THE DEAD Discuss NaNoWriMo_IWSG post

The ghost of Hemingway scowled at his cards.

"Bad hand?" asked the ghost of Mark Twain, his eyes twinkling with mischief.

"Bad season" Hemingway gruffed.  

"Damn NaNoNites are wasting a whole month vomiting out quantity not quality."

"Their choice," I said, looking at a hand full of jokers I was sure Mark had double-dealt me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald sighed and sipped his champagne.  "They are making a gimmick of an art form."

The ghost of Jung frowned at his own cards, 

and I had a suspicion that Mark had jury-rigged another hand.

Jung said, 

"Perhaps it is the herd mentality which possesses mankind.  It can be harmful if the individual gives into it unthinkingly."

I said, "It gives stimulus to many to write each day."

Hemingway chewed his cigar.  

"If you need a kick in the pants to write, you are a wannabe not a writer." 

The ghost of Roger Zelazny said, 

"I made myself write three times during each day and insisted on completing at least a page each sitting.  

Not even close to 50,000 words a month, but I wrote a good many novels.  Even won an award or two."

Hemingway snorted, "And now, you are forgotten."

Roger shook his head.  "Roland still reads me."

Hemingway scowled, "Roland doesn't count."

"You must be talking to my past dates," I smiled 

and then sighed as I drew yet another Joker for the one I discarded.

Mark ignored my dirty look and said, 

"Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, 

unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which your words are trying to describe.  

And to do that, you must live not chain yourself to a desk!"

He lit his own cigar, saying

"I read that NaNo electronic page.  Why they say: 'You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing.'  

Am I the only sane person here to think 'writing a lot of crap' does not sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, 

even if it is November?"


Mark shook his head.

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. 

Lord, to condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence is worthy of a prize just by itself."

He sighed, 
"Anybody can have ideas -- the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."


I said, "They say that they can go back and edit ...."

Hemingway looked like he was going to slug me.  

"I have gone to their site, too.  'The world needs your novel' is their motto.  

The world does not NEED badly thought-through novels.  The world only needs to breathe, eat, and sleep."

Fitzgerald nodded,

"The joy of writing is not in deadlines and word counts, but in taking time to shape your work: 

to sit and let the ideas flow and then, when they ebb away, retreat from your keyboard 

until the next surge washes new fragments of story into your head."


Jung turned to me.  "What do you think, Roland."


"I believe writing is not a sprint but a marathon, 

a way of life for every day of each year, not just a competition for a month.  But that's just me."


Jung stroked his chin.

"I believe this competition, where word counts are paramount, forms bad writing habits. 

Habits such as overusing adjectives or bloating the pages with needless description. 

It takes 28 days to form a habit, Roland, so you can see how November can become a hothouse for writing problems."


I nodded, "Many think that NaNo made writing feel achievable."


Hemingway growled, 

"I put a gun to your child's head and say 'Write 50,000 words or I pull the trigger.'  

You will write that many words.  It is all a matter of motivation.  If you do not burn to write, you are a dreamer not a writer."


Jung frowned,

"No one convinced of the worth of this contest is going to be dissuaded by your words.  

Sad fact actually.  

You see, if their goal is to increase creativity, this contest will not help them.  Research has shown that anticipating evaluation -- 

even the mild stimulus of the Winner's Badge to pin on their electronic newsletter-- 

has a negative effect on creative performance."

Fitzgerald murmured,

"I am concerned for these NaNites. 

I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than they are prepared to pay at present.

 You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. 

This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, 

when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

 This is the experience of all writers. 

It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. 

Ernest’s first stories ‘In Our Time’ went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. 

In ‘This Side of Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

And all of this takes time to distill into just the right magical words to conjure the images in the minds of the readers.  

Throwing them like dice onto the felt of the written page just will not do."

Roger nodded his head.

"Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.

 If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, 

you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, 

so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together"


Mark smiled at me.  "What do you think, Roland?"

