40,000 words

So I have hit the 40,000 word mark into the first book of my Theater Door series.

It’s funny; before you start out on an adventure, you have all of these preconceived ideas about how things will happen and fall into place, whether it’s visiting a place you’ve never been before or starting a new project.  The only way you’ll truly know how things happen is to begin.

I’ve done a number of longer fiction projects in the past; nothing quite as long as this.  But I thought I had a reasonable understanding of how things would happen.  And NaNoWriMo has been an eye opening experience as to where my expectations were legit and where I was completely off.

For one thing, I was convinced that I was a planner.  In projects that I’ve done in the past, when things went awry from the original plan (like realizing that another name was better for the main character or realizing that some event was better off happening at a different part and it throws off the rest of the unfolding of events), cleaning up the mess is. . . well, hard.  I want to use a harsher word, but I don’t want younger readers to learn bad words from me.  The point is, cleaning up the mess is something that is .not fun. and .not something I ever want to have to do again.

So, I thought that, with a longer project, I’d REALLY want to have everything supremely organized and laid out before I began.

NaNoWriMo, you’ve proven me wrong.

On page 40, you can discover that there’s this perfect allusion to the author of ancient Roman comedy and that one of your characters is a descendant of his or related in some other way.  Sometimes there’s just no way to discover the reality of your characters inner lives until you start to detail the microcosms of their worlds.

I’m such a macro baby.  I love seeing the big picture of things.  I was always the kid in an English class to get frustrated with another student’s questions about tangential details of a character’s unwritten journey – like, to me it doesn’t matter and 28 people can have 28 different interpretations about where and what a character does between the defined scenes of the work.  Why debate it?  There’s enough on the page to start nitpicking some detail that may or may not have any consequential standing on the meaning of the piece as a whole.

So I love getting the big picture and THEN zooming in on the little moments.

Which is what I thought I wanted to do with this writing project.  But, once you get started, even if you remain grounded in the original concept, things come up that were unforeseeable during the planning process.  And they’re usually so much better than anything you could have imagined.

I don’t know, maybe it’s closer to the allegory of the boulders, rocks, pebbles, sand, water, rather than macro vs. micro.  I’ve stayed true to the boulders of the storyline – the fact that it’s in a school, there’s a teacher, and there’s an unexpected adventure through a mysterious door – but the rocks have changed.  Like, enormously.

And whereas, before this, I was a believer that you really shouldn’t create when you’re not entirely inspired to do so – because that’s how boring, uninspired creations come into being – I’m now a bigger believer in “you’ll discover it if you just take the leap.”  And it’s been fun.  Coming up with new scenarios to reveal the characters beneath.

There’s a significant focus on the immediate action of the storyline, but, and again as an actor I feel moderately embarrassed admitting this in my rambling “not a part of my official daily word count” stream of consciousness blog post, but that’s not enough to really reveal the characters behind the plot.  So, having to stay true to the deadline, to just get words on the page even if they’re schlock, I’ve been reminded of the beautiful moment of “SO THIS IS WHAT IT IS” simply because you’re pushing yourself to go SOMEWHERE.

It’s funny, as a dance teacher I remind the kids that “if you want to get your splits, you’ll have to practice them every day.”  I teach a lot of things that I forget to practice on a regular basis.  I mean, you don’t want to practice incorrectly – that’s how you perfect doing things incorrectly – but you’ll never get there if you don’t devote daily attention to it.

That’s exactly how writing is.  You’ll never write the story if you just sit back and wait for it all to write itself.  But if you keep moving steadily in one direction, even if you’re not entirely positive what direction that is, if you keep working towards getting your splits, you’ll get so much farther than just sitting back and waiting for your splits to get themselves.

How’s that for a confusing metaphor?  Whatever, it made sense to me.

So yeah, 40,000 words.  And yes, some of them MAY be schlock (in fact, I guarantee it).  But they’re 40,000 words steadily in the direction of an adventure of a group of kids, in a performing arts school, going through a mysterious door and finding themselves in ancient Rome (at least for this first book).  It’s 40,000 words towards defining and redefining and refining this world I’m creating that should, hopefully, express some of my life views and lessons and philosophies to a new generation of kids that are currently having to navigate the confusing world of social media and daily technological advances and electronic footprints and the death of imagination….  Life lessons and thoughts and reminders that “we’re not alone” and to never forget that there are more things in heaven and earth than exist in our immediate philosophies.

I mean, I know how much my world – my current beliefs and expectations of and hopes for the world – was shaped by the imagined worlds of authors past.  If I can create something like that for someone else . . . that would be amazing.

Just keep writing.  Just keep writing.  (Sing that in your head in Dory’s voice).