Word Count | Literature and Libation

NaNoWriMo 2012: 28 Days Later

November 28, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Phew. I was just writing, and this is crazy, but if I write ~3500 words by Friday, I might hit 50,000 maybe.

I can’t believe I just did that. I’m so sorry, everyone everywhere.

I’d prefer to have this thing all nicely packaged and bundled into 50,000 words of finished product, but time and responsibility have a tendency to gang up on my good intentions and leave them broken and bloody in some dirty alley. Looks like I’ll be writing all the way up to and across the finish line this year.

Lessons learned this week:

1. Transcribe, transpose: I found a hidden cache of words that I had been hoarding in my little brown notebook, almost subconsciously. I had been scribbling notes, scenes, dialogue, ideas, and other literary detritus whenever I was away from my computer, and when I sat down to type it all up, I found I had nearly 4800 words in there! Sure, they were an incoherent mess of the very rawest of my brain oozlings, but they were words. Words in pursuit of the novel. And those count.

The double plus mega awesome advantage of transcribing notes from one medium to another is that you get a chance to do quick edits and fill out points you missed in your hasty penning. I even came up with a whole new idea for another story, just from some random thing I had drawn (it was like a mushroom-tiger-dragon-monstrosity-thing)!

2. Get up, get out: No joke, 16 of my 20 original short story ideas came to me while I was out wandering the world, experiencing the electromagnetic spectrum, interacting with other beings, living and inanimate. One came from noticing how a meeting presenter kept walking in front of the projector and the text from the PowerPoint slide looked like a tattoo on his forehead. Another came from watching some obscenely large rats run from cover to cover scavenging for food at the fountain in Dupont Circle. One even came from a late-night session of Borderlands 2 (who said video games never taught us anything).

It can be hard to come up with vivid, living ideas in the vacuum of your writing cave, so don’t make it any harder on yourself. Get out there. Check shit out. Ask questions. Drive across that bridge. Take note when something or someone or some concept bothers you. Take a picture of that weird flower or bush that totally looks like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But don’t sit around in your pajamas trying to force the creativity to spontaneously explode inside your skull. Go get stimulated by some stimuli.

3. The word count doesn’t really matter, the ideas do: One of the reasons I’ve managed to keep up this month is because I’m masochistic and uber-competitive (even with myself). If I commit to something, the idea of failing to do that thing is worse than any other situation I can imagine, thus I tend to get it done, somehow someway. It’s either totally awesome and effective or terrible and unhealthy.

But really, it doesn’t matter if I or you or anyone makes the word count. It’s not like someone busts into our homes on December 1 and confiscates all of our computers and notebooks and pens and tiny scraps of pencil lead that could possibly be used to write. The ideas, thoughts, introspection, and other mine-able literary gold is what makes this month so great. It’s an opportunity for you to expand your brain, learn about some stuff you’d never even heard of, and hopefully learn about yourself as a result. It’s a chance to commit to something bigger than the right now, and work towards a real, tangible goal. It’s a chance to break the monotony of the perfunctory and think about exciting worlds where anything can happen, and heroes are real. It’s a chance to wring some satisfaction out of life, and remind yourself that you are creative and hardworking and really freakin’ love words.

So if you didn’t make 50,000, no big deal. If you came up with some great ideas, or even one pretty good idea, I’d say that’s a NaNoWriMo well spent. You’ve got plenty of time to write it all down, unless you are currently on fire or being chased by an ornery velociraptor. Take what you’ve learned this month about how and when and what and why you write, and store that in your database under “stuff that will make me a better writer.”

Writing drink of choice this week: Magic Hat Heart of Darkness Stout

This is a weird but compelling beer. It almost looks purple in the glass, just on the edges where light pierces the blackness of the body. It tastes choclately and heavy, sort of what you’d expect people from a SteamPunk novel would drink out of gas-powered beer steins or something. It lingers on your tongue for a while, making it a great “I’m in a pensive mood tonight” beer.

Is that weather vane a dragon or a fish or a fishdragon?

Week the First

November 8, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

Today marks one full week of NaNoWriMo.

I’ve written 16,201 words worth of description, dialogue, exposition, technology, and other fun nonsense. I’m about ~5000 words ahead of the game, and don’t feel a slow down coming any time soon.

Some lessons learned so far:

1. Writing an outline was more important than I ever thought. All of those professors pounding the idea into my head for 4+ years were trying to help, after all. If I get lost or lose steam, I just pull up my outline (which I’ve color coded and added icons to) and suddenly my mind knows where to go next! Organization is actually helpful? I may need to revisit this notion later.

2. I love writing female characters. Who knew?

3. This whole writing-a-piece-of-substantive-length thing is 90% discipline. Imagination, art, and skill obviously count for something, but if you don’t force your fingers onto the keys to turn your insane story into words, all the creativity in the world won’t help you.

4. Painkillers (prescribed!) make for interesting metaphors.

5. I’m having a shitload of fun. Not only do I feel accomplished at the end of each day, but I get a stupid, giddy feeling when I talk about the plot and the characters, and how the plot is going to emotionally destroy the characters. Here’s to hoping I actually produce something worth reading.

To the first week of NaNoWriMo, I raise a Magner’s Irish Cider. Cheers!

Maybe I can do this whole writing for a living thing.

Der WriMo

November 1, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

In an attempt to save precious words, this post will contain fewer of them than normal.