I scowled at him.  "I think you've been dealing from a deck of 52 Jokers."

He blew a smoke ring at me.  "That's the story of life, son.  The story of life." 

DEAN KOONTZ talks to NaNoWriMo

{Photo courtesy Steve Z Photography:

http://www.stevezphotography.com/ }

{This post based on two excellent interviews by STRANGE HORIZONS and NOVEL ROCKETS.

Go to these links for much more revelations and tips}:

http://www.novelrocket.com/2007/10/bestselling-author-dean-koontz.html
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20080428/1mccarty-a.shtml 

Stan Getz was doing an evocative version of  "Skylark" as Dean Koontz sat opposite me at Meilori's.

Thanks for agreeing to come here and talk to those who have decided to do NaNoWriMo.

I've read that you will rewrite a page until it's right before moving on, sometimes redoing a draft thirty or forty times. This must make for a slow process. Approximately how long does it take you to write one novel?

I work 10- and 11-hour days because in long sessions I fall away more completely into story and characters than I would in, say, a six-hour day.

On good days, I might wind up with five or six pages of finished work; on bad days, a third of a page. Even five or six is not a high rate of production for a 10- or 11-hour day, but there are more good days than bad.

And the secret is doing it day after day, committing to it and avoiding distractions.

A month--perhaps 22 to 25 work days--goes by and, as a slow drip of water can fill a huge cauldron in a month, so you discover that you have 75 polished pages. The process is slow, but that's a good thing.

Because I don't do a quick first draft and then revise it, I have plenty of time to let the subconscious work; therefore, I am led to surprise after surprise that enriches story and deepens character.

I have a low boredom threshold, and in part I suspect I fell into this method of working in order to keep myself mystified about the direction of the piece--and therefore entertained. A very long novel, like FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE can take a year. A book like THE GOOD GUY, six months.

What kinds of things are you doing during that time:
Writing? Plotting? Rewriting? Outlining? Character development?

I sit down at my desk about 7:30 [a.m.], or 8:30 if it's my turn to walk the dog—9:00 if I also have to polish the alligator—

and I'm there until dinner, because I rarely eat lunch.

When I need an excuse to avoid taking out the garbage, I usually claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, because deadlines aren't a sufficient excuse to deflect Gerda. Why she buys the evil-aliens story, I don't know, but she's never called me on it.

Outline?

I never outline. For me, fiction is character driven, not plot driven, so I start with one or two interesting characters and a brief premise—and then leap off the narrative cliff. On the way down, like a circus clown, I'm desperately opening a series of ever larger umbrellas, hoping to slow my speed of descent and land on both feet.

Character development?

That isn't something I do as a separate task. I don't cobble up lists of a character's favorite foods, habits, preferences in clothing, political attitudes, favorite game shows, or his excuses for not taking out the garbage.

That's all useless.

If characters come alive, they do so by virtue of their actions, their decisions and choices, and it's in the writing that they assume dimension, not in some portrait or capsule biography written prior to launching the book.

Though I was once a Freudian writer, showing how every character's traumatic past shaped the person he became, I have in the '90s become virulently anti-Freudian because I believe it's all bunk, and dangerous bunk to boot.

Freudian-colored writing—which is 99 percent of all fiction in this century—

reduces every character to a victim on some level; and the writer who either consciously or unconsciously uses Freudian dogma to explain his characters' motivations

is reducing the mysterious complexity of the human mind to a monkey-simple cause-and-effect mechanism. Dickens's characters were not given depth by mechanistic psychological analyses of their childhoods;

Freud hadn't yet started to infect the world, and Dickens defined his characters by their actions, by their decisions and choices and attitudes. Some critics won't get what I'm doing, because they're conditioned to looking for certain devices and techniques as signs that characterization is taking place—but, happily, most have not only caught on to it but have supported it as more natural and, ultimately, deeper reaching.

