Reverb13 Day Three: The Heart Speaks
Today’s prompt was based on an exercise designed to ask one’s heart what it needs today. What does your heart have to tell you?
I’m not adept at getting messages directly from my heart in the short term, though. When I examine my heart at any given time, what gets reflected back at me is often vague. Vague to the point of either being obvious, (“my heart needs happiness and contentment”) or it is indicative of my not being especially well connected to my heart in the first place.
Part of the problem might be that I don’t know exactly how to define “heart” in such a context. Sometimes it gets conflated with my mind, I think, and my mind tells me that what I am, and what is expected of me is directly related to mostly outside factors: a job, esteem from the community, demonstrable physical productivity. Under such an auspices as this it becomes at times easy for me to conclude that my heart’s desires are not especially relevant. And when they are deemed, even by only a part of me, as irrelevant, it’s only natural that it would be difficult to tune into my heart’s voice.
Given time, however, a long time of asking similar questions of myself, and doing my best to fight back the onslaught of expectations that are thrust upon me by sources that shouldn’t hold that much power over me, a few concepts emerge.
-More honest companionship.
-More quiet, both in terms of contemplation and in terms of freedom from fear and anxiety.
-More curiosity, whimsy and magic.
-Respect for it’s true nature, from others and myself.
-In terms of more concrete requirements, it also needs more of a chance to move people with stories and words, such as this blog post as well as my novels and short fiction. Also with other people’s words, as if the case in theater. Not telling stories for their own sake, but telling them so that they are consumed by people who are moved by them. People who find something of themselves in the stories I tell. My heart wants more of that than I have.
Knowing what the heart desires would be among the easiest things to determine, one might think. Those desires may or may not be feasible at any given moment, but knowing what they are would seem to be easy enough to know. But not with me. It has taken years to know what my heart really longs for, and even now I am not always certain.
But it’s worth asking the question often enough, because some sort of answer tends to emerge eventually, as it would appear it has with me.
Reverb13 Day Two: Nourishment
What made your soul feel most nourished this year?
I’m probably guilty of not putting as much specific effort and thought into nourishing my soul as I should.
Part of it is due to a general anxiety that in the end, I wouldn’t be as successful as I’d like to be at such an endeavor, so I don’t engage it in as much as wisdom would dictate. Another reason for this sometime shirking of my spiritual nourishing is the difficult-to-shake societal pressure that such things are not monetarily productive and hence should be avoided as wastes of time. (This view is, thankfully, losing its grip upon me as I get older.)
Even if I committed every day to soul nourishment, without shame or fear of failure, I’d still be faced with the dilemma of not knowing which approach to take in accomplishing that task on any given day. Some things that are nourishing once never are again, (or at least are not again for a considerable amount of time.) I have tried various forms of such nourishment over the years, and not many have have a consistent effect.
On the other side of this frustrating coin, those successful nourishing activities that have been rather consistent in the past have over the last few years either become unavailable due to lack of resources/opportunity, or have succumbed to a weakened potency. (Or I have become weaker in some regard as their potency remains unchanged.)
So while I believe in and practice nourishment of the soul as best I can, it is a practice with which I still face difficulty.
I’ll say, however, that I have taken a few steps that have trended in the right direction in 2013. At least so far. Examples:
-I have set aside more time to read. A writer must read, of course, and I have always done so. But having a specific time wherein I say, “I’m going to read for an hour” and such is a relatively new concept for me. Generally when I find an empty block of time that will allow me to read whatever is on my cue, (and it’s a ponderous cue at this point) I take some time to do so. Sometimes while something else is going on. This year I made an effort more often to set aside the time, and make sure I was doing nothing else, shut off the phone, and sit and read. I don’t know if it has served as the entire meal for my soul, but it has certainly been a nice cold drink for it throughout the year at times. I even feel less anxious after I read once in a while, and anything that accomplishes that is a plus.
-I have tried, with spotty success, to begin a regular meditation regime. That’s a work in progress, but it has helped a bit here and there.
-Concentrating even more on my writing.
