Novels – they grow up so fast.

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I’m still struggling to bring my novel to a close.

Tonight, for some inspiration, I dragged out the short story that eventually became my novel. I wrote the story last spring, and a year ago, turned it in as a workshop sample for my MFA program.

It’s a strange little piece. I’m not exactly sure when or how the idea for it hit me, but I was watching a lot of Rupaul’s Drag Race at the time, and as an arts reporter, had been writing a series of stories on summer Shakespeare productions. I must have also picked up a bag of JaVaNa coffee beans at the grocery store. Somehow all of this churned together in my brain and came out as a short story about a drag queen named Javana who desperately wants to play the Lady Macbeth in an amateur Shakespeare on the Green production.

The story is 16 pages long. That’s it. Sixteen pages. My manuscript is, at this point, 260 pages long. Good lord – that’s a lot of pages. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that long. They funny thing is that the 16-pager is almost a miniature of the novel; both pieces cover (more or less) the same material and the same amount of time. Both attempt the same character arc. It’s amazing to me that I ever thought I could do that with a short story.

Novels. They grow up so fast. This one has been my baby. I’ve loved it and nurtured it and given it the best I could. That said, I can’t wait until this one is fully grown.  After graduation, I’m kicking its lazy butt out of my house so it can go out into the world, get a job and hopefully support me in my old age.

 

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The elusive ending.

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As my MFA program winds down, I’m seeing lots of members of my cohort (that’s MFA-speak for “my class”) writing Facebook statuses that look like this:

Joe Schmo has typed the last words.

Jane Doe sending her thesis out, OMG collapsing brb.

BobTodd just typed THE END.

I’m going to be honest. While I’m happy for my classmates and proud of their accomplishments, I’m jealous. The portion of my novel that is acting as my thesis is  complete, but I want to type THE END. And I thought the end was imminent (and not in a Harold Camping kind of way). Two weeks ago I wrote that I was beginning to write the end of the novel, and I was, but here’s the thing – the end of the novel just keeps getting further and further away.

The excellent Phil Lemos (who typed THE END on May 16) recently blogged that he was proud to have finished his novel. He wrote that he had started many novels in his life:

I emphasize the word “start,” because I would always get about 20 pages in before something else would command my attention — birthday parties, homework, the latest comic book — and I would toss the novel aside.

I know the feeling. I have a filing cabinet drawer dedicated to dead novels. Below are a few examples of the things that languish in my little drawer of horrors:

•There’s one novel, written when I was 15 years old, which thankfully petered out by the time I turned 16. I wrote about drinking and drugs and lots of other things I had no experience with as a 15-year-old. As a result of my innocence, bizarre things happen. My characters take one sip of beer and are wasted. Someone walks by a pot smoker and suddenly starts acting as if they’ve been dropping acid. It’s like Reefer Madness, but in the form of a bad novel. I should have thrown this manuscript out when I was in college, but I keep it as a reminder of how bad my writing can be.

•There’s another, almost complete novel, which features dinosaurs and a theme park in a dying Midwestern mill town. It’s a really good science fiction novel, if  I do say so myself, and I’m very proud of it. I hope to salvage it someday by rewriting everything in third person, because it does have some flaws. The biggest flaw?  Michael Crichton already wrote it. It’s called Jurassic Park.

• There’s an action novella (written before Sept. 11) featuring a reluctant member of a domestic terrorist group who is forced to go to Boston in order to  pick up a mysterious package. That piece is almost done. I’ve already written the ending. It’s missing two pages, right between the ending and where I stopped writing. It’s been like that for a decade. Just two pages.

And there’s my real problem, because that’s where I always stop writing. I write the end. I write almost all the way up to the end, and then I stop. I get distracted by life, or, more likely, by another novel idea.

I’ve overcome some of these obstacles. I’ve been dragging my feet creatively for some time, but I’ve stayed strong – I’m writing at least 500 words every day. And last month I knew I must be getting near the end because I came up with a new novel idea, an opening scene and a soundtrack to listen to while writing it. I jotted down some notes and resisted it. I kept on plugging along with my current project.

But now I realize that I’m falling into my old habits. I’ve already written the last page. And I’m trying to close the gap between where I am now – which seems not far from the end – and that final couple of paragraphs. Two weeks ago I thought the end was very, very close. No more than a day or two of writing.

But the more I write, the more it seems like I’m just filling out my daily word count and not advancing the plot. All of a sudden my protagonist heads off to do something completely unrelated to the story. Or stands in a park, musing. Could it be that I’m actually trying not to finish the novel? Am I afraid to say good bye to the characters? It seems more likely that I’m just afraid to finish my draft.

Why? Maybe because  a finished draft brings me one step closer to being accepted, rejected  or ignored by agents, publishers, the reading public and potentially by my friends and family. Or maybe I just like a little self sabotage to spice up my semester.

