It gets hard sometimes, refraining from clicky, mindless computer games. I haven't played any of those since last October, so four whole months (with the exception of playing iPad games at home over winter break, but those were tappy games rather than clicky games, and now I can't play them anyway, seeing that I don't have any Apple products around me). Instead, when I feel the need to do something mindless, I go read manga online. Sometimes it gets bad if it's a series because then I need to finish the series, or catch up to its current point, before I can do anything else productive again. That was the case with Kimi ni Todoke two weeks ago. I read the whole thing up to the current chapter in three days. =_= So there's manga. Sometimes, fanfic, but I'm not as interested in it as I was before since I'm not into any particular fandom at the moment.

They're still a bad habit, the clicky games. Even if I don't play them anymore, the mentality is still there. I have the urge to spill some creative juices, so I open a story file or two. And look at it. And then I have the urge to play clicky games, so I go and read manga instead. I may have broken my addiction to clicky games, but I need to stop running from my Word files every time I open them because that's where the real problem lies.

This morning I flailed, but I made it! The previous night, I went to bed much later than usual, almost midnight (as opposed to 9 p.m.) due to putting in a few serious hours on my Japanese history paper and watching several fabulous episodes of the fabulous anime about American football, Eyeshield 21 (Deimon vs. Shinryuuji game). I set my alarm and woke up with it at 4:20 a.m., but with so little sleep, I was far too tired, and yes, wasted, to apply myself to writing. Plus I hadn't finished the Deimon vs. Shinryuuji game yet and had had dreams about how Deimon could pull off a 20-point touchdown, so I ended up watching the last three episodes of the game. Which worked to wake me up because I have never fallen asleep while watching anime. Then I took a shower, and then I forced myself past my reluctance to write and my uncertainty about where to take the story. And I wrote. And I somehow produced a page with plot progression that I can build on. Thank goodness. Sometimes you just really have to power through.

It was a bit risky to watch anime first thing in the morning instead of writing or showering, but it worked out. Day 12 of NaNo and still going strong.

Also, arrangements have been made for my visit to Purdue in a bit over a week! People there sound very nice, and I am quite looking forward to it!

Day 10, and I am keeping up. Although to make a confession, today I spent my hour today deleting instead of writing. It's because I've moved on to a part of the story where the plotting and everything is still up in the air. I had about 25 pages of old stuff for this chapter, but having made some decisions as to where the story is headed, I had to sort out stuff that I wouldn't need anymore, and stuff I wanted to keep but needed to figure out how to incorporate still.

This is usually the point in my writing where I become deathly afraid and unsure of where to take my story, and then it languishes for a year. I suspect this is why, from college graduation until now, I've averaged a bit more than one new good chapter a year. It's a really sad pace at which to make progress on a novel. That being said, I must find a way to plow through this. Thinking is involved, yes, and planning, and plotting, but I can't let myself stop writing either. It's too easy to stop under the pretext of needing more time to think, and then suddenly half a year has passed and not a word written.

Thinking on it this afternoon, I realized that thus far, my characters have faced no great obstacles. Sure, there's the obvious one around which the story is centered, but there's nothing that throws a wrench in the works when they decide to do something. Perhaps that is why my story is languishing at this stage. Throwing obstacles in front of my characters would be a good thing to revive the pace of the story, introduce new things in interesting ways, and just keep the story going. My characters have had it too easy. But vacation is over! It's time for them to start working.

What is this, Day 6? Writing is still going well and I am keeping up. I finished Chapter 5 yesterday/today and today wrote the first page or so of Chapter 6. Chapter 6 goes back to the other character's side of the story, which is good because I need more time to think about how I want Hinako's story to progress. It's nice to finally be making progress, even if the quality is not so great.

Thursday at dinner a girl from my program asked me how my writing was going. I told her how I had not written anything for well over a month and then recently started writing an hour a day. She said, "Oh, that's good, to take a break and then start writing again when you're inspired." Maybe it's okay to take a break sometimes, but I think a one month break is just awful and lazy. There's nothing good about it. And I didn't start writing again because I was inspired. Inspiration happens in the early stages as a story idea is still fresh with endless possibilities. At this point, maybe a fourth of the way through the story, it's all about discipline. Forcing yourself to write and slugging through it no matter how you feel that day. There's no inspiration, except that which you create if you desperately need to delude yourself into believing that there is inspiration. Inspiration, if there is such a thing, only comes when you stick your butt in the chair, open up that story file, and start typing out the shaky ideas that you don't think will work but type anyway because you've got nothing else. That is my kind of inspiration.

Day 10 Progress Report, Measuring Progress

Day 10 (August 7) - Pulled teeth with Chapter 5 and got a lot of apparently useless lines, because they didn't help me jump the plot gap. After half an hour, gave up for the day. Went downstiars and cleaned up doggy poo from the carpet--Ginger is sick these days; probably caught a cold from when we washed her.

Had an extremely unproductive day, in terms of writing. I took a two-hour nap in the evening and woke up at 9 pm feeling sluggish. It was dark downstairs. I let Ginger in, closed the garage and locked the door, then went back upstairs. Only a few minutes later, there is the sound of the garage door opening and then knocking and shouting from outside. Apparently I locked my dad out; he had gone off to visit a friend and pick pears and peaches from a nearby orchard. Anyways, realizing my error, I hurried downstairs and unlocked the door. The whole incident reminded me of Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" with the banging and shouting and locking people out (or in, in the case of the story).