As for plotting . . .

well, this is also something that resolves itself in the process of writing, not in an outline. If I keep the characters moving, keep them thinking and feeling, the plot will evolve as I go. An outline always felt unnatural to me,

and I stopped using one when I began Strangers. Before that, I created outlines, but the books never followed them anyway.

Rewriting is also not a separate task for me. I don't bang out a book, or even a chapter, and then go back to revise it.

I rework every sentence before moving to the next, and then rework every paragraph before moving to the next, and then revise each page twenty, thirty, fifty times before moving on to the next.

When I reach the end of a chapter—which has by that time been revised exhaustively—I then print it out and pencil it three or four times, because I see things on the printout that I don't see on the screen.

By the time I reach the end of the book, every line in it has received so much attention that there's nothing to go back and revise—unless the editor spots a problem that, on reflection, I agree needs to be addressed.

I've sometimes described this method of writing a novel as being similar to the way coral reefs are formed from the accreted skeletons of marine polyps—

though I must admit I've never polled any polyps to see if they agree. Some writers have wondered how I maintain spontaneity when working in this fashion, but it's no problem at all, because you get so intimately involved with the fine details of the story

 that it remains eternally fresh to you on a lot of levels rather than just on the level of plot.

I'm sure all those polyps feel spontaneous and full of life as they form colonies, reproduce, and finally die in the service of creating underwater tourist attractions and providing the raw material for junk jewelry and dust-catching paperweights.


Do you think a new novelist should take the route you did and write some easier to place genre fiction to get their foot in the door or begin with the type of fiction they hope always to write?

Out of the gate, run with what you most love. Starting in a genre--if you don't expect always to stay there--will label you, and the labor needed to strip off a publisher's label, once it has been applied, is Herculean. I know because I've had to reinvent myself more than once.

{Just look at his private library and his 18 year old computer}

WHY DO I HATE NaNoWriMo? CASABLANCA is why.

November is almost here. And so is NaNoWriMo –

which sounds like you trying to ask the dentist to get his pain-inflicting  fingers out of your mouth!

But now to my title.

Ask any screenwriter. 

From experience they know from their point (the start of the process)

to the film being released into cinemas, it takes about 18 months (for a decent movie at least).

The screen writing for TWILIGHT took only 6 weeks, but the filming and touching-up took roughly eight or nine months. 

Yes, I know. Earlier I said it took 18 months … but that was for a decent movie, remember?

And then there is CASABLANCA:

The start of production was on May 25.  

Filming was completed on August 3, and the production cost $1,039,000 ($75,000 over budget) - above average for the time. The film was shot in sequence, mainly because only the first half of the script was ready when filming began.

The film was a solid, if unspectacular, success in its initial run, rushed into release to take advantage of the publicity from the Allied invasion of North Africa a few weeks earlier.

 Despite a changing assortment of screenwriters frantically adapting an unstaged play and barely keeping ahead of production, and Bogart attempting his first romantic lead role,

Casablanca won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Its characters, dialogue, and music have become iconic, and the film has grown in popularity to the point that it now consistently ranks near the top of lists of the greatest films of all time.

The uncredited Casey Robinson assisted with three weeks of rewrites, including contributing the series of meetings between Rick and Ilsa in the café^.

Koch highlighted the political and melodramatic elements, while Curtiz seems to have favored the romantic parts, insisting on retaining the Paris flashbacks.

Wallis wrote the final line ("Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.") after shooting had been completed. Bogart had to be called in a month after the end of filming to dub it.

Despite the many writers, the film has what Ebert describes as a "wonderfully unified and consistent" script.

 Koch later claimed it was the tension between his own approach and Curtiz's which accounted for this: "Surprisingly, these disparate approaches somehow meshed,

and perhaps it was partly this tug of war between Curtiz and me that gave the film a certain balance."

Julius Epstein would later note the screenplay contained "more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works, there's nothing better.”

My point?

All the writers CARED.  Yes, they needed to hit a WORD QUOTA                but THEY CARED about the quality of those words.