Or maybe it’s none of those things and I’m just the slow kid in class. It always did take me longer to eat my lunch and finish my math homework.

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Say my name: guest bloggery at ReinventingErin.com

Today, I am the guest blogger of the fabulous Erin Corriveau over at her site Reinventing Erin.

Erin, is a non-fiction writer and a fellow student at Fairfield University’s MFA program. In the last month, she asked a group of bloggers to write guest posts on the theme of self-reinvention. My post explores the moment, 11 years ago, that I decided to choose a pen name, and the ensuing hilarity and confusion of being A.J. at work and Ann at home. It’s why I have two Twitter accounts, two email addresses,  my maiden name and a lot of confused students. Good times!

So check it, y’all. And check out the whole site, poke around, and get to know Erin. She is well worth knowing!

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Coming soon – guest bloggery over at ReinventingErin.com

Just a quick update to let you all know that on Monday, I get to be the guest blogger of the fabulous Erin Corriveau over at her site Reinventing Erin.

Erin, a fellow student at Fairfield University’s MFA program, is a veteran blogger and non-fiction writer. She asked a group of bloggers to write guest posts on the theme of self-reinvention. I half-wrote three embarrassing posts about moments of reinvention. One was depressing. One didn’t make any sense whatsoever. My final one though? In the immortal words of Goldilocks, that post was “juuuust right.”

So check her site on Monday. And, if I get a few minutes to search my office this weekend, you may even get to see some silly pictures of me from 10 years ago.

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The reluctant grammarian.

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I hate wasting my time on grammar. As a student, I rolled my eyes whenever a teacher pointed out a grammatical error. Though I was an English nerd as a student, I was one of those lazy kids who became indignant when a science teacher had the temerity to point out and then — oh horror — take points off my grade for sloppy spelling and grammar. “But this is science, not English,” I would whine. “Grammar isn’t important in science.”

If I could reach back through time and slap myself, I would.

Because grammar is always important. There. I said it. Grammar is important, but despite the fact that I’ve made my living with my ability to put ideas into words, I didn’t really pay grammar much attention for years. I mostly just knew when things I wrote were wrong and when they were right. In fact avoided reading about the rules of grammar until two things happened: 1) I started teaching at the college level 2) I opened a Facebook account.

First let it be noted,  I hate grammar.

One of the reasons that I’m all worked up about this is because I feel like I’ve been forced to brand myself a grammarian, when all I want is for people to stop pluralizing by sticking apostrophes to the end of random, innocent nouns.

I don’t want to be a grammarian because I’m not one. I don’t know every rule. I regularly make a fool of myself in Facebook statuses, email and on Twitter. Probably even on this blog. But I feel I have to say something when I see yea used as yeah, and people who fling a handful of commas at every sentence in hopes that one of those commas will end up in the correct place. Commas are not ninja stars, people.

One of the universe’s strangest phenomena.

Here’s something else I hate about paying attention to grammar. My complaining about other people’s errors makes me look like a moron when I make a mistake. And I will make a mistake. Because that is one of the universe’s strangest phenomena: People who point out the grammatical errors of others always make their own grammatical mistakes while they’re critiquing someone else. When I was working for the newspaper, and “helpful” readers would email me to correct a mistake I’d made in an article, there was almost always a spelling error in the email that pointed out my mistake. I’m no different. I will proof this post many times, but an error born of righteous indignation will appear in it. I just know it. (Point the error out in the comments! Think of it as a grammatical game of Where’s Waldo.)

The reluctant grammarian in the classroom.

In past years, several students have said some version of this to me: “It’s not important how I write it. My message is the important thing.”

Right.

Look, our Constitution is properly punctuated. Every holy book for every faith on the planet has been proofed. You can put money down that every advertisement blasted at you has been edited and spellchecked multiple times.

If your message is at least as important as any of the above, it probably deserves to be encrypted in proper grammar.

Here’s what I would like to say to those students, and to anyone who has a message so important that they think it might transcend the rules of basic grammar:

I too would prefer to concentrate on the content of a piece rather than the arrangement of the characters that make it up.  But because of your bad grammar I can’t concentrate on the meaning of your piece. Instead, I’m wasting time trying to decipher it. Your precious message might be important. It might be life-changing. But if you don’t take the time to write it down correctly — if your their turns into a there, or if your yeah loses its h, or if you slip into Facebook-speak and use 2 instead of to and ur instead of your — well, then your message might not be taken seriously.

And that brings me to my next point.

The reluctant grammarian on Facebook.

Sometimes it can be painful to read status updates on Facebook.

For the record, I do not think Facebook and Twitter are ruining the English language and making people illiterate. Facebook and Twitter are encouraging literacy because both sites rely on written language. You can’t be illiterate and be on Facebook, so there’s a sort of added social pressure to be able to express yourself in words. And social media has done something else for language: it has made people’s levels of literacy public.

