YesNoWriMo

I hit 51,605 words on this latest project a few minutes ago. So I've reached the 50,000 word goal, I could call it finished now, but I want to enjoy tomorrow, my last day of this "writing like nobody's watching" phase, before I have to head into the ugly "looking at it realistically" phase.

I learned a few things from Nanowrimo last year. This year I feel like I learned new things. I didn't push myself as hard this year; I didn't write until my hands ached, and I didn't spend every minute away from the keyboard thinking about the project. Last year, I said I wasn't going to talk about my project, but I wound up caving around Day 10 and then talking Bill's ear off about it all the time, so that he knew all six of the major characters* by name, and all of the various plot threads in which they were involved. This year, I shut my goddamn mouth entirely -- anything I've said about it has been in the past two days, while I've been watching it slip away from me anyway.

I've tried not to fall in love with it, but I have.

But I have one more day of November, one more day of pure writing. Tomorrow I'm going to try to write an ending. I've been writing out of order, jumping around in time, but things have to end up somewhere, and tomorrow I'm going to try to find out where that might be. 

Then I read it. I have two options: Wait a while before reading it, or read it on Wednesday, the day after I "finish" it. Arguments for waiting: It allows me to become dispassionate before I write a second draft. Arguments for reading it immediately: It prevents me from becoming dispassionate before I write a second draft. If I become too dispassionate, I fear losing the momentum I've got going right now. I fear I might talk myself out of this book, the way I talked myself out of last year's.

I guess I'll wait until Wednesday and figure it out then.

Next step after reading it: Writing a time line of all the scenes, adding notes on the scenes I think are missing, making some major decisions (do I keep the meta text? the [god help us] footnotes?), then going back and rewriting the whole thing.

The time line part sounds fun.

In other news: Janice Erlbaum outs herself as a pretentious twit. Yes, again! And here I was, worried that the Poetry Establishment was going to come down on me for talking too much about slam, when it turns out that I was not showing proper love and respect for the very fucking serious art form that is slam poetry! Which should only be discussed earnestly, in the context of the oral poetic tradition, the democratization of poetry, the politicization of art by the new generation of poets, the rise of hip hop culture, the tradition of the African griot, cowboy poets, academic outsiders, zzzzztop.

And by the way, buddy, I traveled from 1993, not 1997; my school is very, very, very old.

PUSSY POETS 4 LIFE!

Or, for like a year and a half.

(*Way, way too many, I know. But I was having such a good time with them!)

Unpublished

I was looking through the draft of the book I wrote about my mom last winter/spring, hoping to find a stand-alone excerpt I could publish on this site. I haven't looked at it since May, and reading it now I realized, I don't like this book. Not for the usual reasons -- I actually like the writing well enough here, the words and sentences are okay, and there are a few nice insights and good lines. But the story, pacing, characters, and especially the tone -- yuck. And I'm not being modest here*:

1. A lot of it is long, frustrating conversations with doctors and social workers, which nobody needs to relive in detail, not even me, and I had a stake in them.

2. The characters are unlikable, and they don't evolve over the course of the book. Nobody wants to spend 275 pages with my mother, me fuming at her side -- if you were there in the waiting room of the doctor's with us, you would excuse yourself to go find a water fountain and get lost for twenty minutes. It's not a fun scene in person, or on the page.

3. Holy shit, is it angry. Not just angry, but bitter. Recriminatory, written with a grudge and an agenda, which is something you can do in a first draft if it helps get you to the end, but then you have to rewrite it. I already rewrote this one, and it's just as furious as the first draft, with an extra edge of resignation. Whee! I kept telling people, "It's not Eat Pray Love! It's Eat Shit and Die!" But who wants to read 275 of shit-eating? (Please don't answer that. I have enough tsuris with the pee freaks who make up a full third of this blog audience. [Another story I probably shouldn't have published...])

The other thing: I am so much happier not working on this book. I like my new project so much more than this one. I am so grateful that this book was turned down, because it's not my best work, and I'd regret it if it were coming out next year.

