seekingferret (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seekingferret) wrote2010-11-01 05:03 pm
seekingferret) wrote2010-11-01 05:03 pm
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NaNoWriMo began today. What fun!
I don't take NaNo very seriously, which is helpful. Wordcount is way more important to me than quality. Humor's also a plus. I like writing things where I can grab a snippet and share it with people and make them laugh. And I've been on a fairly serious post-modernism kick of late, what with working through Midnight's Children, Tristram Shandy, and Infinite Jest, not to mention various less voluminous tomes by Percival Everett, Roberto Arellano, Charles Yu, Colson Whitehead, etc...
So my NaNo novel this year is titled "The Great American Metanovel," and it's just a venue for me to experiment with language and characters for thousands and thousands of words. And make bad jokes. I've written my first 2000 words, introduced my narrator and her boyfriend Hamlet, and mucked around with metafictional tropes for a while.
It's totally writing by feel, and it's kind of terrifying. I've already hit several moments where my fingers outpaced my brain, then I stopped, contemplated deleting something unexpected, and decided to keep it. That's how my narrator became female. That's how Hamlet became mute. I have no idea where this story is heading, strongly doubt it can be sustained for the whole month at this pace, but it's exhilarating as hell to be embarking on an adventure like this. In some ways it's more surrealist than post-modernist, but I'm okay with that. The surrealists were accommodating of metafictions, too.
One of the other cool surprises? I'd planned to be digressive, because a)digressions are good for word length and b) digressions are a trope of metafiction, but I actually came up with an in-story motivation for the digressions that fills every ramble about something irrelevant with deep meaning: my narrator is trapped between the beginning of the book and its ending, and she knows that the longer she spends in the middle, the longer she gets to live. Digressions are her way of stalling for more time to live. It's a shockingly effective metaphor to just stumble on randomly.
I don't take NaNo very seriously, which is helpful. Wordcount is way more important to me than quality. Humor's also a plus. I like writing things where I can grab a snippet and share it with people and make them laugh. And I've been on a fairly serious post-modernism kick of late, what with working through Midnight's Children, Tristram Shandy, and Infinite Jest, not to mention various less voluminous tomes by Percival Everett, Roberto Arellano, Charles Yu, Colson Whitehead, etc...
So my NaNo novel this year is titled "The Great American Metanovel," and it's just a venue for me to experiment with language and characters for thousands and thousands of words. And make bad jokes. I've written my first 2000 words, introduced my narrator and her boyfriend Hamlet, and mucked around with metafictional tropes for a while.
It's totally writing by feel, and it's kind of terrifying. I've already hit several moments where my fingers outpaced my brain, then I stopped, contemplated deleting something unexpected, and decided to keep it. That's how my narrator became female. That's how Hamlet became mute. I have no idea where this story is heading, strongly doubt it can be sustained for the whole month at this pace, but it's exhilarating as hell to be embarking on an adventure like this. In some ways it's more surrealist than post-modernist, but I'm okay with that. The surrealists were accommodating of metafictions, too.
One of the other cool surprises? I'd planned to be digressive, because a)digressions are good for word length and b) digressions are a trope of metafiction, but I actually came up with an in-story motivation for the digressions that fills every ramble about something irrelevant with deep meaning: my narrator is trapped between the beginning of the book and its ending, and she knows that the longer she spends in the middle, the longer she gets to live. Digressions are her way of stalling for more time to live. It's a shockingly effective metaphor to just stumble on randomly.