Marathon writing, teaching art classes, cooking, word counts, making up for lost writing time, an unfinished children's book, story creation by storyb

Marathon writing, teaching art classes, cooking, word counts, making up for lost writing time, an unfinished children's book, story creation by storyboard ...
11/23/11
12:42p

She was starting her Nanowrimo writing session late in the day again and she had had to miss two days of writing this week. Much as she had thought she would be able to make up a day's writing by starting the work later in the day after the morning's obligations had been done, it had not worked out that way. It was as if the obligations consumed too much emotional energy to have anything left to put towards the writing for the Nano project. Since that writing was done with such a different attitude and voice than her usual writing, she found it could not be done in bits and pieces with the extra time pressure hanging over her. Or, at least in her mind, it had itself become an obligation that restricted the free flow needed for wriiting. She found it inhibiting in a way. Once that much time had been spent doing things seemingly willed upon her from outside of her, she simply balked at answering any further demands, even if they had been self imposed demands. At that point they had crossed from the border of desire to the border of demand.

She had been worrying how she would be able to make up the word deficit. Two days missed and this day still was three days of writing to make up. It had taken her a long time to catch up from those first two days missed. And how would she fare next week when the same schedule problems came up again? Could she possibly write enough extra every day to make it through?

And why was it so important to make this challenge? She realized why. Because she knew how much she had been writing all along over the years. She wanted visible proof so that she could say to the world she could do this. She wanted to be able to say it as an artist, not as a 'writer'. A writer should be able to do this easily. But an artist doing it was a different story.

This was much the same as years ago, when she had first taken up bread baking. She had tried a few recipes and then decided she would make bread without a recipe. After that, she always made bread without a recipe, and almost every other food. It was not that she had memorized the recipe. She simply made it up. She would try to write her own recipes after making something she particularly liked. These were often recipes of remembered and guessed measurements because her cooking was usually done by feel and 'eyeball'.

She hated having to write by word count. It put the focus so much on whether she was there yet, instead of on what she wanted to say. It put too much pressure on counting. The counting pressure made her feel the writing had to be done as fast as possible. That made her stay away from certain topics. There were already enough topics to stay away from.

She had seen the other day that at least her having classes gave her material to write about. So did going out on errands. That had put a new light on obligations. If she could think of obligations that way, what possibilities that might open up. The other problem with the 'obligation' was the pressure of their time constraints. She hated that pressure of things having to be done by a certain time. But there were times that having to be ready by a certain time was fun. Perhaps the problem was not the time constraint, but that one had not fully embraced a committment as being of one's own desire and choosing. If one had the smallest amount of resentment about it, the feeling that one had to do it because of outside demand rather than inner desire, one balked and rebelled. How did one change how one looked at a thing? Could one just will that away? Or did one have to find a way to look at it so that one could see that it was truly one's own choice AND that one always had the choice to do the thing or not.

Then perhaps the problem was also that one was accepting for oneself a judgment that one did not measure up if one did not do whatever particular thing one felt one was supposed to do. Those were mostly expectations one had for oneself or presumed that others held for one. Why was one unwilling to believe that for the most part others would accept the expectations one held firmly for oneself. When one thought it was others holding the expectations, it was simply because one's self was holding those expectations. Was this because one did not want to be responsible for making the choice to stand apart? One wanted to be able to put the blame elsewhere for why one did or did not do a thing, or pursue a thing?

This morning she had hit upon an idea for how to get around the word count. It could be considered a certain kind of cheating. She had looked through her hand written journal, which she had been keeping all along with doing the Nano project, though not as frequently as usual, and found that she had written there almost 17000 words in November. She could transcribe entries and insert them into the Nano piece. She had no idea how redundant it would be. It was a completely different kind writing. It could be inserted chronologically or as a appendix. There were several others ways to do it too. She did want to at least test how hard it was to transcribe a section of it.

