Tag Archives: short stories

NaNoWriMo: The first 4 days

04 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

I’m feeling cautiously optimistic here: I’m on par (even a little ahead) right now with NaNoWriMo, and hope to put more words in the bank as buffer against the dreaded Slump that tends to hit somewhere during the second week. It’s amazing to learn how much writing time I actually can wrestle out of my schedule, without sacrificing too much. I’m perhaps sneaking an extra few minutes here and there at work to pound out 100 words now and again, but I’m still keeping an eye on my projects, so I’m feeling okay.

The freeing aspect really is the quantity-over-quality permission you get while doing NaNo. I don’t have to worry if the scene sucks, or the whole story: get those 1,667 words out today and fix it in December. Most of my short stories run between 1,500 and 2,000 words. I’m writing just over 2,000 a day right now. It doesn’t matter if I write three terrible ones for every one story that’s half decent, because that rate will still leave me with about 8 workable stories at the end of the month, which is still a respectable productivity rate. It’s also helpful to allow myself to spew all the editorial and backstory, because I believe characters get rounder the more you know about them, and that it shows even when you cut it all out in a later draft, because what you leave is what’s truest to them. I tend to forget this in regular writing time because the spewing is ugly, and I’m reluctant to spend my valuable morning minutes writing something I know I’ll cut.

I need to go check on work now so that I can jot down another paragraph or two once everything’s in order, but I wanted to let you know we’re off to a good start, at least. Also, I’m temporarily suspending Flash Fridays, but I will post some story excerpts here in the next day or so. Onward to more words!

NaNo Word Count Update: 6, 820 (154 words ahead)

Flash Friday #4

28 Friday Oct 2011

Posted by in Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Here’s the flash from this week:

Cleaner

Anna arrived at the Laundromat with a basket of clothes already clean, pressed and folded. If anyone had been watching her, they might have noted that she was down to only one basket now, but she didn’t keep a regular schedule, so the same people were unlikely to be there twice.

They were men’s clothes, mostly shirts. A few socks remained, and one or two pairs of pants. There was no underwear. Anna loaded them into the washer and took off her jacket. She had a tank top on underneath, an old one, with a few stray beads dangling down her front. The Laundromat was kept quite cold, to combat the constant heat from the dryers cranking and the washers rolling gallons of hot water around and around. There was florescent light, and the orange glow from the neon outside falling on the orange chairs inside. Anna didn’t bring a book or magazine. She pulled up a chair in front of the washer with her elbows on her thighs, hands stretched out a little toward the plastic, as though she were looking into a fire.

When the washer stopped, she loaded it into the dryer and dragged the chair with one hand across the linoleum to wait.

When all the laundry was dry, Anna pulled it in great hot armfuls from the machine and piled it into her lap. The shirts crushed against her, still almost steaming. In order to fold them, she had to hold each shirt at arm’s length, shaking the wrinkles out and using just her fingers to pinch and flick the shirt into place. For the last fold, the folding of the top half down to rest on the bottom half, she had to bring it back to her lap. Then she stretched forward awkwardly and put the shirt in the empty basket. She did all the clothes this way, her movements growing less awkward as the pile on her lap grew smaller. Then she put the basket in the car.

After twenty minutes of driving, Anna pulled into the parking lot of the Goodwill and stopped the car. She looked at the carton boxes outside the door and for a moment her hands trembled.

“Hush,” she said then, aloud, and opened the door, and pulled out a carton box from the backseat, and left it on the trunk of the car while she got the laundry basket out of the passenger side. She stacked the folded clothes neatly into the box, shirts and pants first, and the socks last, tucked here and there into the crevices between piles. Anna carried the box to the closed doors, set it down with the others, and took a step back. Then she removed one of the shirts from the box. It was blue flannel, soft around the collar, with lint pills at the elbows and around the buttonholes. Anna shook it out and pulled it on. Though the drive had been long enough and the air outside was cool, she imagined she could still feel the last ghost of dryer heat in the cloth, warm like breath.

Two Jobs and a Midnight Snack

08 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by in Growing Up, Stories, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Last May, I was working at a church, and it was awful. The pastor was a perfectionist, slow to praise and quick to point out anything I did wrong. The last straw came when he told me that he’d decided I had five typos left, and then I’d be out of a job. I hadn’t thought I was making that many mistakes, and I knew I was putting effort into my work. I also was involved in other projects, like helping overhaul the website, that were acknowledged minimally, if at all. So I quit.