-I started that meetup group for introverts. It’s still in its infancy, but hopefully the company I keep from that will nourish my soul in certain ways eventually. Like company is valuable.
So there are a few things. What are yours?
Reverb13 Day One
Two posts in one day?? I know, rare. But necessary, as I wanted to close out Nanowrimo, and once again begin the Reverb daily blog project for the month of December. As with last year, there are multiple sources for the prompts, and I will probably go back and forth between two of them, just to keep it interesting.
The prompt for day one is: How do you feel, on this first day, in your mind? In your body? In your heart? In your soul?
My mind feels a bit tired, but excited as well, because for the first time, I completed an entire novel for Nanowrimo. Took some doing, but I got it done. I just need to recover for a few days (or more) from writing fiction, but I’ll be okay, and I think my mind is, in the end, better off for it.
Also, I don’t know if this goes under mind or heart. I guess technically mind. But I am anxious, as I have been generally for the last few years. I keep trying to find the right professional to assess the situation, to see if perhaps something can be done about it. But the last person I tried last month was a total quack. I have someone else in mind, but I have to build up the patience to make the appointment.
In body, I feel a bit off. Generally I am more tired than I like to be as a default, and I am still above the weight I want to be at, despite trying things all year.
In my heart, I feel pleased with some of my accomplishments lately. (See above.) But I also feel more lonely than average. I don’t feel I am connecting with enough new people of my kind, or connecting as well with people I’ve known for years that seem to be changing.
How I feel in my soul is the most difficult to answer, because I don’t know which feelings or observation lie within the realm of the soul as opposed to the heart. What is the essential difference between the two? I don’t have definitive answer, so I’ll just say that a soul is more permanent, and deals more with the basic essence of why I exist on earth, as opposed to how I’m interpreting or reacting to any given day.
Under this definition I’d say my soul, (which would transcend the problems with my mind, I guess) is in decent shape, but longs for more space. More exercise. More opportunity to engage in the things for which it seems to have been designed. In soul, I am perhaps stuck somewhat in neutral in certain ways.
If I were to combine all aspects of my existence and come up with one overall well being number, I guess I’d give myself about a 6 out of a possible 10. Not miserable, but not fulfilled as often as I should be, probably.
Nanowrimo 2013: Final Update
Yes, I realize this is not Monday, when my previous Nanowrimo updates have taken place. But as I am starting Reverb13, I’ve opted to post my final thoughts now, and start that new blogging project later today.
To begin with, the big news: at about 7:00 PM last night I successfully completed the entire first draft of the novel within the 30 days! (Actually within 29 days, if you consider the fact I didn’t do any writing on Thanksgiving Day.) If you’ve been following along here on blog, you know that this is a first for me, after meeting the 50,000 words requirement several different times now. The word count total for my complete rough draft is 70, 294 words. 14,000 of those in the last two days, which is a record for me in any type of writing.
A few other notes before I get into how it feels to have done this:
-I missed the final write-in. The weather was terrible icy-slop, and perhaps nobody showed, I don’t know. But I was looking forward to that final session of library writing in that wonderfully plain and quiet board room. I’d already gotten to 50,000 words, but that would have just made the write-in experience even more rewarding.
-As I mentioned, I only skipped Thanksgiving Day. That’s the fewest days I’ve ever skipped during Nanowrimo, and in fact some years I did in fact write on Thanksgiving. On average, I have skipped three days total each Nano, but not this time.
-I had three different writing days during which I achieved 7,000 words or more. Before this year, I had never written that many words in a day before. My average was, (and is) about 2000 words a day during Nano.
So how does it feel over all to have both won the word count and achieved a full first draft? Both rewarding and unusual. It feels good to have accomplished that personal challenge; I can forever say I once wrote a novel in 30 days. But in order to do so, I had to adopt an approach unfamiliar to me in many ways, and at times it was stressful.
