Check it out!

I did hear Katherine Paterson speak, once, at the New York Public Library. Perhaps she was winning some award, I don’t recall. I sat beside Charlotte Zolotow, so it was already a great evening before Katherine Paterson stepped up to the podium, but when she did, she spoke about the nature of the human heart. I was so moved, I’m sure I ran all the way home to my dinky studio apartment and wrote everything down. “Dear Diary; Katherine Paterson is totally awesome!!!”

She totally is.

Also, this fake morning news show segment from The Onion made me laugh. Click on “laugh.”

There. Did you laugh, too?

Remember when you were a kid, and someone read you a story? Countless stories? Didn’t you love how they all ended in the most satisfying way, with the same two bracing words?

Here it is the close of a long November and NaNoWriMo ’09, and my two daughters have won. They met their word count goals and brought their stories around to the place where they could write: The End. In Eliza’s story, ogres are defeated, the antidote is found, and the villain becomes the hero. As for Molly, the character she named and brought to life — Lilac –finally finds the answers. In the end, the girl knows who she is.

My daughters do, too. They’re writers.

Molly, you’re a nanowrimo veteran, having won last year. What has been your experience so far, NaNoWriMo -09? Well, sometimes I’m feeling that I can’t get up and write, but if I just write, I can get unexpected plot ideas. And I’m enjoying nano this year, even more than last year, because I’m older, and have more experience with writing. It’s just really fun.

Unexpected plot ideas? My characters are in a dilemma right now. One of them is an orphan, and she really wants information about her parents. She moved from Florida to New York, and she made a friend named Sydney. But I felt really tired a few days ago and couldn’t think of anything. And suddenly this crazy weird but exciting idea came to me: I’ll have them kidnapped!

That definitely sounds unexpected, Molly! Any tactics for the final week of nano? I’m just going to keep writing, fill in a few scenes that I haven’t filled in yet, but first do the end. (Which I actually already wrote.)

Oh! Can you tell us how it ends?
No.

Fair enough. Although it’s completely irrelevant to nano, do  you think your novel is very good? It’s better than last year’s, but that’s not saying anything. But I actually do like it for the reasons that it deals with some real life problems, as well as being really exciting.

That sounds like a terrific novel, Molly! Thanks for talking with me today. Good luck!

Okay. Now I have to leave and work on my nano.

Right. Me, too.

1) cutting an album (what do I even call that? pressing a cd?),

2) EFP (explosively formed penetrator) roadside bombs, and,

3) the roosting habits of the Little Brown Myotis. (I am already aware that these bats can eat their own weight in mosquitoes every night. That would be like you or me eating thirty pizzas in one go. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but… well I am. It can’t be done. I’d hate to see the Big Brown Myotis bat.)

Screech! Now we’re into week two. My nanoing daughters and I keep saying, hopefully, to each other, “things are going great, and I haven’t even had to use any tricks yet!” By that we mean: nano tricks.

Such as?

Such as having a character read aloud from the 164 – box of Crayons. Many of the colors have two-word names, bonus! Or, having a character walk on and sing all the lyrics to Waltzing Matilda, and then disappear, never to be seen again. A dream sequence. A sudden recollection of a past life. Two past lives.

But here’s really a neat trick. A few weeks ago I saw the (former Oregon resident and) poetDorianne Laux give a reading, and one of the poems she read was called “Cher.” The origin of the poem was a challenge from her husband, the poet Joe Millar. He gave her ten words and told her to use them to write a poem meant to say something she’s been wanting to say but hasn’t. Let’s us try it.

Here are ten words:

1. Peat moss

2. Jellybean

3. Post-it Note

4. Convertible

5. Plausible

6. Switch

7. Tooth

8. Curator

9. Fringe

10. Custard cup

You can try this yourself, or – nano trick! — make your character write the poem. It will probably take your character several tries. Record them all in your novel. Good luck.

Example: the first year I did NaNo, I began to flounder halfway into it. I went for a run along the Esplanade downtown, to clear my head. Running along the west side of the river, I naturally looked over at the east bank. And there, painted in two-foot high (at least!) bright white letters was a name: FRANCES. Frances was the name of my novel’s main character. The name had not been there the day before, and, thanks to Portland’s crack team of graffiti-removal artists, it was gone soon after.

