“I have something to share with you,” cries every book cover, album cover, website, blog post. “Check this out, I think it’s pretty cool.”
What draws us to pick it up may be a pretty picture, a name, a curious title, or caprice. What keeps us reading or listening or watching is … quality? the same caprice? the promise of the cover fulfilled?
The cover generates expectation. The interior must deliver, or the sampler won’t be back for many a day.
How to deliver? Have fun. Don’t think. Be silly sometimes. Do what you said you would do.
November is National Novel Writing Month, and traditionally folks use the month to challenge themselves to write a 50,000-word novel. But there’s more than one way to celebrate the month.
I launched into the challenge in November 2019 and sailed along for about a week before the train derailed. It was glorious for a while — composing 1,667 words a day was a snap. Before Nov. 1 I’d completed the first chapter of a novel, and over those first few days I added more than 11,000 words and five chapters. Next thing I knew, November was over and I had stopped writing the novel.
In the ensuing couple of years, I’ve learned a little more about how I write and why my brain does this to my stories. And for this November I have set somewhat more realistic goals and yet more ambitious goals than I have conjured in quite some time.
Not long ago I announced that I would release my now-long-awaited next novel, Jeep Thompson and the Lost Prince of Venus, on Nov. 26. Just like clockwork, once I made the announcement I stopped writing the novel. Some days I think I should find a nice therapist and talk about this.
Anyway, with Nov. 1, 2021, coming up Monday, I’m getting those goals set in my mind.
My first more realistic and yet more ambitious goal is to finish the first draft by Nov. 26. That would be about 20,000 words worth of story.
My second goal for the month is to make a plan to finish the other two novels that I have started and set aside in recent years, completing them in the first few months of 2022.
My third goal for the month is to set some realistic and yet ambitious goals for my writing during the rest of 2022.
My wish, my desire, my ambitious goal is to complete not just those three novels but three more before my 70th birthday, now a mere 18 months away, and to keep writing at that pace for as many days as remain. Actually, my wish and desire is to write much more swiftly than that and to have fun making so many books that I laugh at the idea I thought it was realistic to write only six novels in a year and a half.
Friday, I sketched out a first draft of a book-release plan for 2022. The first, second and fourth novels are the currently unfinished symphonies.
March 13 – Jeep Thompson and the Lost Prince of Venus April – No Chance to Dream: A Comfort & Joy Mystery May – Jeep Thompson and the Martian Alternative July – The Girl, the Alien, and Me September – Newly conceived novel, working title The First Travelers November – Jeep Thompson and the World Jumpers
That schedule, and that pace, would give me time to release two or three more novels before that magic birthday in March 2023, so I have some wiggle room if I commit to only six novels. But my goal is to set an ambitious schedule and stick to it.
You may ask, if making announcements like this in the past has shifted my procrastination into overdrive, why am I announcing this? Hell, I don’t know. Another topic for that therapist.
The heroine of his story looked over from her exile. “Now, boss? You want to hear the rest of the story now?”
“Pretty soon,” he promised. “Pretty soon.”
… or WAS it a promise? He’d been here before — trying to figure out his impulse to procrastinate, the fear of accomplishing the task, the certainty the story would not turn out as good as he wanted it to be. Why did he let that stop him every time?
When he was a child, the act of creation was the reward, the scribbles on paper telling stories or pulling songs of the ether was all he needed, and every so often something would really sing back to him. Even now a captured thought, a seized image, a turn of phrase would give him a private delight in the morning stillness. What was it that had turned the storytelling into a chore?
How could he turn the spigot back on once the flow of words has been closed for whatever reason for so long? The stories had come in spurts, then trickled, and finally dribbled into dryness. “Oh yeah, that’s normal,” the writing mentors insisted. “Just plow through.” “How?!” “Just do it.” “What?!?!”
He supposed it did make sense. If you give yourself no choice except to sit there motionless, you fill the page with anything until something emerges from the chaos. You become the infinite monkeys at typewriters and Hamlet is waiting in there to come out randomly. Is it as easy as that? Fill infinite pages and look back to find the accidental genius? It feels like that some days.
“Now, boss? Want to hear what comes next?”
He realized he could rescue his heroine faster by sitting down and putting words on the screen than by sitting on the couch watching this week’s game.
Did Eliot mean to write “The Waste Land” or was he tired of the blank page?
