the excitement is building, as I hold off writing until it’s November 1 in earnest.  In November, I write my novel and then in December, I send it to my first-draft beta readers, and in turn read the novels produced by my writing buddies. Only in mid-January, in the cold light of the new year, do I set myself to the task of re-visioning and re-imagining the strange beast that emerged from the forge of the Muse in darkest November.

Coda: I wrote the foregoing this morning in my favorite writing cafe, and then went to visit one of my mentors at her nursing home. We went to the residents’ Halloween party and then sat on a sunny bench outside, soaking up sun and talking about the Halloween blizzard of 1991, twenty years ago tonight; then the conversation ranged over life, art, the journal/memoir she’s writing, and the interplay between visual and written work.

We walked together to the reception area. Just as I arrived to sign out, a procession passed me: one going to the hospital in an ambulance; another, shrouded on a gurney, elsewhere.

The day had spoken its word: “Live! Burn bright, because the darkness is coming.”

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Six Sentence Sunday, 30 October 2011 (Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues)

Posted on October 30, 2011 by epbeaumont

Beulah Mae and Martin had been as brilliant as the sparkling cusp of a wave driving in to the beach at Waikiki with the force of three thousand miles of Pacific behind it. Behind them swelled the hopes and ambitions of generations of ancestors. The wave had by no means crested, for Annie felt the force of the same expectations. There were Gifts and there were Powers and there were Opportunities, and the ancestors had possessed but two of those three. It was up to her generation to carry forward what had been accomplished.

So her mother’s disappointment at being unable to match the wallpaper on the repairs to the wall her daughter destroyed at age three, buzzing around the house at near-supersonic speed, was minor compared to her pride and elation to have a child with a Gift and a Power.

Due to error on the scheduling, it didn’t go up in time. I’m putting it up now. 😦

 

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NaNoFeed: Who are your people? A magic tool for finding out!

Posted on October 29, 2011 by epbeaumont

The best part of National Novel Writing Month is reading the forums and picking up new and interesting ideas about how to write. Once in a while I encounter something truly magical that revolutionizes my practice as a writer.

So here it is: Thirty Question Character Survey, or Thirty Day Character Questionnaire.

Day 01 – introduce yourself, in great detail

Day 02 – Your first love, in great detail

Day 03 – Your parents, in great detail

Day 04 – What you ate today, in great detail

Day 05 – Your definition of love, in great detail

Day 06 – Your day, in great detail

Day 07 – Your best friend, in great detail

Day 08 – A moment, in great detail

Day 09 – Your beliefs, in great detail

Day 10 – What you wore today, in great detail

Day 11 – Your siblings, in great detail

Day 12 – What’s in your bag, in great detail

Day 13 – This week, in great detail

Day 14 – What you wore today, in great detail

Day 15 – Your dreams, in great detail

Day 16 – Your first kiss, in great detail

Day 17 – Your favorite memory, in great detail

Day 18 – Your favorite birthday, in great detail

Day 19 – Something you regret, in great detail

Day 20 – This month, in great detail

Day 21 – Another moment, in great detail

Day 22 – Something that upsets you, in great detail

Day 23 – Something that makes you feel better, in great detail

Day 24 – Something that makes you cry, in great detail

Day 25 – A first, in great detail

Day 26 – Your fears, in great detail

Day 27 – Your favorite place, in great detail

Day 28 – Something that you miss, in great detail

Day 29 – Your aspirations, in great detail

Day 30 – One last moment, in great detail

User testimonial: This questionnaire gave me the plot, more or less, for last year’s NaNo novel. I’d won before, but 2010 was the first time I actually had a complete plot arc. It was instrumental in the revision of the novel. I used it to interview the other six major characters, which gave me the shape of the rest of the novel as well as multiple stories in the same universe.

Some of the responses to the questionnaire are stand-alone fictions all by themselves. That led me to suggest to a fellow NaNo novelist that she pick out two or three characters and use the questionnaire as the framework for her novel. Guaranteed, the result will be a story, especially as the characters start talking to each other as well as to the interviewer. (And who knows but that the interviewer might also be a character in the same story.)

What’s the magic? The interview format requires you to step into the character’s skin to answer, to speak as “I” rather than to speak about “him” or “her” or “them.” The odd juxtapositions have some of the generative randomness of real conversation; I’ve always been surprised at the strange and beautiful things that result.