I think I'm going to sit on it for a few more months and see how I feel about it then. It would be nice if six months of work didn't go to waste -- I wanted to at least get a few blog posts out of the draft, if nothing else -- but I have a feeling this book was something I needed to write, and not something I need to publish. 

Good thing nobody's asking me to publish it!

(* Like I usually am! How modest of me, to acknowledge my own modesty!)

33643

What a week.

I had to deal with my mother again, after six wonderful mom-free months; now the sign on the wall of the warehouse in my head has to flip back to "zero days since last accident." There's plenty I could say about it, but I'll just say this: I tried. Okay? So when she drops dead, you'll know, it's not because I didn't try, because I tried. Again. For three days. And then I gave up. Much faster than last year, when it took me almost six months to give up on her. Next time maybe I can get it over in ten minutes. 

Meanwhile, I did not do my best job as a guest blogger at That Other Blog this week, because I got a little bit derailed for a second there, and frankly I forgot that I'd signed up to do it weeks ago. (I didn't put it on my calendar, which is so not like me, but who am I anyway? Apparently that is me, because I'm the one who did it.) If I'd remembered, I would have done a whole bunch of work in advance, and written really thoughtful and informative posts, instead of the quarter-assed lorem ipsum I slapped up there. That crowd isn't looking for slam poetry and intro exercises, and that's all I've got. 

Nor have I been able to blog over here, though I am now at 33,643 words, or 67 percent of my Nanowrimo goal, which means I'm about 1970 words ahead, though by tomorrow morning I'll owe another 1667 so that sign too will flip back to only 303 words ahead. In other words, I have about a day's leeway to not work on it, though I'm being super superstitious about this one, and am loathe to miss a day. I usually write a bunch all week and not on weekends, but this doing it every day thing feels right, seems to be working. This is the fun part, filling a new document every day and stuffing into a folder at the end of it, not looking back, and trying not to look too far forward either, just making it up as I go. Yeah, I said it: There's times when writing itself is fun. It never seems like it's going to be that way when I sit down at the odious desk, but then it is.

Reading a lot of memoirs about Borderline Personality Disorder: Borderlines by Caroline Knaus, Get Me Out of Here by Rachel Reiland. I don't know why I'm drawn to them right now (whatever happened to Dickens?), but I usually find later that these reading spates were "research." Maybe I am researching myself. Maybe I have BPD. I said to Bill the other night that I must have been bored and needed to stir things up with my mother because I am a drama queen who loves misery: The Girl Who Kicks the Hornet's Nest, Over and Over, Even Though She's Been Stung By Hornets Like 5000 Times Because She Keeps Kicking Their Nest Like She Doesn't Know What A Hornet Is Or What Their Nests Look Like, Because Why Would She Keep Kicking It Otherwise.

There it is! My new working title!  

Recipe for a 15-minute poem

(Originally published on the Best American Poetry Blog. Thanks, BAMPO!)

I wanted to share a poetry exercise I like to do with students who are intimidated by the idea of writing poetry, in case it might be useful to you, reader dear. Because it consists of writing fragments and then tumbling them together, and because it's like looking at your life through a bunch of tiny mirrors, I call is the Kaleidoscope. The instructions are as follows:

1. Get your notebook, or open a new document. (You'd think this would be evident, but I've seen people try to do this in their head.)

2. Write down the top five things on your mind in no more than a few phrases

E.g.:

The thing with Melanie
Money money money
Ellen's tumor
Writing writing writing
Gut hanging over waist of pants

2. Write down five lines of dialogue you've either heard or said this week

E.g.:

"These tickets are no good for tonight, you were supposed to be here last night."
"Janice, can you take care of that?"
"Based on what happened yesterday I think we need to talk." 
"I think the material is mostly there."
"Pardonnez moi?"