1:27p

It was nice to have the diary transcriptions as a back-up plan, but she felt that part of the Nano challenge for her had been to see if she could write this spontaneously and as fast as possible. No she did not like it, but she wanted to see it through in the manner she had set out, if possible. Doing it that way had brought up such interesting results and revelations, that she wanted to find out if there were anymore there by carrying the process out for the full term. Theoretically one should have been writing every day. That rule had been broken several times.

Had she already told about the article she had found, on publicity stunts that writers had been pulling over the centuries to promote their work. There was one author who had advertised that he would write a novel with non-stop writing in 36 hours while suspended in a glass cage in a bank. The story of this challenge event to be had attracted a lot of attention in the public eye. The author did not have to follow through on it because the bank went bust before the event was to take place. Perhaps they had hatched the plan as a joint promotion to help the bank as well. Perhaps the author had known this would happen and could therefore feel free to say he would do such a thing. She thought the author was Guy De Maupassant. Perhaps that was the reference her father had made when he spoke of that working method of non-stop writing being followed by certain authors during a certain time in history. Had that particular author been a novelist though? She thought he just wrote short stories. She wanted to look further into this.
1:46 p 1267 words

So many things had been running through her head that she had thought she could relate in the writing, but as often happened, they disappeared from mind or lost interest when she sat down to the actual writing. How on earth did those marathon writers of long ago imagine and write for such a long period of time? Or had no one actually done it. It was like the senators who stood up to do the philibusters. They had to just keep talking non stop, even though no one was listening she guessed. She had seen that movie where Jimmy Stewart played a character who had to stand hours on end in his philibuster mission. She could remember nothing about the movie other than him standing there continually in his attempt to hold the fort and keep talking. What cause had he been fighting for?

She could not even write non-stop for one half hour it seemed. She still wanted to try the practice of doing that. She had to keep that purpose separate from the Nano project. That would be a separate skill to practice. She had no idea how she would practice it. It was too easy to stop when one sat writing one one's own using a machine that one could so easily correct with. She thought she had heard about devices that taught one how to keep writing continuously.

Could one do it if one did it as a promotional event? She did not believe she would have the guts to try that public a challenge. It certainly was easier in a way to follow through with a goal if one announced it publicly, if one did it in public. Perhaps that was also the purpose of the obligations she accepted, though she had refused to see them that way. She did often look at her art classes that way. it was when it seemed like she had not really created anything herself in a given class that she felt her efforts were wasted. She needed to consolidate her documentation of her lessons more so that they continued to create a body of work as she continued with them. What kind of quick piece of art work could she make at the minimum within each of her adult classes? She thought the raccoons painting might have been a breakthrough, even though she had waited so long to finish it. The direct style of painting, without an underdrawing was a necessary aspect to this if she was to get it done. The challenge of it was to paint without drawing beforehand. To paint with minimal correction. This was a skill she felt had a lot of room for development still.

2:09p 1724 words

How did those marathon writers make up a long story on the spot? This question was intriguing her. Could she find out more about how they did it? She wanted to run off and find out about it right away. She hoped she would remember to check into this later.

She had had two art classes the previous day. The private adult class did a turkey drawing painting lesson. They were to start off by trying to paint the subject in somewhat flat designed shapes like a stencil design, in a dark monochrome. They were to try the figure twice, or do two different figures, Then they were to do it in reverse - to flip the image around. That was a difficult skill. She found it difficult to do. The littlest interruption could throw off one's concentration and mess up how one was painting it. One was also painting this directly - no under drawing, no correction. They moved on to creating the turkey figure using calligraphic flourish strokes. The problem was that they were using brushes instead of pens or otherwise stiff tools. The brush did not like to loop around in its path. Perhaps it was because the were using the floppier rigger brush. A rigger brush was made for painting long thin lines, like those of boat rigging. If one tried to loop it back on its path, the hairs caught on the paper and broke the curve of the loop. It might be different with a small 'round' brush, but those could not make long thin marks. They started out thin and quickly widened. Neither could a smaller brush hold enough paint to make a a long stroke.