Source: Variously known as the Thirty Question Character Survey or (my name for it) the Thirty Day Character Questionnaire, it was originally posted by NaNoWriMo participant R. M. Anton, who reports to me in private correspondence that it’s probably a journal meme that they had saved at some point. (Anyone who can supply a more precise citation, please feel free to note in comments below.)

 

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NaNoFeed: research as vacation

Posted on October 27, 2011 by epbeaumont

In the run-up to National Novel Writing Month, I’m doing a lot of research and writing. Yesterday, my box of research materials arrived: two DVD documentaries about life in the European Iron Age, one about the Germans and the other about the Celts; a monograph about the ideological afterlife of the Germania of Tacitus; a handbook of life in prehistoric Europe. (There were books in that box for other projects as well, but that’s for another post.) Meanwhile, I’m out on YouTube looking at videos about forensic facial reconstruction, checking out the landscapes in which the bog bodies were discovered, and taking virtual tours of Hadrian’s Wall.

It isn’t research. It’s a virtual vacation.  I’m taking a long strange trip, as usual, hanging out with my characters and settling into their world. Once I know the characters, the story usually takes shape of its own accord.

The strangest part so far? Writing modern life from the point of view of a teenager from the Iron Age. Even after half an hour in his point of view, I look up and everything looks alien, and (given it’s usually on lunch hour) I have to go back to my day job, the daily details of which are passingly strange from nearly any viewpoint in the past.  Not to mention my clothes, the food in my lunch, the glass windows between me and the increasingly bitter autumn wind.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 23 October 2011 (The Lost Pissarro)

Posted on October 23, 2011 by epbeaumont

“Of course she does,” Stavros said. “I looked her up. They haven’t found any of them,” She didn’t want to say aloud what she could all too easily imagine: she would die, and they would dismantle that tiny apartment, and throw the canvases finished and unfinished into the trash. She knew the ones who’d nearly missed that: Alice Neel, whose apartment grew crowded by the decade with the canvases that no one ever saw, because no one was going to show the work of a woman artist who painted her neighbors in Spanish Harlem. Not in the decades when they were all busy Avoiding the Subject – that’s how she saw the clinging to abstraction – while the world burned around them.

Six Sentence Sunday isn’t officially happening this Sunday (see this post for why not) but I’m in the habit so I thought I’d post anyway.

 

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NaNoFeed: On the Eve

Posted on October 22, 2011 by epbeaumont

In the run-up to National Novel Writing Month, I’ve spent the last month interviewing my characters and figuring out a rough notion of the setting for my story.

I’ve also added a few more goals to the list for the month of November:

  • Post to the blog daily, even if it’s just a note.
  • End the month with a logbook of hours worked. Writing is now my second job, even if it’s not paying me money (yet). I’ve set a preliminary goal of 100 hours.
  • End the month with an agenda for my research party in December. Oh yes, and that’s another use of the Magna Carta exercise: what things do I want to know more about?
  • Spend money on my reference library. This is the first NaNo that I’ve actually spent money aside from cafe patronage: so far, it’s been a research trip to the bog habitat in Theodore Wirth Park (Minneapolis), and a $10.00 e-book about forensic facial reconstruction, that confirmed once more my own identification of the magisterial text in the field.
I love NaNoWriMo. In November, I’ll be counting the ways, right here. Stay tuned!

 

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Six Sentence Sunday, 16 October 2011 (The Lost Pissarro)

Posted on October 16, 2011 by epbeaumont

It was a shame there was nobody alive with that kind of spirit, she thought, but then Victorine and she wouldn’t understand each other. Only in paint and canvas. She read French, but spoke it excecrably.

(And that was just how her professor had described her accent: execrable, with that turned-up voiced vowel at the end where the English would have a silent ‘e’.)

Minneapolis and St. Paul had been settled by fur traders, French some of them, and there were places all over town with French names where they weren’t corruptions of Ojibwe or Dakota, or pasted-on Anglo… but nothing was pronounced as it had been. Time corrupted everything, drew it away from the purity of the original, or made it into something new.

[Author’s note: Angie Stavros is looking at the painting Woman with a Parrot, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Victorine Meurent (1844-1927) worked with Eduoard Manet as a model, and was a painter in her own right. The portrait is in the Metropolitan Museum. See also this 2008 article from the Guardian, on the occasion of the discovery of one of Meurent’s paintings.]