3. Write down five things you have in your bag, using two words per item.

E.g.:

Broken lipstick
Extra tissues
Great Expectations
Sugar-free gum
Various change 

4. Write down five "freeze frame" moments, little moments from the movie of your life, from the past month.

E.g.:

Hugging a woman I didn't want to hug
Biting my lower lip while watching reality TV
Nearly crying with hunger and frustration outside the store
Standing in tree pose while my oatmeal cools
Glaring at the empty page, which glares back at me

5. Write down five quotes, phrases, lines from songs, whatever jumps into your head as describing your life right now.

E.g.:

Fake it 'til you make it
"La vie en rose"
"Shut up, just shut up, shut up"
"I work this relationship 9 to 5, and I deserve overtime"
"I can't help it, that's the way that I am."

Okay!

You now have eight minutes to reorganize these lists into stanzas. You can use a formula -- one from list A, one from list B, then from C, D, and E, then repeat -- or you can shuffle them according to any scheme you want. You can leave items out or rephrase them, or you can copy them exactly. If one of the above phrases seems like a good title or starting point, start there. As long as you write a poem, you can write anything you want -- obviously -- you don't need my permission to write a poem, and in case you do need it, you most certainly have it. 

These tickets are no good for tonight, you were
supposed to be here last night. Pardonnez moi?
Nearly crying with hunger and frustration,
Faking it until I fake it some more; shut up
Just shut up, shut up. Based on what happened
Yesterday, I think we need to talk –
The thing with Melanie
Money, money, money
Ellen’s tumor
Broken lipstick, extra tissues
Janice, can you take care of that?
I work this relationship 9 to 5
Glaring at the empty page
Writing, writing, writing
Biting my own sugar-free lips
Great Expectations, various change
Hugging a woman I don’t want hugging me
Gut hanging over the waist of my pants
Standing in tree pose, la vie en rose…
I can’t help it!
                That’s the way that I am.

So there it is! I didn't say it would be a great poem, I just said it would be a poem. For a great poem, you need at least fifteen more minutes.

Also

"I've always believed everybody had a story to tell, but I'm not convinced everyone has two." -- Stephen Elliott, Daily Rumpus, 11/16

This

"A friend once told me that a book should change a person's life. But what he meant, I think, was a book should contain information you can use. But it turns out not to be true. There isn't anything a book should or shouldn't be. Just go door to door and ask your neighbors a few questions about  what's important. You'll be amazed what people think." -- Stephen Elliott, The Daily Rumpus newsletter, 11/15

NAACPoets

(Originally posted on the Best American Poetry blog -- thanks, BAMPO!)

I judged a poetry slam on Friday night.

It's been about eighteen years since I was a little baby slammer, all of 23 years old, waving my righteous little fist around on the stage of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, hoping that MTV would put me on the air (they did) and make me into a famous poet (they didn't). And in that eighteen years, I've seen my share of slams, and often enjoyed them, though the formula's getting a little stale. But it's been a while since I put on my judging shoes (sneakers, in case I have to run from an angry poet), whipped out the fat black marker that makes me dizzy when I smell it (I know -- don't smell it! But I have to, just to check and see if it still makes me dizzy!), and tried to assign a quantitative value to another poet's expression of their art.

Then I was invited by a teenaged writer I know to judge the NAACP -- that's the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- Jamaica Youth Poetry Slam. Which was very cool, especially for a comparatively colorless Pink Person, as I am definitely in favor of the advancement of all peoples, especially youthful peoples, and I was eager to see what the ever-rotating cast of Kids Today was up to when it came to the spoken word.

Friends! I have journeyed far and wide! (St. Albans, Queens, which is pretty goddamn far/wide from my place in Manhattan, and is also the birthplace of LL Cool J, and therefore a significant site in the history of hip hop.) I have listened to derivative drivel, and I have had my ears filled with gold! (Metaphorical gold, not the molten metal kind, because that would be painful.) And I have come to tell you that there is hope for slam poetry!

