NaNoWriMo Revisited: Clips from the Real Thing

I've been getting some requests lately to share the 50,000-word novel I drafted in November, and while I'm sure everyone thinks I'm just putting them off (maybe I am), I really do want my words to be read eventually.  However, I feel like revealing your newborn projects to too wide an audience can be dangerous, hence why I've only given the manuscript to two people for feedback so far.

I do appreciate that a number of people -- including some of my lovely family and friends who read this blog -- would like to see proof this thing exists.  And I'm excited to share a few pieces, so I've asked those two aforementioned friends to give me a couple of their favorite passages.  Over the next couple weeks or so I'm going to take those excerpts, polish them up where necessary, and post them here for your consumption.

I hesitate to characterize this as a "young adult novel."  It just so happens to be about a young adult.

Click on the jump below to read it.  As always, feedback is welcome!  Thanks to Tyson for picking this one :)

Bad Poetry

Over the holidays a friend gave me a little cardboard box full of pretty little notebooks.  This sounds like a gift, but really it was just part of the reward I reaped for keeping him company while he cleaned out 10 years' worth of papers stuffed into his desk.  Occasionally he'd find something he hadn't used in several years and offer it to me.

The notebooks are unlined and pretty small -- about 1/4 of a standard sheet of paper -- so my first thought was, these are perfect for poetry!  Now, poetry always came naturally to me when I was younger, but it hasn't for at least 10 years or so.  I'm certain this event coincides with the point when I realized all the poetry I was writing was terrible.

Who knows if I still write bad poetry now, though, because I just stopped doing it.  Just about every other form of writing comes easily and reads well, so I figured I should just give up on writing poetry and lyrics.  However, receiving that box of little notebooks got me thinking: just like I give myself permission to write just about anything in my daily writing practice, maybe I should give myself permission to write bad poetry, too.  So that's what I'm doing: writing bad poetry in these little notebooks.  So far I've written about unrequited desires and fleeting fantasies and musings on the land of my birth, since most bad poetry tends to be about these things.

The thing is, a lot of good poetry is about that, too.  And if I never let myself write poetry because it's not coming out sounding perfect or right or even tolerable, I'll never come out on the other side.  Scrawling out a novel rather haphazardly seems to have been pretty well-received, so I'm going to try writing down some vaguely poetic lines in hopes of finding something good eventually.

And, to honor that sentiment, I'm putting something below the cut that I wrote in the car on the way up to Vermont the other day.  Leave something in the comments if you've ever hesitated to do something because you thought it wouldn't be good.

Breaks.

Lately I've been wondering about my creative process, wondering if breaks are a necessary gear keeping the process spinning or whether breaks are just that, a break in character.  A skip, a foible.  Between Christmas and New Year's I took an honest and true break.  Though I carried my notebook to Pennsylvania for Christmas, its pages remained largely undisturbed for the length of the trip.

But now I'm typing this with my laptop on the kitchen counter, reheating the last of the Christmas leftovers, and really telling myself -- it's over.  Break's over.

While I was home from work (lucky us, our office closes between Christmas and New Year's) I stayed up late, mostly slept late, drank champagne and played board games, spent whole days in my pajamas watching movies and playing World of Warcraft.  Occasionally I'd feel a twinge and think, "I should be working on my novel," but then I'd realize I'd let writerfriends take it away, force this break.

By Sunday, though, the last Sunday before returning to the office, I was finished.  Even on Saturday I had an inclination to start planning a zine, got out a sketchpad and some old stuff and laid in my writing room, back on the floor and eyes glued to the ceiling fan.  So much of the creative process can be laying on the floor surrounded by papers and books.

But on Sunday I was full-on done with breaks.  I twisted an incense burner out of tin foil and struck out to the basement to sort through some of the boxes down there, thinking I might find inspiration in purging, sorting, making plans for the space after I empty it of clutter.  I watched Angels in America and relished the way it put my soul through a wringer, lost myself in it as an artist and a human.  I started writing again in earnest, returned to my daily practice.  I had a significant personal revelation.

My question is, did my break pave the way for all this?  Did it prepare me to work again on my novel after I receive it back full of red pen?  Did it leave my heart open for new ideas, new inspiration, did it give me new eyes? Or was it just a delay, a hiccup, a missed opportunity to immerse myself in a project?

We have such a need to create, but I'm feeling oddly guiltless about taking some time away from "real" things, "productive" things.  Accomplishments.  I'm feeling like the past week left me open to realize even after taking so much time out for myself, I still voluntarily return to my words.  I miss them, need them.  I can take a break from them, go on vacation, and know full well I'll be more than happy to come back.