Example: looking around this morning for word-count type texture, I saw a woman dressed entirely in purple, including a pair of purple leather boots. THEN, I saw a completely other woman, running for the bus and dressed head to toe in GREEN, and carrying also a green leather tote.

Another one: A writer I admire, Ron Carlson, said when he begins writing a story, he uses the names Mickey and Doris, at first, just to keep things moving, and he changes the names later, when he knows the characters better. So, I was putting a new character into a story, and I called him Mickey. THE NEXT DAY, I meet this woman, and she introduces herself as Mickey. Then she calls someone over, and she says, “I’d like you to meet my husband, whose name is also Mickey.” I fully expect to meet Doris one day soon.

Finally, my friend Wendy gave her characters, a married couple, some unusual names I can’t remember at the moment, but let’s say they were Mortimer and Crissy. Very soon after that, a couple walks in to where Wendy works, and signs in: Mortimer and Crissy. The pair of them, together. No joke!

I could go on. I have another example about pajama sightings in public.

How about you? Any weird coincidences to report?

My daughter has the right idea, very dialed in with this high-velocity noveling.

She’s only 195 words into her nano, and already the hero/villain (to save time cutting to the chase, one character does double-duty as both good AND evil) has committed the crime, set out on a quest to find the antidote to make it right, and at the moment is riding a Pega-corn (winged unicorn) into combat with a pack of ogres. Wow. You go, high-velocity noveling 6-year-old!

Me? Not zooming along as speedily, plot-wise. Yesterday I left my character in a fencing class, considering the balance between defense and aggression. Zzzzzzzz.

6-year-olds don’t pace themselves, they give it all they’ve got. That’s the way to do it.

Today, I’m going to follow her lead. Hop on a Pega-corn, maybe fight an ogre. But first, coffee.

nano word count: 4,180

Novel Influenza A, H1N1, yes, the swine flu, as has blown its fetid breath through our humble abode, leaving us all weak, pale, and pounds lighter, even our six-year-old, who hadn’t an ounce to spare, and now, only now, soon to be restored to our former health and vigor, and filled with the glory that it is to be alive, we stand, three out of four anyway, stand united, sharpened pencils in pinched fingers, ready to face November and whatnot.

Glad you’re over the hump, SL, but, why so wordy, and not quite true, and, well, badly written?

Oh. Because… it’s National Novel Writing Month.  And every word counts. Literally. All 50,000 of them. They must be counted, and they must add up to 50k.

National Novel Writing Month, in the words of Evil Genius and Founder Chris Baty, is “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.  Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.”

It’s all about the word count. It’s about going forward, to build without tearing down. Kurt Vonnegut: “Practicing an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way of making your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”

My friend Natalie is at a prestigious writers’ retreat this month, practicing her art, but let me just say to my friend, Hey, Natalie, I have my own writer’s retreat right here (see cute T-shirt: CAMP NANOWRIMO: An idyllic writers retreat, smack-dab in the  middle of your crazy life), just me and my mini HP, and a hundred and twenty thousand or so other fellows — so, yeah. (Again, with the wordiness!!)

I thought I might skip NaNo this year, because I’m in the middle of a novel revision (of course I am, I wrote the thing in a MONTH, did you think it wouldn’t need revision??), and, thanks be, I have a lot of contract work, and then there’s this FLU, and such and so on. But, you know, I’d miss the community. For a lot of us typically solitary writers, that’s what it’s all about — this gorgeous web of noveling people in all pockets of the world, including the town of Dinosaur, all supporting each other, and never is heard a discouraging word, all month long. It’s a beautiful thing.

And, thanks to the lovely and talented NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program, my two daughters will be writing novels this month, too. Fully three fourths of my family will be shirking our duties, eating takeout, wearing the same clothes day in and day out, etc. etc. to be nanoing fools this month. That’s three out of four, seventy-five percent, or per cent, three slices of the family pie, three quarters, oh AGAIN with the word count!

Good luck all you nano novel writers out there. The sun has set on Day One. Huzzah and good writing.