Today marked the start of my first NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It’s been a goal of mine to finish something of substantial length, and this event will be my motivation and excuse to write until I lose conciousness.

The ultimate goal is to write 50,000 words (or more!) by November 30th.

I wrote 2801 words today (so far).

I’ve got a complete plot outline, character bios, and more notes than I know what to do with. I’m far more prepared for this than I usually am for anything else in my life.

My story is science fiction. The plot synopsis, short and sweet, is: “In a near-future world where the universal language translator is a reality, a group of displaced linguists attempt to discover a sinister truth about the device that the world has come to rely on.”

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. Or mine. Yea, the latter. I think that’s how it’s supposed to work.

P.S. I know my synopsis ends with a preposition. Go read something else if that is the sort of language up with which you cannot put.

Word(s) Count(s)

July 7, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

It seems like my life has been overtaken by writing requirements of one kind or another. Shifting word counts, page limitations, and section weight have begun to shape how I spend my conscious hours. I obsess with the little counter at the bottom of the page, praying heathen prayers that my mind can regurgitate enough content to appease the language overlords.

So far, this post is 63 piffling words long.

And yet, I don’t mind. Every 10 words adds to my sense of accomplishment; every 100 to my sense of worth; every 1,000 my sense of satisfaction. As my fingers click and clack away on my transmogrified typewriter, I am filled with a sense that I am doing something. Writing means to me what eating means to others; it fulfills, satisfies, and gives me energy.

My job requires I sew and weave words into specific margins, man-handle paragraphs into certain tensing, and wrestle pronouns to the ground with appropriate aggression. I am asked daily to paint a picture using words; my canvas already stained by dozens of other painters, but a masterpiece expected none-the-less. I do this job dutifully, but take little time to recognize how these endeavors have shaped how I view the world.

I am currently working on proposals, where the length, format, content, colors, spacing, margins, and graphics are all strictly mandated by an invisible person, via an errant unheralded email. This leads to frantic attempts to appease these mystery correspondents, squeezing, slicing, and smearing the language to meet the draconian guidelines. While I dislike the term “wordsmithing” it is actually quite appropriate when taken literally; we take raw, unprocessed words and turn them into a finely forged weapon of business.

As of this point, I have forged 301 words into the outline of a sword.

I spent a few hours helping my lovely fiancé edit her Graduate School essay. We, ultimately, had to chop her very well written 900 words down to 500 words. Syntax machete in hand, I went to doing what I do, hacking out adverbs, removing adjectival clauses. Getting that brief little monologue down to 500 words was criminal, vexing, and exhausting. Reduction is an art.

An art I embrace and find myself dwelling on, even when inappropriate or inopportune. Like an addict, my mind is constantly fixated on what I can write; snippets of ideas come to me in the shower, and I mull them about my mushy, pre-woken skull all morning until something solid springs forth, Athena style. Sometimes, a fleeting idea comes to me, and I roll and fumble to hold it, promising myself I won’t forget so awesome an idea. I usually forget, and become frustrated, picking through my brain thought by thought, trying to reconnect the chain that led me to the original idea.

Good ideas begin to form around the 478 word mark.

I love to write. I love all the things that most people hate about writing. I love editing, cropping, massaging, even at times, translating. If I am putting thoughts down into words, no matter how banal those thoughts, I am a happy word-wizard. I may not be the best, but perfection derides passion, in my experience.

To this end, I am going to undertake something this year: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). It’s a month long odyssey to scrawl 50,000 words of fiction across increasingly blurry, blood stained pages. It’s a quantity over quality exercise; an attempt to prove to oneself that they are capable of doing it, if they just do it.

I have several larger projects already underway, all of which I have stalled on under the guise of “I’ll come back when it hits me”. But when you do come back, you’ve lost track, your mood has changed; the veritable essence of what you were writing is either gone, or no longer readily available. I’ve stalled at 10,000 words, 23,000 words, and even 31,000 words, always thinking I’ll come back. I’ve even stalled as small as 500 words; if you abandon something, it’s incredibly difficult to find your way back.

To complete 50,000 words in a month (30 days), you have to write 1667 words a day. This post so far is 705 words. It’s taken me roughly 20 minutes to write 715 words, meaning it would take me an hour a day to write 2145 words. That pace is unrealistic, as this topic is fresh and new, so the writing flows like Franzia from a slapped bag. But it proves what I am capable of.

This blog has 49 posts (some are hidden, in case you try to count) with an average word count of ~750 words. That’s 36,750 words in my blog. At ~550 12pt, single spaced words a page, my blog is ~67 proposal pages long. That’s 134 Academia pages long. If it were novelized, it would be ~142 pages long! It would be disjointed, confusing, and decidedly awful, but it would be ~142 pages long!

So come November, that is what I’ll be doing. I’m going to set aside writing time each day, in an attempt to formulate the first complete, novel length narrative of my life. It’s one of my major goals, and I think I’ve finally found the vehicle that will guilt, pressure, and force me enough to finally realize it.

Until then, I will practice. If I had to run 3 miles, I used to practice by running 5, so I’ll do the same with my writing. If I can write 2500 words a day, for 15 days, 1700 words a day for 30 days should come more easily. Out will flow words about topics, and hell, I might even write some dialogue, too.

As of this upcoming period, this post is 964 words long.