That is to say, more than any other piece of long fiction, I pantsed my way through it. Other than a one page outline, and single paragraph character descriptions, (both of which I diverged from a bit), I had no plan. I can see see the creative advantage to jumping into writing something totally cold, and have even used it when writing some short fiction. But I don’t know if I have the constitution to approach a novel like this on a regular basis. I won’t say “never”, but I will say I had to abandon my comfortable method many times. For some that’s worthy in it’s own right. For me, it is circumstantial.
For example, I think some of the short cuts I had to take, and some of the uber-linear approaches to “scene-scene-scene” I had to employ in order to save time this month can work quite well with a cozy mystery like the one I wrote for this challenge. Seeing if I could light a fire under myself and tighten plot creation, (something with which I often struggle) is one of the reasons I chose to do this in general. It is also one of the reasons I chose a mystery, because I think it can accommodate such plotting. I certainly learned something.
But for the magical-realist, quasi-fantasy, partially spiritual literary fiction I usually write? I’m not so sure. My sense is that when writing those sorts of novels, I need a bit more elbow room, a bit few guns pointed at my head, and a bit more planning headed into it. Again, I won’t say I’d never try it again, but now that I’ve accomplished what I set out to do, I’m not sure the benefit beyond that outweigh the stresses of this method.
So would I try to write a whole plot within 30 days again? Perhaps. Would it be anything other than mystery? Action and adventure perhaps. But something like Flowers to Dionysus or Novel 2? I have to say at the moment, I doubt it.
And what about another mystery, outside of Nano? Again, I don’t know. I think if I outlined a mystery, with all of it’s required conventions and clues and foreshadowing and mechanisms, I might just drive myself crazy with my at time overly-meticulous, perfectionist nature. It seems a mystery has potential for me only under a short and sweet deadline, when I have no time to worry about details.
As for this mystery though, it feels more solid than I would have expected about two weeks ago. Several plot holes I worried about were filled in as I wrote. Solutions presented themselves. Sometimes it required me to go back and retro-fit an earlier scene, but it worked far more often than I thought it would. All by way of saying that this finished draft, which started out as a mere personal challenge may, unlike most of my previous Nano projects, have a life outside of Nano.
I’ll at least read it once in a few months, to see how it holds up. Let a few interested friends read it. Possibly conduct a revision or two. If it remains solid, I may either use it as a guinea pig to test the mechanics of self-publishing, (using a pseudonym), or test those of querying agents, (also using a pseudonym, should it be selected.) This novel could be interesting to me enough to make the try, but not so close to my heart that I would be devastated if nobody bought it.
In any event, I find that being totally done in only 30 days has presented a certain disorientation. It’s exciting to have this whole new world and set of characters already fully “birthed” after just a month. (That hasn’t happened in previous Nano attempts for me.) But at the same time, I’m still adjusting to my “relationship” with them in a sense. It’s a whirlwind romance, and I’m used to long, casual courtships.
Regardless, I have achieved a personal writing goal, and produced more fiction in a shorter amount of time than ever before, (as far as I can determine.) That made the experience worth it, whether or not I do more with this one and whether or not I do anything like this again.
How’d your Nanowrimo go?
Nanowrimo Update 4
Here’s a bit of almost exciting news for this update: barring a massive change in my schedule, I will easily achieve the 50,000 words threshold today.
I say almost exciting because while the official point of Nanowrimo is of course to get to 50,000 words in a month, you all know I’ve set my sights on finishing the book itself in that time period. So the next logical question is, “How are you coming on that?”
The answer is, I’m not sure. I can say that I’ve moved the plot along at speeds I’ve previously never even considered for a novel. I don’t mean the speed with which I type down the words, I mean the narrative is moving from one scene to another and then another in less time than I’ve ever given to a novel. So much so that at times it feels a little strained. I can’t say for certain because I don’t read a first draft as I’m writing it. Therefore it may flow better than I think it does. It may turn out to be a good thing that I’ve not been able to write the flourishes and character moments in as much detail as I am used to. At least for a mystery it may be a good thing. Maybe this is how mysteries are supposed to progress, but the feeling of wearing someone else’s shoes is still there for now.