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Six Sentence Sunday, 9 October 2011 (The Lost Pissarro)

Posted on October 9, 2011 by epbeaumont

She still remembered her very first set of real brushes, and the marvel of being able to draw out of the messy paint some semblance of her own thoughts. “You’ve been trying to paint with house-painting brushes,” Florence had said in some astonishment, when she saw the old brushes she’d kept, the ones with which she’d made her first paintings at ten and eleven years old. Kept, something like grave-goods: of no use to the living, but precious still to the ten-year-old who had discovered how to pluck tunes out of the rainbow on the palette.

She’d struggled, she’d wrestled, looking up books on color, on how to mix without making mud, on the theory behind that, and it was painting really that had led her to chemistry, not the other way around. Chemistry had given her precision and insight, and more importantly a sense of danger. That was all to the good: she was a descendant of alchemists, in that line, and the spirits of matter were inhuman in their loves and hatreds; quite simply, they did not care with what they bonded.

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Why do you read stories?

Posted on October 6, 2011 by epbeaumont

It’s actually not too different from why I write stories.

I read stories…

  • to find out what happens next. I didn’t realize how powerful a force narrative was until I was reading in my second language (French). I had the choice between Descartes’ Discourse on Method (simple, straightforward technical prose) and Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma (deeply twisty plot, heavy-duty literary vocabulary) and it was the latter that sucked me in and kept my attention. Some writers have such powerful narrative drive that I had trouble being honest with the dictionary, at least in French. In Russian, I had no choice, because I started out with insufficient vocabulary. The narrative piece of the brain is really, really powerful and can deal even when you’re whacked out on painkillers, as I was post-surgery some years ago. I couldn’t manage art history or geometry (linear perspective), the two things I was reading at the time, but I could manage narratives.
  • to go on a trip, somewhere else (as someone else). That’s actually the same reason that I write: to put on another skin, and I think it’s what draws me to tales of magic and other worlds: to be commonsensical and everyday about something that doesn’t exist in our world. There are realistic writers who can take me on a trip. I don’t need to take mind-altering drugs if I’ve got Virginia Woolf’s novels or Marina Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical essays or Henry Thoreau’s naturalist’s notes at hand.
  • to meet new people. The characters stay with me for a long time, as does the author’s particular lens. Realistic fiction from other countries or times is like foreign travel, and in present-tense it teaches me about the lives of people who aren’t me. There’s nothing to get you inside a culture like its stories. To turn it around to writing, I know that a story is going to work out as soon as the characters show up. I might throw ingredients in the cookpot/cauldron, but it isn’t until a real person steps across the barrier from Not-There to Here that the story really starts to grow.
  • to savor the elegances of plot. I feel plot as impetus on the first pass (where it keeps me reading), but on the second reading I feel it as structure. And there’s no pleasure like being inside a gorgeous piece of narrative architecture. I’m still learning plot as a writer, and part of that education is being conscious of it as a reader. A really splendid plot is one that creates more tension on the third reading than on the first; knowing how it turns out should crank the suspense even more. That’s the principle on which tragedy is built.
  • to watch a train wreck. Yeah, speaking of tragedy, when you know how it turns out but you want to watch the trajectory, and in particular watch the characters’ reactions. As a kid, my two favorite train wrecks were the Nordic Twilight of the Gods (from Padraic Collum’s Children of Odin, which I read at age seven) and Nevil Shute’s post-nuclear-apocalypse novel On the Beach, a Chekhovian study in denial (read and obsessively re-read, the year I was twelve). Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard is another train wreck. And Macbeth, excuse me, “The Scottish play,” which never pales, and Hamlet, ditto. Just watching the characters entangle themselves in the machinery of karma. Heck yeah.
  • to learn new things about using language. Funny, I really only notice the language when I’m not reading in English, but I think that’s a function of speed, and also that the spoken language is still very close to the surface; I can feel the texture and rhythm of prose in French or Russian much more easily than I can in English. In English, I always have to re-read, or read aloud.

 

There’s more, I know, but I think this covers the major bases. What intrigues me is how close reading is to writing: it’s a very powerful sort of lucid dreaming. It’s conjuring: serious heavy-duty brain magic.

Why do you read stories?

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