NaNoWriMo

So I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. I'd gotten to where I believed all I had was little scraps and piles and lists of research notes and facts and dates, and no story. I thought if I could force myself to pound out a first draft, however thin, however awful, it would ground me in my story again. The first day (yesterday) I wrote a bit on a couple of scenes and hit my target and it was ok.

I'd had some advice from Diana Gabaldon on the Books and Writers Community boards about what was important and what wasn't, and she told me about how to write with brackets. The short version is that it's the characters and the story that are important, not the ticky historical details (at this stage, anyway) and whenever you come to something you haven't covered in your research yet (like what street Bill walks down--or up, I don't know the answer to that yet, either--to get to Fannie's house) you use brackets. Doing that, I wrote some very rough first-draft stuff. It comes with lots of brackets, but I wrote it.

Today, I got up thinking I would write on thus and such a scene tonight, but somehow over the course of the day managed to convince myself again that I don't have anything to say. Which is exactly where I was this past weekend before Diana wrote me that post, God bless her. She is so generous with her time over there, and talks to ridiculously inexperienced newbies like myself as kindly and respectfully as she does anyone else on the boards.

But I digress.

By the time I got home, I had come to the conclusion that there was one thing that I knew positively, absolutely had to get into the book sooner or later. I can dither over what battles to put in and which ones to tell as flashbacks or to have Bill rehash in conversation versus which ones to tell in 'real time' and never write a word. But Fannie has to get pregnant: It's the core event of the whole book. In order for that to happen, obviously, she and Bill have to have sex. Once that's happened, she'll have to realize it, and then she will have to tell Bill about it. So there's three scenes I could work on tonight, no need to dither about whether or where they go in, and I told myself that I could use the bracket trick ("He began undoing her [ ]") to fill in all my vast areas of ignorance, like exactly what women wore back then and how they fastened.

And I did! Before I knew it, I'd overshot my day's target by 319 words.

The Interview

Image by wili_hybrid via FlickrSo I was reading this afternoon in NaNo for the New and the Insane, by Lazette Gifford (I'm planning on using NaNoWriMo this year to force a first draft), and she's talking about interviewing your characters. She includes a link to a cute mock interview that Valery Comer posted on Vision. That seemed cool.

Then this afternoon, Rebecca O'Connor posted a link to an essay she'd written for The Daily Rumpus, in which she describes sitting in her closet with the door shut and putting a (not loaded) gun in her mouth to see what it would be like.

I'm not willing to go that far.

But I have been chatting with Bill on and off this afternoon, in between sessions, and it's been fascinating. For one thing, he sits on the couch in my office leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, hands lightly clasped between them. He looks at his hands when he talks, looking up from under heavier eyebrows than I'd thought he'd have. He has a complicated relationship with his father, Anderson, which I got some glimpses into. Anderson tends to be a bit critical, but respects Bill now because of his war service. And he reminded me that I do know what it is like to be shot at, and so I won't have to work as hard as I'd thought to imagine what it would be like going into battle.

Although technically I wasn't the one being shot at, I was close enough once for research purposes, thank you very much, and I remember afterward being surprised at the smallness of the space I had been able to hide in. So yeah. I think I can write pretty authoritatively about the urge to make oneself as small--not to say invisible--a target as possible.

Library Book Sale

Image via WikipediaI really need to be getting my notes in order and my outlines into Scrivener (OneNote having proved to be a less-than-satisfactory platform for novel-writing) in preparation for NaNoWriMo, which I plan to use to get a jump-start on the writing. Instead, I'm still doing research. Today, my research activities took the form of scrounging for cheap resource books at the Cobb County Public Library's twice-a-year book sell-off cum fundraiser.

It took 3-1/2 hours to go through half (the non-fiction half) of the tables, and I was exhausted when I got home. But happy! I made out like a bandit. I got a little magazine-sized "book" called The Concise Illustrated History of the Civil War, mostly for the reproduction of Sheridan's charge at the Battle of Five Forks (not the one pictured here). I can well imagine what Brother Bill and his comrades must have felt like seeing that coming at them.

And Long's The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. Once I got it home I was kind of disappointed that it's not footnoted (although there is an extensive bibliography), but that was balanced out by my pleasure at the "Special Studies" section at the back, with short bits on desertion, disease, POWs, and the like.

But the pièce de résistance was Sam Abell's Distant Thunder: A Photographic Essay on the American Civil War. And to think, I almost missed it! I had already been around the barn once and was in line to check out, gazing about me, when I spotted a box labeled "History" under the "Arts" table (go figure). So I backed Tillie out of line and went to investigate, and there it was! The front cover photo is of the Wisconsin State Memorial at Vicksburg, in early morning (or early evening) fog, and it is stunning. Many of the photos are of reenactors, but never mind: It's a beautiful book.

I got these, and one just for fun--A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. I wish I could use her, but she's not only the wrong period, she's a Yank. The few pages I read made me think of Claire Frazier (protagonist of Gabaldon's Outlander series). I can't wait to read it!

All this for $5.50.