Chatter & Noise

This month is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which sounds pretty nice until you realize that what they really mean is “writing a novel in thirty days” and not “spending thirty days celebrating and exploring the craft of novel-writing.” Every year I tell myself I’m going to participate, plop myself down and churn out the 50,000 words required to “win.” I admire the idea of NaNoWriMo, anyway, the bold move to free up the creative mind, escape from the inner critic and give yourself permission to just go wild, write whatever, just write, write, write! Yes. Many people need to indulge in this process but don’t know how, they need the encouragement and social support to nudge them out the door into the untamed land of Imagination.

But then—a lot of it is just… crap. They know that over at NaNoWriMo, too, and they condone it, they smile and say soothingly: of course it’ll be crap, you’re trying to write a novel in a month—the point isn’t to write a masterpiece, it’s to get yourself writing, to prove to yourself that you can do it. Of course, anyone who has ever completed a first draft of anything, much to their horror, knows that the first thing you need to do before anything else is just write crap. You can worry about what becomes of it later.

Still, during the month of November, I inevitably find myself unable to write much of anything at all. Instead, what I get is a lot of noise and mental chatter. (Why they chose the month of November in the first place is a mystery to me—a month where, if you’re like me, you inevitably begin it just a bit hung over from Halloween booze and sweets, then there’s Thanksgiving slammed right in there and the beginning of the Holiday Season… not to mention it’s that dark no-time time between Samhain and the winter solstice when anyone in their right mind is hibernating and gestating, listening and waiting…) Perhaps this is just me trying to push blame off on other people, but each year, as the popularity of NaNoWriMo grows and more and more people participate, it’s like all that crappy writing gets vomited up into the astral ether and I spend the month wading through grossness and confusion.

That’s what it is, really, in many ways: vomit. Plenty of people use the phrase “verbal diarrhea,” but I don’t think that’s accurate. Vomit—the half-digested things, the stomach juices and the gagging and the difficulty—but then also, the relief of it afterwards, how you feel a little less nauseated, a little more grounded, pleasantly empty. Writing can do that for you, empty you out, clear out your system. But with everybody going around vomiting, I find myself in this weird state: I have a lot of things to write about, but nothing to say.

I don’t know about your writing process, but mine usually begins with a scavenger hunt brainstorming, watching and listening. Somewhere along the way, a few seeds are sewn, but I hardly ever know which ones will take root, which ones will die off. Eventually, all this… stuff that I’ve been gathering crystallizes, and suddenly I can’t resist the urge to sit down and write. There is a form there, with its own purposes and momentum, and I sit down and let it carry me along, allowing the central notion to drive my work and shape it, guiding me on what to include and what to pass over.

Right now, I’ve been working on a comparative book review that’s due in a few days. I’ve read both books, taken copious notes, made outlines, reread both books… And while I have a lot to write about them, separately and as a pair—I have no crystallizing, central, driving idea, nothing to say about them. Just disorganized noise and chatter, with nothing to give it shape or direction, no helpful sense of meaning to set me going. My creative work is in a similar lull, random images and ideas surfacing, drifting about, then submerging again into the dark waters of the subconscious. No pattern or message emerging.

Well. A perfect kind of mood for journaling, maybe even for blogging. But write a novel? Certainly not. I have no problem waiting this no-time out, letting things settle, letting them digest so that my internal processes can extract what is valuable and nutritious, and let pass what is so much filler and cardboard.

And I’ll just have to hope that my editors won’t mind a horribly messy rough draft of this review and can give me some time to revise it in December when everyone has quieted back down.

~ by Ali on November 22, 2008.