They had worked hard doing the turkey painting exercises. It had taken them longer than she had realized by the time she had checked the clock to see how much time they had left. Their turkey paintings were to be painted as they wished. She was able to finish her turkey painting much before the others this time. Usually she was so far behind them. That was perhaps part of her resentment over these classes. The students were always rushing through every exercise it seemed. It was as if they did not understand anything about practicing. She would get absorbed in whatever the practice was and they would be waiting for what they were supposed to do next. They did not know how to work at improving a skill on their own. She felt at her wits end in trying to communicate how to practice a skill. She could not accept that this concept of practice and skill improvement could not be understood.

This time she had finished a little painting before the students had finished theirs. She had started packing up her painting gear as they continued working. She had announced also that they were already past the appointed ending time of the class. Never mind that the students always came late to class. She supposed somewhere that was a precedent she had allowed to continue.

There was another thing that she felt troubled by. One of the students had said that day that coming to class was important because it kept the dream of artistic self expression alive. It was the one place of self sanctity through/from which art could and did emerge.

2:44p 2285 words

She was aching to find out more about those marathon fiction writers and how they could possibly make up one story over such a condensed time period. Perhaps it was no different than people playing a long chess game together. Did they play chess for such extended times? It seemed like there were other games that people played over many hours in one stretch. She also wanted to find out what had been written about whether one could learn the skill of how to make up stories in the first place.

Had she described how she had gone about doing a simple story that first time? She had similarly wanted first to find out if she could. Back in those days she had been intrigued with the idea of being able to write and illustrate at least one children's book. But she had felt at a loss about making up a story. She had no idea how to go about it. Somehow she got the idea she could start by making some thumbnail sketches, in a little storyboard form - just to make a story visually. This could be the simplest of stories. So she started her storyboard thumbnails and had been immediately able to scribble down some text for each sketch as it came out. The text and basic image ideas had come out hand in hand. She had worked up enough scenes to fill the requirements of a basic book printing in those days. She had worked up the first few scenes in a more formal illustration style. Soon after, when she went to a talk by a children's book editor from a well known publishing house, she had learned that certain kinds of story endings were considered nono's by editors. Her story had that kind of ending - ...and then the hero woke up. So, she was stuck on how that story would resolve itself. The illustrations that she had carried out for it, she had been selling all along as greeting cards. She always had to apologize how these images had been meant for a story she had started, a story that had been pushed way to the back of the stove for such a long time now.

It had now been already a few years ago that she had finally pulled out that story again and taken further steps with it. She had just been browsing her old art work and come across the scribbled storyboard, as she did periodically, and looked once again wistfully at it. This time however, she realized that nowadays there was such a thing as letting readers put their own endings to stories. That was enough to give her ideas for actions she could take on the story/book. First she wanted to take just the rough sketches and reproduce them in larger format so that they could stand alone as a book dummy, draft, or even something people would enjoy having in that form. If an artist's sketches or sketchbooks could be sold, why not a little series of story sketches? She had followed through with the basic reproductions of the sketches. From there she set about making larger ink drawings in a loose style, rather than in the intricate style of her first few illustrations. She saw that these drawings would also be good coloring pages. She had worked steadily through the scenes making them all as coloring pages. She wanted to be able to have these drawings as a small easily produced volume. One could make such a volume, and copies of it, in the most basically accessible methods. She had completed all the drawings. All that was left for producing a coloring book was those final mechanical set-up details that she had allowed to hold her up because she hated that part. She had to let those drawings see the light of day. They had been out of sight for too long.

As for the ending of that story, just the other day she remembered suddenly, "Wait a minute, didn't Alice in Wonderland wake up from her fantastic dream?" . And what about The Wizard of Oz? Did not Dorothy wake up from the delirium of an illness?

3:30p 2989 words

It was looking like there was a possibility that she might be getting back on schedule with the writing. She wanted to break to eat a lunch, but that could be too much interruption. There was a small sandwich she had leftover from her breakfast preparation that was waiting for her still. It could wait a bit longer.

