NaBloPoMo 5: Writing in My Sleep

Sleep has a ridiculous effect on my creativity. I love to stay up late, and I can do a lot of things when I'm up past my bedtime, but writing well isn't one of them.

That being said, I'm not sure exactly how I pulled off NaNoWriMo last year as well as I did. I mean, it's certainly not hard for me to generate 50,000 words in a month — and not only did I do that but I also knocked out 30 blog posts that month — but I was actually happy with what I wrote. (Well, not the blog posts — they were crap. But the novel I still like very much.) I know I had the help with a lot of caffeine, and of course there was all that leftover Halloween candy. For some reason, Laura bought a ludicrous amount of mini Tootsie Pops, and I pretty much lived on them during November 2007. I'm not exactly sure how Chris Baty chose November as the best month for NaNoWriMo, but having the marathon kick off with an infusion of refined sugar certainly helped me.

If I'm really gonna churn out words — words that I can be proud of, whether they are for work or for "pleasure" — I need a good amount of sleep. Naps can be very helpful — even a five-minute power-nap can make a huge difference. (In fact, I often come out of those catnaps with the solution to a problem I was having with the work, or with a whole new scene or sequence of scenes almost fully worked out in my head, waiting for transcription.) But if I'm serious about kicking some fiction ass, I need a good eight to ten hours under my belt.

This is part of what has made this year more difficult: I've been working a second freelance job that involves a lot of reading, writing and thinking. So after the girls have gone to bed and I've taken care of the most important cultural duty (watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report), I have to dig into the work on this other job. By the time that is done, I have no energy left for more creative pursuits.

My mom's favorite line recently has been: "Take care of yourself first; the writing will be there waiting for you when the right time comes." That's very sweet. Sane, even. But it's hard for me not to feel like every day not spent writing is one less day I'll have in my life to complete the stuff I'm doing. I want to keep writing!

It's a sad irony that I want to draw on my life as inspiration for good writing, but life keeps getting in the way of my writing.

It's getting more real.

Saturday was the Chicago-area kickoff party for National Novel Writing Month. It was bizarre for me — mainly because this introvert actually attended an event where I knew not a single soul. It turned out to be a pretty cool event, if only to get the opportunity to check out the Uptown Writers Space, which I've wanted to do for some time.

I quickly gravitated toward other NaNoWriMo virgins like myself . . . or perhaps most of the people there were newbies, I'm not sure. We immediately talked about how we discovered NaNoWriMo, how difficult we thought it was going to be, how much prep (if any) we had done. I was pretty shocked to discover that, of the five people in our little chat circle, I was by far the most "prepared." Three of the others had no clue what they would be writing come midnight 11/1. One had a vague idea — basically a title — and a setting. And that was it.

I put "prepared" in quotes above because I'm not sure that it's wise to be too prepared for NaNoWriMo. By actually having some character studies and a vague plot outline, I wonder if I'm already narrowing my options, painting myself into a corner, and preparing to go blank when things don't seem to be going the way I expected. There should be no surprise that this is a metaphor for issues in my life (especially my creative life), where I have always struggled with the idea of improvising when things go pear-shaped from how I had planned it. Maybe this will be my great battle in November.

I wouldn't have been as prepared as I am if it weren't for the hour-and-a-half I spent on the El on Friday night when I headed downtown for a going-away party for a friend. (For those of you keeping score, that was two social events in a 24-hour period — a level of social involvement I don't believe I've achieved since college.) On the ride to and from downtown, with the accompaniment of 39 songs shuffling on my iPod, I got down sketches of my main character, his father, his love interest, her daughter, the daughter's best friend/unofficial guardian. I also got down on paper for the first time some of the many "moments" and scenes that have been flying inside my head.

Then, Sunday morning, when Zuzu got up insanely early, I settled her in front of Go, Diego, Go and I started outlining my plot. Half an hour later, I was petrified: while I have a beginning, middle, and end, ther are enormous gaps in between. You know, where the real stuff happens.

But Chris Baty assures me (via his book) that I don't need to worry about this. I need to let that fear go, trust that the magic will happen in the middle of the night. And I'm going to trust Baty — though I have to admit that this is sounding suspiciously like the "think method" espoused in Meredith Willson's The Music Man.