And with six writing days remaining, will I be able to complete even a basic plot by way of this leaner, more rapid prose style? That’s the real question, isn’t it? The answer to this one is also I’m not sure. I think I’ve had a few chapters where one person appears to be the killer, only to have that doubted eventually. I’ve eliminated one or two other suspects, and I’ve now called attention to some of the clues I’ve been leaving all along. Next up, I plan to have the facts point (shockingly) to someone else, and have enough time to have a small twist about that someone revealed in the end. In other words, I’ve covered a lot, and still have a lot to cover in the next week.
To tell you the truth I think I’ll really have to put my shoulder into it in order to do so. Whereas getting to the word count requires just straight up dedication each day to writing, finishing the story requires paying attention to specific touchstones, and make sure each of them are reached in a logical manner. A lot more to cover there.
Yet before I sit down to each writing session, I have a list of plot worries. I’ve found that at least one of them changes or vanishes by the time I’m halfway through said session. I’ve still got a lot of holes that need to be filled, but I’ve filled more by this point than I thought I would, as well. These last few days are crucial, though. I have a lot of tying up to do in order to properly reveal the killer, without just pulling a sheet off of them and saying, “bingo, mystery over.” I don’t want to fall into the trap of making it too tidy, but I want readers to have a chance to see things and figure it out themselves, as well. Without it being too easy of course.
Yet I must avoid getting too worked up about it, and I have come close to doing so a few times now, especially in the last week. My goal was to finish the first draft of a plot all within November. To do so without cheating and without tricks, and to have fun in the process. Despite some quick jumps, I don’t in my heart believe I’ve resorted to tricks, nor do I intend to. And it has been a mostly fun experience–writing in a new genre and bestowing Nanowrimo with some extra expectations this year, so I really should see it as a success regardless.
But I really want to finish the story in a decent way within the next week. But if not, that is its own reward…the attempt. This was never supposed to be one of my “official” novels anyway, so I shouldn’t give it that level of criticism either. Though if I am close to finishing the plot when time runs out, and I feel there is something solid there, I will probably keep writing into December, so I cam say I wrote a mystery. And who knows, I may even make it an “official” novel if it turns out to be more solid, or at least more fixable than I anticipated. Maybe if there’s time I’ll self-publish it under a pseudonym someday…
I think writing for plot once I get passed the 50,000 today will get easier, though. At that point I can say I’ve at least achieved the technical goal of Nanowrimo. After that, I can relax and just write what needs to be written for the remaining days.
As for what I’ve physically accomplished in the last week, I went to the next-to-last write in at the library. Unfortunately that one was not well attended, compared to the first two; only three people, including myself and the moderator showed up. On top of that, for whatever reason, it was my most difficult write-in session. For whatever reason the words just weren’t flowing that day. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say the plot was just not flowing that day. It felt like I was dragging the book along in order to get to another serviceable plot point. I did get my quota for the day written, however.
Last week I also took my laptop to the local branch of the library to work some of the novel by myself. This is significant in that I’ve never done it before. I never thought I’d be able to set my mind to it. And though, like the write-ins I didn’t write as fast as I do at home sometimes, I did accomplish my quota by myself writing at the library. The write-ins gave me to comfort level to try writing in public, and I confirmed my ability to do so. If nothing else, I’ve learned I can do that sometimes. That could prove useful for future projects.
Also in the last week I had both writing sessions that covered less than my quota for the day, and more than my quota. One or two days I only got 500 or so words out. More than once I got over 2,000, and in one I got 3,000. That day I had two writing sessions, one in the day and one in the evening-the only time I’ve done that this year. It will probably be the highest single word count for one day for me this year.
However you slice it, it’s almost over now. I’ve not yet skipped a single day of writing, and I think most years I skipped at least one by now. With Thanksgiving coming up on Thursday, I may make that my one and only skip day, depending on how I feel.
Next Monday is December. (Scary, right?) I’ll post a final wrap up of my Nanowrimo 2013 experience then. Until then, see if you can bare the suspense of wondering if I can finish the book in time!
Ty Unglebower 