About a week later, I was chatting to my MFA program director, who’s also the co-founder and editor of a literary magazine, and when she heard I needed work, she offered me a job on the spot. It’s a fantastic job. I’ve learned how to use two new computer programs since I’ve been here (not to mention a new operating system), and gotten markedly better than I used to be at two more. My bosses now are all about exploration and playfulness, and much less about mechanical perfection. I design posters, for example, for guest poets and speakers, for example, and once or twice it’s happened that a typo went to print and it hasn’t been a big deal (I keep wanting to clarify – I really don’t mess up that often, and I catch more errors than I make, but sometimes ‘night’ gets changed to ‘evening’ at the last second and I forget to switch ‘a’ to ‘an’). If I was thoughtless or careless about what I was doing, that would be another story, but in this job the bigger picture of what I’m doing matters more than any little bumps.

I’m still working on making a similar shift in my writing life. I’m still too quick to scold myself for not being as good or fast or prolific as I want to be, and need a hugely significant achievement (see Exhibit A) to happen in order to feel proud of what I’m doing. So I’m trying to quit, or rather I’m trying to be that kind of supportive presence for myself. I’ve got a new essay up in Stories & Things, a little piece I’ve been meaning to write for a while now, but hadn’t, perhaps because I thought it was too light to really matter. Now it’s written, and it made me happy to write it, and I hope someone may read it and like it too, but what’s best is that it is there now when it wasn’t before.

Electric Writing Days, or, How I Almost Missed the Train

04 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by in Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Much of the time, writing comes for me in fits and starts. I spend a lot of time treating myself like an old car, thumping myself around, muttering “come onnn,” and making vague promises and threats. Once in a long, long while, though, something magical clicks into place, and I get to spend a little while being the kind of synapse-firing, electric writer that I want to be. Yesterday was one of those days.

I wrote a story in a day, people. I wrote an entire story, beginning to middle to end, in a day. It came in at 3,174 words. Most days, I’m pleased if I hit 500 words, thrilled if I get past 800. During NaNoWriMo, my go-to insane writer’s challenge, reaching 2000 makes me feel like an overachiever, since you only need to write 1,667 to stay on track (I know. “Only.”). This is half again over the kind of overreaching goal I set for myself once a year. Forgive me for bragging, but I am feeling pretty boss right now.

And it was easy! For one glorious day, every time I sat down and opened the laptop, the next sentence came forth smoothly, and the next, and I already knew which scene needed to come after that. I nearly missed my stop on the Metro because I was so engrossed in what I was doing. It’s a good thing I happened to look up to think of the right word and saw “Metro Center” on the board, or chances are I would have been halfway to Vienna by the time I realized I’d been riding too long. It’s a good thing my stop on the way home is the end of the line, too, because it happened again. I only noticed I was there when I realized I was the only person sitting in my car of the train. All in all, between Metro rides, my lunch break, and two power sessions back home, the actual, physical writing of the story took about three and a half hours.

This is not, of course, the same as saying that the story took three and a half hours to write. I’ve been mulling over the world of the story for weeks now, ever since my professor mentioned there’s this crazy experimental poet who wants to use DNA strands as a medium for writing poetry and I thought, how cool would it be if human DNA did have poetry encoded into it? What would that mean for science, and literature, and religion? Who would read it? What would happen if someone didn’t have it? I took a couple stops and starts because there were so many different ways to go with it and I couldn’t figure out whose story I wanted to tell. So two days ago I got frustrated and spent my lunch hour putting together my notes of how this world worked, and who my characters were, and what they wanted and why. I don’t usually take that kind of prep time before writing, and I’m still not sure if I’ll make a regular practice of it, just because one of the things I’m learning is how different stories can be from each other. Practices that feed one story can suck the life out of another, but for this story, at least, making an outline worked in spades.

Next week is revising time, so chances are I’ll be grumbling again, but for now I’m still on the high. These are the moments to hold onto all the other times when nothing is working, and I hope next time I find myself in that place I’ll have the presence of mind to reread this and remember the rush.