Teenagers, man. They're really good. They're really inspired -- they are passionate about social justice, they are passionate about their loves and their hates, and they are passionate about their art. And they're fresh; they haven't had the hope stomped out of them yet. They haven't been told that their work suffers from a lack of tangible imagery, or the meter here is inconsistent, or that the last word of every line in your poem needs to be the same in every stanza according to this formula: ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, OMFG. They just talk about what's on their mind: Paying the bills, getting harassed by law enforcement, worrying about the long term effects of this summer's oil catastrophe (I refuse to call it a "spill," a word that implies a small, easily solvable mess). One young man, in the course of an otherwise beautifully composed and intricately rhymed poem, dropped a couple of lines that suggested he felt antithetical to homosexuality. And he lost to a lovely young boi with a mohawk and a girlfriend.

Not only were the young poets on fire; the crowd was heated up, too. The younger brothers and sisters were rapt, even the toddler-sized ones -- the next generation of poets being hatched. An eleven-year-old named Malachai was too young to slam with the teens, but he was invited to recite something he'd prepared: an excerpt from Jesse Jackson's 1984 speech at the Democratic National Convention. Need I tell you that the crowd went nuts? The lyricism, intricacy, and raw power of the slammers' work was undeniable; the level of talent was unbelievable (I mean, believable, but barely, because they're freaking kids). It was tough, at the end of the competitive round, not to give everyone a 10, or an eleven even, because that's how uplifting the evening was. 

Of course we told them they were all winners, just for writing poetry, just for showing up and putting themselves and their words on the line. But the real winners were us, the audience. Me. I won a sense that poetry is in the hands of a capable new generation, that texting hasn't killed writing, and that the kids, as they say, are okay.

Worst American Memory

Hey, good thing I totally remembered that I'm supposed to be guest blogging this upcoming week for the Best American Poetry blog. So you'll be seeing lots of my, uh, blog posts about poetry up there, starting tomorrow! Ha ha! Ha. Huh.

20,862

A third of the way through Nanowrimo, and I wish I could do this every month: just make shit up without worrying where it's going, or if it's any good; without worrying about anything except that I write at least two and a half pages a day, every day, weekends and holidays included. I was writing in my notebook earlier today, and I wrote, I love what I'm working on, and I immediately wanted to take it back, because I was afraid that if I let myself feel good about my work, it would immediately crumble and turn to shit in my hands.

I'm dismayed that this is my first reaction to having a positive thought about my work: Don't do that. Don't feel good about your writing, and if you do, for god's sake don't admit it. Which is so counterproductive -- the reality is that thinking "I love what I'm working on" is a positive thing, something I should be trying to say to myself more often and not less.

I think I'm trying to protect myself from disappointment. But I don't think I can protect myself from disappointment, because disappointment is a human emotion. Even when I know disappointment is coming, even when I've predicted nothing but failure in my head for the previous two weeks, it's still disappointing. It turns out that purposely thinking negative thoughts doesn't protect me from anything. 

Or does it? I used to think that constantly tearing myself down at least prevented me from becoming a smug, complacent asshole. So instead I was a very smug, uncomplacent asshole -- smug because I thought that at least I was smart enough to hate myself before others could hate me, an asshole to others because I hated myself.

Frankly, I'd rather just be smug and complacent. To the tune of two and a half pages a day.

Wow, blogging is awesome!

Especially when you're trying to avoid writing! Who knew there were so many interesting things to read on the internet? And so many emails to send? 

God, I should just get it over with. I think I'll do that, and then come back and report.

...

Four hours and three and a half pages later:

That sure took me forever. I'm going to have to get the software that disables the internet if I'm going to keep working at home. I'm also going to have to get the software that makes me dinner, and erases episodes of Hoarders from the DVR, and plays with my cats. 

It's really good to be writing a lot again, without pain in my arms (so far). I've missed it. Nanowrimo is almost a third of the way through; I hope I can go the distance without straining myself too much. I hope, when I read it later, it's good. I still haven't read last year's all the way through; I started to, a few months ago, but I got distracted by the book I'd been writing in the meantime. I'm excited to read last year's as soon as I'm done with this one, while this one sits and I try to forget about it for a few days. Then maybe, in the six hundred single spaced pages I've written in the past twelve months, I can find something that will come to fruition someday.