She had made no real arrangements, no real decision about plans for Thanksgiving Day. There were a few possibilities for where she could go if she wanted, but she thought she wanted to stay home and be in the atmosphere of stillness and peacefulness that holdays so universally celebrated seemed to exude. Yes, she enjoyed celebrating Thanksgiving with others, but more and more she had felt that sense of obligation in having to run off at a a certain hour to be somewhere else. People never seemed to really sit down and be together truly attending to each other.

The children's drawing class had gone very nicely the previous day. The topic had been Thanksgiving Feasts and Cornucopias. One family had arrived just at class start time so they had begun the class. Others had drifted in later. One very large family came. This was a family that had come only a few times over the years, usually around the same time of year. She had seen them at the store and suddenly recognized them - "Hey! You're that big family!". She reminded them about the class, that it was still going.

They had trooped in, including the three year old who had been a baby the last time they'd come. She asked Mother how the little one would be. The little one loved to draw Mother assured her. This group of kids, especially the little ones, were quite attentive and focused in their work. That had been a delight. So often there were such problems with three year olds. As she saw it, it was because the children were over indulged, coddled, and interfered with. Here were little kids who could concentrate, who could content themselves. Her Thanksgiving feast had been that day in the drawing of it and in the coming together of that group of children and adults enjoying each other's company as they drew images of the bounty and celebration.

3:58p 3374 words

Now she felt she had really had nothing left to ponder in writing for the day. She could imagine what she might have for dinner. She could describe what she had had for dinner the past two days - it had been the same both days since it was certain foods that had to be used up then. It had been a simple wholewheat spaghetti cooked in chopped stewed tomatoes with a bit of canned artichoke hearts and french cut green beans. If one cooked this with just enough liquid the pasta could cook in the sauce liquid and the whole would cook down to a proper consistency. It needed a bit of vinegar to stretch the tomato taste since this was stewed tomatoes rather than actual tomato sauce. She had put in a bunch of the fresh basil chopped, some garlic granules, beef boullion, and a bit of olive oil. When it was cooked - she'd let it cook a bit too much so that it had gotten stuck to the pot - she put cheddar cheese and grated parmesan on top of the mess in a bowl and covered it so that the cheese melted. Very tasty though this time she had added some brown sugar. It was a touch too much, almost spoiling the balance. Sugar needed to be in good balance with how acidic the dish was.

This evening she had to cook the turkey burger. If she did not eat it, there was still time to freeze it. This was the day it was either to be eaten or frozen.

She was really grasping at straws now. She had made it past her minimum word quota. There was a bit of a word count credit now that she had caught up on the two missed days' worth, but it was only good to add to the writing owed for this day. She could make up the difference and she would be at a 0 balance. Why should it matter that she have a credit. This was looking like it was as obsessive a counting game, a scoring game, as people's obsession with being at whatever money balance of thing balance they thought they should be at.

At the library last night, she'd gotten involved in a somewhat political discussion, or gripe session, that a friend of hers and one of the librarians were engaging in. She had a different view than they did. She tried initially to share it, to play devil's advocate, but soon realized she had better just listen. They were very emotionally caught up in their views. This was all about economics, polarized religious beliefs among family members, the financial state one was now in and how one had to keep working because one did not have the financial security to be able to retire. They were also upset because they felt they had been sold a bill of goods. They wanted what they thought they had been promised.