Facebook isn’t killing the written word, it is changing language. All the little abbreviations that pop up on the Internet are headed for spoken conversation. OMG and WTF are being nicely assimilated into our slang as OK was a century ago.

I support all these things. I think social pressure to be literate is awesome. And I think we can only benefit from being exposed to each others’ literacy levels. I love me some vernacular, so I like the idea of acquiring new slang.

But Facebook might just be taking an axe to the rules of grammar. Why? Because capital letters are a hassle to type on a cell phone, maybe, or because if one’s friends aren’t big on spelling, maybe some people don’t feel like they need to be vigilant about their status updates. Or maybe people are just spelling things in their own way because they are beautiful, unique snowflakes and spelling is how they express that uniqueness. (I know one person whose trademark is a double letter on the end of at least one word in every status update, plus an elipses. Example: “my parakeet lovess sushii…” )

Or maybe because it’s just Facebook and therefore unimportant and therefore somehow undeserving of proper grammar, even though so many of us spend so much time online, reading each other’s status updates.

Even though we’re communicating with hundreds of people at a time.

Even though we’re often communicating about the things that are most important to us.

Even though grammar is the boat that allows us to navigate the great sea of written language.

It’s not “just Facebook,” or “just Twitter” or “just an email” or even “just a text.” It’s the way we communicate with each other in today’s society. And if we’re going to be able to understand one another, we’re all going to need to follow some rules.

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Freedom!

I’m back! I was absent from this blog for a good month because I was finishing my thesis ( my novel) for my MFA in creative writing.

It felt damn near impossible to spend any amount of time writing anything but my novel, or any of the associated bits and bobs that go along with it, so I haven’t been on this blog at all, but I have been thinking of it. In the last month, I came up with a million ideas for posts while driving to work, riding in the car to and from holidays at my parents’ house, walking the dog, taking showers and folding laundry. I didn’t write many of these ideas down. Most of them slipped from my mind as soon as I came home, determined to jot them down in the various notebooks that clutter every surface in our house.  I do know that the posts ranged in theme from dreams to politics to an angry, Twitter-inspired rant about grammar. (I actually half wrote that last one, but it got canned after I made a glaring grammatical error on Facebook and was called out by a former editor.)

My blog is not the only thing that I’ve neglected in the last month, as I struggled to finish scenes, make character’s motivations more believable and put chapters in order. My house was filthy. My garden, which is a major source of food for us in the summer, was nearly overtaken by a violent weed uprising, and there were many seedling casualties. My students got about half as many emails from me as they usually do, (although they probably still thought that was too much.) Our pile of laundry toppled out of the closet and began to crawl across the bedroom floor, like a soldier involved in guerrilla warfare. My dog was allowed to forget basic commands like sit, heel and don’t eat that manuscript.  My friends called me and emailed me, but alas, only 20 percent of the calls and emails have been returned.

Professors told me it would be like this. I read quotes about the insanity of non-stop fiction writing. I heard firsthand from other students in my MFA program that the last push of putting together a thesis is just like going crazy.

They were right, and I’m finally able to stop raving, wipe the froth from my mouth, take a break and write a blog post or two.

I really did question my sanity this month. Not because of the novel writing process itself, per se, but because all I’ve wanted to do with my life, ever since I was a toddler, was write a novel. And it turns out that writing a novel, in its most intense form, is hell. What kind of little kid was I to have aspirations like this? Why did it take me so long to realize that my dream was so dumb? Is it too late to decide that I want to be something else?

Truth is, intense novel writing isn’t healthy. It’s like drinking red wine. In small doses, it can be good for you. My life has been dramatically improved by the Graham Greene method of writing 500 words a day. Five hundred words a day is  a nice round number. It’s healthy. It’s reasonable. You can write 500 words a day and live a normal, productive life.

But if you get a steady diet of novel-writing, if you do nothing but work on a novel for days on end, hoo boy, no one wants to be around you. That’s less like a glass of wine a day and more like wandering around with Thunderbird in a paper bag.  You never change out of your pajamas. You start walking around in a daze, not really interacting with the people who are actually in front of you, but always preoccupied with what some imaginary people are supposed to be doing. Then you get mad at the imaginary people for not doing the things that they are supposed to be doing. You stare at a blank screen and despair. You write a page and are elated. You realize the page of writing is terrible and it’s back down into the pit of despair again. You don’t so much sleep as pass out.

I’m glad that’s over. Or at least that it’s over for now, because I’m not actually done with my novel. My  thesis was done and sent out to my mentor and reader early this week, but the novel is still not quite finished. Which means that I’m sure I’ll disappear to work on it again. For now, I’m enjoying the real world, which is a crazy place, but not as insane as the world inside my head.

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