Quiet of Thanksgiving, writing methods, freeform, author publicity stunts...
11/24/11
2:23p
She had decided not to go anywhere for Thanksgiving. She wanted to stay home to feel the stillness of the holiday. But she had just spent almost two hours trying to update the time allotment for her phone. She had finally, by luck, managed to track down what the error was that was preventing the update to take place. It was a good thing she had figured it out. There had been some out of date information, but nothing indicated there was out of date information on record. By chance she happened upon it. She would have continued to have the problem had she not found out what was wrong. That would have caused other problems.
She was still having good feelings from her marathon Nanowrimo writing session from the previous day. She had worked straight through for five hours and written about 5000 words. She had been wandering in the world of the writing for all that time. It had crossed her mind this day, that one reason she might want to go out for Thanksgiving was to go get some stories to write about. But she just did not feel up to being immersed in other people on this day. A holiday like this meant that most people were out with loved ones celebrating being together. That made a holiday have its own very special peacefulness. She loved to simply soak in that atmosphere. Being in the middle of activity amongst others, masked the stillness of the day.
Now she would have to fish for things to write about again. Nothing to speak of had come up in her life since writing though her marathon session. She had tried to find out more about the continuous writing method. This had led her to an advertisement for information on how to write a novel very quickly. The instruction advertised was intriguing, but also quite expensive. She'd done some sleuthing to see if she could find the same information in other ways. This had led to other information about writing fiction, and just writing in general.
She was able to find out it was not Guy De Maupassant who'd promised to write a novel from a suspended glass cage. It had been Georges Simenon. The event was to occur outside the Moulin Rouge, a well known club in Paris. It was not a bank, but a newspaper that was to sponsor the event. The newspaper folded before the event could occur. Simenon at least made some money just for agreeing to accept the proposal. It was to have taken place over 72 hours rather than 36 hours. And he did later on set up shop at some public location where he banged out a novel on his typewriter, much as if he were a performer. Maupassant's own publicity stunt had been to send up a hot air balloon advertising the title of his latest short story.
She wanted to dream up publicity stunts just for the fun of it, even if she never put any into play. Dreaming up publicity stunts or events seemed like a good brainstorming practice. Like coming up with a list of story line ideas.
She had thought more about the possibilities lying in her boxes of stuff. There was the old yellow plastic sewing kit whose latch did not hold properly. It held very old spools of threads, a package of assorted sewing needles that she'd gotten when she was quite young, several Mexican silver thimbles, an ordinary thimble, among lots of other sewing things.
There was a box of blue glass - bottles, glasses, vases - she'd been collecting to use as still life material for her art classes. She just realized that now she could do still lifes with the class, now that they were meeting at her home. When class was at different locations, it was too unwieldy to cart objects about for still lifes. With a still life there was always the problem of which view would be the good view. In art school the still lifes had always been big enough that such things did not matter. If she were to do this, she would also have to have a different seating arrangement. This was something to consider though. She was also in a better position to make a still life and take photos of it. There was so much more room in this apartment to do this in.
3:14p
The continuous writing method was called 'freeform writing'. She had tried this a long time ago and had never mastered it. She just balked at doing it even though she believed it probably had a lot of merit. She had always done her own version of it, which allowed her to pause and reflect and to correct as she went along. To get more freeform into the writing one would have to use an instrument that was not as easy to correct as one went along - a pen or a typewriter. There the difficulty in correcting would inhibit the desire to correct. The slowness of the method would also allow thoughts to come out more thoughtfully she supposed. It did not seem that one could ever truly think aloud in writing, just because thoughts had to come faster than one could write or speak. One could only approximate the experience.
She had stopped using a pen for her journals a long time ago. She used a pencil - not because pencil was erasable, but because pen faded so much over time, and quickly.
She wanted to look back in her journal for last Thanksgiving to see how she had felt about it then. She suspected she had wished she had stayed home. She would check this later.
3:29p 962 words
She was dragging now and again run out of anything to write about. Her eyes were getting glazed as she found herself almost wanting to drift off to nap. Luckily this was not at the stage of overwhelming yet. She just needed something or she would have to get up. She was also getting chilled as the sun headed low to the horizon. The heater had not kicked in yet. When it did, it would get too hot in the room. There, it had just kicked in.
She had also finally been able to dig up that letter with her economics question that she had sent to her economist friend. The letter had been very hard to track down. The initial correspondence expressed that he had written a couple of novels, but here she had not been able to find out anything more about them. When she had known him so long ago, it had seemed like he had wanted to be a writer. She wondered what else had become of that, how and why he had become an economist instead.
3:46p
The sun was just going down and the sky above the western horizon was getting overcast. It was not yet dusk. She had not heard what the weather forecast was to be. She would check on that after she finished her writing, if she ever could. To be stuck sitting here with nothing to write, was a bit like having to sit at dinner while she chewed the last pieces of gristle and tried to swallow it. This was one of the things she had had to do when her stepdad came on the scene. Dinners changed then. He did not allow her to be picky with her food, a bad habit that meant that she had written her own ticket over what she would or would not eat, until she was almost eight years old. That seemingly endless time of endlessly chewing the same bite of meat and trying to get it swallowed had seemed like torture back then. She did not remember how she grew out of it. She must have somehow figured out how to bury the dreaded food in mashed potato or applesauce so that it could go down the gullet easier. For awhile the parents were on the Adele Davis health food kick. They would often have liver or kidneys for dinner. Her mother did not know how to cook liver so that it was tasty. The worst tasting food of this health food kick was the brewer's yeast 'tiger's milk' her Dad made. The taste of that could not be disguised inside of mashed potato or applesauce. It was a drink and she found it revolting if not downright nauseating. She could remember the taste of it now.
4:05p 1431 words
This was going very slowly.
Tomorrow she would have to write two press releases, on top of her Nano writing. She had to write up what the December kids drawing classes program would be, and what the adult program would be. She just realized that she had not checked with the library about room availability for the Monday time slot in which she held her adult classes. The library was closed tomorrow. For all she knew, the newspapers were closed as well. She could not send out a press release without having that information confirmed. She would have to get the material written, approve the time on Saturday and send it out then. One paper at least would accept it. Perhaps that material had been due yesterday. There were images to prepare for it as well.
Now she wanted to know more about writer's block. Just what was it. Her dad had said it was when one was trying to write about something one did not know about. She thought it was when one got stuck and did not know how to resolve a problem in story line. Or bigger then that - where one did not know how to begin writing something, or did not have anything to write about, or did not have anything one wanted to write about.
She had tried to find out more about Charles Dickens writing method. All she could learn was that he wrote for serial publication. He was continually publishing what he wrote. Also that he worked closely with the illustrators. He gave them story lines in advance so that they could be working the illustrations up in advance. He had to supply them with character descriptions so the illustrations would match what he had written. Her friend had told her there was no evidence of how he had kept track of all the plot lines. No one knew whether he had outlines all worked out to the end of a book. If he did not, then he would have been forced to find resolutions to those 'written into a corner' places because there was no taking back what had already been published.
4:28p
She was intrigued with the idea of doing this, though she did not believe it was something she would want to carry out when it came right down to it. She first wanted find out if it were possible to learn how to make up and write a story. A possible practice would be to make up a daily tiny story to do it as a game. Try such an exercise for a month.
4:32 p 1873 words
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