4:30 p 3874 words

It was dark now. The road still sounded wet out there. They had again not gotten the snow storm forecast. She had no inclination to go out even if it was no longer raining and/or snowing. Wet roads would probably soon ice up. The one thing she had felt she really should have on hand and which she had been out of for days now, was the delicious raisins she liked. She usually only bought them at Thanksgiving time because she needed them to make her traditional cranberry sauce. She had bought them last year but never made the sauce. Instead she'd gotten into the habit of eating the raisins as a tasty snack. One mouthful and she would have to eat several more mouthfuls. No raisins and there would certainly be no special cranberry sauce. She just did not want to go through all that cooking production. All she ever made for Thanksgiving was her special mashed yams, and special cranberry sauce - both recipes she had reconstructed from her favorite dishes that her best friend's mother made at their Thanksgivings. For years she had gone to their house for Thanksgiving and had the fondest memories of those times. This was a friend from high school. She guessed she'd stopped going to their house for Thanksgiving when her job at the bakery required her to work on the holidays. It had always been fun to work on the holidays. Working at a bakery meant one was part of many people's holiday in a way.
4:46 p
Further Tday traditions? She could continue in this line if she returned to this section of writing later in the evening. She never looked at the previous day's writing though. She had to remember on her own what lines of thought or story she wanted to continue to tell about. It had to come upon her. She was possibly repeating some stories too.

4:50 pm 4201 words

She had made a big mistake in the word count. She had misread it and thought she was so much further ahead than she was. She discovered this when she updated the word count and found she had so much less than the previous count. Now there was just a very manageable amount left to complete the three days and still have the credit she had managed to build up. She was laughing at what the writing resorted to by the end of a session. What ridiculous things one turned to writing about, just because one kept on looking to see how far one had gotten, It was like the children trapped in a car travelling long distance to the family vacation, with the endless question of "Are we there yet?" or "How much further?"

Where else could she travel now? How much further could she travel? All for the sake of travelling a certain distance, and of getting somewhere, rather than watching where one was going or attending to the beauty one was passing through. This was what people did with their lives too. Her library friends had been following the prescribed rule of working hard all along at work one did not know if one enjoyed and assuming that the day would come when one could upon retirement pursue the interests one really wanted to engage in. They were upset because it no longer looked like there would be a retirement at which one would be able to do those long put off interests. Why did people wait though? Why did people believe they had to wait? That was something she found disturbing. She had taken more of a risk than others in that way, but she too was caught up in not daring to believe she could do the thing without a safety net. Why couldn't this also be approached as a challenge - like doing the Nano challenge? She wanted to consider this.

What challenge could she set herself that would be in keeping with something she really wanted to see if she could do. The way she'd set up that proposition for herself about doing the boat painting, finding the owner, and selling it.

She could for example do some new series of art works along her more desired lines, to be done within one month, to be further produced and made available to others in such a way that she did not have to maintain any product inventory, but to set a goal that she wanted to make a certain income with it - just to see if she could. She would have to brainstorm a list of possible ways for this new image series to earn income.

Perhaps she do the images hand in hand with a story. The other story would have to wait yet again. Was she going off starting another project? This part happened too often it felt like. Was it really a problem to leave things unfinished? Did it really matter? What in life was ever really finished when it came right down to it? This was another question she would have to ponder further.

5:25p 4730 words

Now her arms were getting numb from being in this constantly held forward position. She was so close - she felt compelled to continue until she had finished the three days worth of writing.

The next question was whether that would leave her so oversaturated that she would not be able to write on the next day?

What else could she possibly write about now? The looking around the room for writing triggers did not work. ...

Another thing she wanted to do as soon as she could get to it was to retrieve a letter she had written to an economist friend. This was an old friend from her hometown that she had reconnected with just momentarily. She had not known until then that he had gone on to become an economist. She had posed in her letter the many questions she had about economics, along with her own theories, of which she knew that she was not qualified to be airing, but no one had ever given her solid enough reasons to think differently than she did. She had asked her dad, the economist, about these questions. He had either not heard them correctly or not heard them at all. His answers had been completely unsatisfactory. They had seemed to make magical solutions to the question - a rationale that was magical thinking.

ooh she had not recorded the last stopping time. It had been around 5:45 p she thought. Yes! she'd figured out she could pin the time down.

4982 words

She had set up her dinner to cooking. There were sliced red potatoes cooking with spinach, chicken boullion, curry powder, splash of vinegar, and water to cover. Once cooked she would add cheddar cheese to melt on them. She had warmed up a glass of red wine from the bottle of wine that she kept stored in the fridge. She had still to sautee the turkey burger. It would be a delicious dinner.

6:53p 5059 words