Anyways, I finally return to Chapter 5 at 11pm. Surprisingly, I had figured out how to bridge the gap, at least partway, in the morning. And it didn't take me long after sitting down to figure out how to move Chapter 5 forward. It's still a lot of talking heads, but now it has some momentum and set up for the mid-story peak which should be in Chapter 6. So now Chapter 5 is in some semblance of an order. Not really what I would call drafted, but it is storyboarded, at least enough for my purposes, and I can move on.

On another topic, I was thinking today how people always ask, how far are you from being done? How done are you with this chapter? There's really three ways to answer that. One is, you can go by process and say, "I've drafted the whole chapter and am on my first revision." That's a good answer to me, because I know exactly what that means--there'll probably be at least another huge revision after that, and countless dissection of word choices and phrases, countless re-readings with a critical eye for plot, for character, and a critical ear for sound and language flow. There may be only one more huge revision looming ahead, or maybe two or three, but then a million little revisions and edits that all add up. Because the person asking the question knows even less than the writer where the finish line is, that answer means nothing to the questioner.

The second way to answer, and it's somewhat related to the first way, is to go by percentage. Say, I have my draft and have finished a round of heavy revisions. By this point, if I did my work well and make no gigantic changes to the plot down the line, I might say that, optimistically, 70% of what I have right there is going to make it to the final draft. (Do note that this is all speculation, as I have not yet produced anything near a final draft yet.) Of course I may need to add scenes and delete things and nitpick, but the manuscript itself is 70% done. This sounds optimistic, but really, it doesn't tell you all that much either. If the first 70% came after a lot of headbanging, teeth pulling, and blood-letting, then the last 30% will come in excruciating cuts. Tiny papercuts, maybe some larger ones for a short transition scene. But by in large, it will be a painful, slow process whereby you have to make an old beaten cowhide boot shine, somehow. This way of answering the question sounds more optimistic than it really is, but it is more informative than the first way in that you know the endpoint is 100%, or maybe 120%.

The last way to answer is to go by time: "I've worked on this since high school, on and off. And at the rate I'm going, I'll never finish. This effusion of creative desperation and raw want will never see the light of a bookstore. Or maybe it will, in another decade. Five years if I really try. Two if I suddenly turn into a genius writer and everything goes smoothly. ...Okay, fine. I know what you're asking. The first complete draft--a real draft and not skimpy chunks of scene and plot and character and dialogue, with a full set of first-time revisions (because an unrevised first draft is absolutely worthless and terrible by nature)--will be done by the end of this year. If I kill myself. Which I plan to do, because yes, it's time to stop dreaming and start chasing the dream." That probably answers the question in terms the questioner understands.

the art of writing

There's great joy in figuring out why something doesn't work. For example, take the following sentence: "She stretched, eyes flying open when pain shot through her right leg." This sentence fails as a narrative sentence. The immediacy of pain is lost. She would stretch, and there would be pain. And then, if you really care, her eyes may fly open at that, but by that point, I think that's the least of her concerns. The sentence must convey the immediacy of the pain, so the order must go from stretch to pain instantly without the padding of an exterior reaction. In any case, it was a good thing to realize, and now that sentence has been scrapped completely. Edit: Actually, I came up with something only marginally better, which I excuse by reducing the importance of pain. Huh.

Which just goes to show that everything I write must be re-written for it to be much good. I was thinking on my drive home that for this thing (novel? novel-thing? I hesitate to call it anything so ambitious while I am only on chapter 3. Maybe I should refer to it as this Thing, capitalized), I've been having to do so much re-writing. And that made me think of all the levels of writing I engage in. Like the lowest level writing is when I don't know what's going on and can't connect with the characters or engage in any semblence of plot or plausible interaction. In that case, the writing is usually a jumble of dialogue from the characters going, "Hey, I want to be more unbalanced, Storygoddess," and "Why don't you give me better lines, Storygoddess?" and so on.

And then the next level up is when I have a vague, general idea of what I want happening, so I sketch out the basic actions and dialogue. It's like a key animator who draws up key frame A and key frame B for a motion sequence, A being where the motion starts and B being where the motion ends. The next level up after that is like me doing the inbetweener work, where I have to draw each motion frame to get from frame A to frame B. This really requires immersion into the story, where as the lower levels didn't. Unfortunately, most of the time the writing on this level is still poor, and the immersion is not quite enough. Things may still be out of character, and even key frames may still be changed.

So then you go up to the highest basic level, which is essentially another immersion into the story. You re-write everything, think of pleasing ways to phrase and depict things, and you're there, right in the story, right in your character's heads, and everything makes sense. You realize that your previous immersion wasn't enough, and you realize, this is it. This is right. Maybe it's like ascending to the director's position and putting everything into place and overseeing the whole thing.

During the whole process, particularly the highest stage, is a lot of head banging as you dissect every sentence and every phrase, every word choice, until you are satisfied. Or tired and apathetic. Or best of all, until your brain has turned to mush from too much abuse and you can't figure out if what you wrote was any good or not. Then you put it aside or send it to someone to read and tell you if you failed magificently or miserably.

Edit: Re-thinking it, I think it goes from total disconnect to director to key animator to inbetweener to everything all at once, which is why the highest basic stage is what it is.

I suppose I will stop procrastinating now and actually go write.