Further questions of voice, consciousness, identity & writing...

Further questions of voice, consciousness, identity & writing...
11/10/11 11:03am
She thought she was off schedule for her daily Nanowrimo writing session but then realized she had really only been 'on schedule' for two days. What had 'on schedule' meant for her? It just meant she had found herself getting to work at a much earlier time than she had previously done. The day before though she had had to make up the big deficit of word production from having had to miss the previous day, that now she was almost oversaturated mentally. One needed time to regroup or reassemble the self she believed. Especially when, after working for such a prolonged time period, she'd had that experience of accidentally thinking of herself as 'she' instead of 'I' when it was time to be back in her own voice. This had happened a few more times throughout the day. She knew it was just the aftereffects of such concentrated attention to the writing and the staying in character/voice, but still it was an odd feeling.

It was one thing to have the 'writing' play on in her mind during the time between getting up and sitting down to write - the time she prepared breakfast, ate breakfast, and generally got herself ready for the day. That was just in anticipation of what was to come. It was an ongoing imagination of what she saw herself doing. During that time she was too busy with physically attending to the tasks at hand to be able to interrupt to scribble down all the ideas and thoughts that came up. She could only pray they would return when it was time to actually write - pray, trust, have faith. There was so much of it it was impossible to remember it all. It flew by so fast, simply no way to capture it.

She'd looked into 'stream-of-consciousness' writing method or style to find out just what that supposedly meant. One account/article/essay she found explored whether this writing method could be used strictly to write about philosophy instead of writing fiction with it. The author/writer, in defining what stream of consciousness meant, spoke of the problem that would ensue if a writer were to write actual stream of consciousness in the voice of a writer writing - it would then have to include the process of the actual writing. She had not remembered exactly what she had read there but the idea felt very much like what she was doing with this Nano writing. In a way, the idea of stream of consiousness for philosphy, was also aligned with a big part of what she wanted in her writing. Her philosophies and self- realizations or insights of essential realities behind things was what kept her going with her journal writing and was what she wanted to have out there somewhere.

It was another thing to have the third person voice continue on after the daily writing stint. She wanted to be able to trust she could return to her own identity, her own way of being, when her daily writing stint was over. It was unnerving to catch herself referring to herself as 'she' where she would normally have referred to herself as 'I'. 'She' still held its meaning as 'she', a person/being outside herself. It was not that 'she' had suddenly meant 'I'. It was that 'I' could mean the other in real life instead of only in that 'fiction' world. It had started simply as a way to get around the rule of Nanowrimo participation requiring one to write a draft for a new 'novel' within the 30 days of November, She had soon discovered that just the act of writing in this third person voice made it real make-believe, a real fiction. It was believable to her as fiction. It was a parallel reality but not the main shared reality of waking consciousness.

This then brought up new questions of who was one really. It was looking as if one had learned to see or identify oneself as 'I'. This presumably had happened before one could remember being. Now there had been this glimpse of the awareness or being that sat behind the 'I' and the 'she'. That 'I' one could not get properly hold of. One could not experience it in the same way one could experience the usual 'I'. This did not seem to be an 'I' of physical boundaries or existence. It did not feel like it was. If it was not physical, then where was the line between it and other 'I's. Was there a line if it was not made of 'stuff'?

11:50a

She had started a list of possible nouns to use in place of 'she', and had thought of a few more. Artist - did she have that already? Nanowrimoer, NanowrimoAr (Nanowrimo Artist - as in
someone who engages in the art of Nanowrimo, or
an artist who makes an art piece with their Nanowrimo work
a person who does/performs/creates/plays the art of Nanowrimo writing)
Artist Nanowrimoer - an artist who participates in Nanowrimo
Contender
Participant
Beginner
Newbie
Player
possible author/writer/novelist
potential autho/writer/novelist
hopeful
committed
uncommitted
committed one
doubtful writer
skeptic
skeptic writer
unbelieving
agnostic
Nanowrimo agnostic

She had just remembered what she did like about the use of 'she' instead of a character name. She remembered where she had heard a similar usage that gave a certain feel to the world of that writing. It was E.B. White's use of 'the boy' and 'the woman' in his essays on life in Maine. She loved the feeling of timelessness or universal experience almost mythical reality it gave to the essays. They, however, at least had nouns to differentiate their beings from each other. The nouns seemed to mean an essential nature of being rather than a specific individual. One knew in reading that these were probably the real experiences of the author, but just that shift of character naming set that mood.

She simply had not had the time to come up with the right name or noun yet because she had had to start writing immediately if she wanted to do this Nano project. She thought she was getting closer to finding a name. Then there would be the question of would she go backwards to give her a name? That would mean having to change everything that had been written afterwards. No, she would probably have to make up some impossibly ridiculous and unbelievable solution to this.

She had been thinking a lot about the nature of writing vs the nature of making art. Did she have to always state in her thinking whether she meant art as image or arts in general. Every word seemed to have so many levels of meanings. There seemed to be an almost ongoing conflict or tension between the specific and the general in the use of any term or word. Meanings and relationships sprang up everywhere one looked once one started looking. How was one to keep one's direction, one's motion if one saw alternate paths in everything? There was no way one's ordinary thinking could keep all these possibilities straight and decide one's action at any given time if one presumed one had to decide the 'best' course. One could only try to sense one's inner impulse or motion and trust that. If one could give up the idea one needed to choose 'the best', one was free to move.

Did one need to practice sensing that inner motion? One had grown so habituated to other ways of being, that one had long ago lost the trust in that inner motion, except perhaps in certain aspects of one's life. One got feedback that conditioned one to identify with limited ways of being. One came to believe that one's identity was the person one had grown used to being at the earliest age. That was often formed by how others around one had responded and reacted....
this was growing complicated. She needed to step back to where she could think. She was getting lost in the ideas....*

12:38p

There had been another point she wanted to capture in her daily writing. She kept remembering it as she wrote but was always at writing something else. She was sure she would be able to remember it before finishing for the day, since it had come up so often. Now that she felt she needed to finish, the thought had disappeared. If she sat agonizing waiting for it to return she would only be reinforcing the idea that the impulse stream was not to be trusted, that it had to be worried or harried or driven to produce the goods.

It had just returned. What was the difference of making up one's novel on the spot or as one went along, and planning it out ahead of time? How were these two ways really different?* It seems that having an outline or plan means one knows where one is going. But in deciding that, in laying out that plan, that outline, had one known where one was going? At some point one had had to make it up, or, it had just come to one. What difference did it make whether one decided before hand or on the spot? With a plan one could presumably anticipate what one would need, what one would have to do to get there. One never, however, could really anticipate everything before hand. There were always unforeseen circumstances that came up. The benefit of a plan was that it gave oneself the confidence of feeling prepared. It was the confidence and trust in oneself or the nature of things, that got one through a situation. At some point one had to realize that it was an indefinable something that carried one through, not the thing, not the tool, not the technique, not the circumstance. If one believed it was something on the outside, then one had always to rely on the outside. True freedom meant being stripped of any outside means or means that were seen as outside or separate from oneself.*
12:59p

She had been lapsing into writing and thinking rather than trying to write non-stop. That was because her desire to say what she wanted to say had -------- taken presedence over her desire to practice the non-stop writing method. She might never get to doing that now. It would be such a good skill to practice and develop. What if she set aside smaller practice times for that? Perhaps, but she still had to juggle this additional nano writing time when she still had not justified engaging in it beyond its purpose as a meditative practice and a fluency practice.

For this session she'd also been keeping notes on the side of things she wanted to say and things she'd just said - little summaries she guessed they were.

Earlier she had tallied her total output since beginning the writing challenge. She wanted to know how much she needed to make up the deficit from having started two days into the month. She had been writing steadily ahead of the daily quota needed but just one day missed was a huge setback. Here was the matter of trust in the flow of things. Could she trust that the difference would naturally get made up in the process of things? Did it matter whether she actually fulfilled the rules of the game or did it matter more that by participating as much as she did, she was learning and growing from it. There was a lot to be said for accepting the given restrictions of an engagement one decided to take part in. There were always things to be learned by accepting the restrictions of the form. It always stretched one in ways that one did not so readily stretch oneself. Here was the matter of trust again! Could one trust oneself to stretch oneself beyond one's usual comfortable ways? How far did one carry game rules? What were one's intentions in participating in Nano/ the game?

1:17p 2023 words (356 over), (11:03p - 1:17p = 2:14 = 134 min c. 15 wds/min - time for side notes words)