Quotations from Casablanca (1942)

Senor Ferrari: Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca, and the Germans have outlawed miracles.

Captain Renault: I've often speculated why you don't return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator's wife? I like to think you killed a man. It's the Romantic in me.

Rick: It was a combination of all three.

[Ugarte sells exit visas]
Ugarte: You despise me, don't you?

Rick Blaine: If I gave you any thought I probably would.

Ugarte: Rick, think of all the poor devils who can't meet Renault's price. I get it for them for half. Is that so ... parasitic?

Rick Blaine: I don't mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one.

Renault: If Rick has the letters, he's much too smart to let you find them there.

Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he's just another blundering American.

Renault: You mustn't underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they "blundered" into Berlin in 1918.

---

Renault: Carl, see that Major Strasser gets a good table, one close to the ladies.

Carl: I have already given him the best, knowing he is German and would take it anyway.

[Renault has ordered that Rick's close immediately]

---

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.

Employee of Rick's: [hands Renault money] Your winnings, sir.

Renault: Oh, thank you, very much. Everybody out at once!

Yvonne: Where were you last night?

Rick Blaine: That's so long ago, I don't remember.

Yvonne: Will I see you tonight?

Rick Blaine: I never make plans that far ahead.

Rick: Don't you sometimes wonder if it's worth all this? I mean what you're fighting for.

Victor Laszlo: You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we'll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.


Rick: Well, what of it? It'll be out of its misery.

Victor Laszlo: You know how you sound, Mr. Blaine? Like a man who's trying to convince himself of something he doesn't
believe in his heart.

Major Strasser: What is your nationality?

Rick Blaine: I'm a drunkard.

Capt. Louis Renault: That makes Rick a citizen of the world.

[Of Victor Lazlo, who wants to escape from Casablanca]
Capt. Louis Renault: No matter how clever he is, he still needs an exit visa . . . or should I say two?

Rick Blaine: Why two?

Capt. Louis Renault: He is traveling with a lady.

Rick Blaine: He'll take one.

Capt. Louis Renault: I think not. I have seen the lady.

Capt. Louis Renault: My dear Ricky, you overestimate the influence of the Gestapo. I don't interfere with them and they don't interfere with me. In Casablanca I am master of my fate! I am . . .

Police Officer: Major Strasser is here, sir!

Rick Blaine: You were saying?

Capt. Louis Renault: Excuse me.

Rick Blaine: I congratulate you.

Victor Lazlo: What for?

Rick Blaine: . . . your work.

Victor Lazlo: I try my best.

Rick Blaine: We all try. You succeed.

[When Sam doesn't want to play "As Time Goes By"]
Rick Blaine: Play it!

Rick Blaine to Ilsa: Who are you really? And what were you before? And what did you do? And what did you think?

Rick Blaine: Here's looking at you, kid.

[After observing the gambling tables at Rick's]
Customer: Are you sure this place is honest?
Carl: Honest? As honest as the day is long!

[As he goes to hand Renault a bribe]
Jay Brandel: Capt. Renault ... may I?

Capt. Louis Renault: Oh no! Not here please! Come to my office tomorrow morning. We'll do everything businesslike.

Jay Brandel: We'll be there at six!

Capt. Louis Renault: I'll be there at ten.

Rick Blaine: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Capt. Louis Renault: I'm shocked ... shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.

[A croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Capt. Louis Renault: Oh, thank you ... very much. Everybody out at once!

Rick Blaine: Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.

Ilsa Lund: Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.


Rick Blaine: And remember, this gun is pointed right at your heart.
Capt. Louis Renault: That is my least vulnerable spot.

[After he watches Rick do the shooting, Renault gives orders to his police]
Capt. Louis Renault: Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.

[Last line]
Rick Blaine: Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

{Rick's Cafe Americain is in SECOND AVENUE SECOND HAND   https://www.createspace.com/3857701 }

And don't forget my FREE  

LUCIFER'S ORPHAN: JOURNEY OF THE LOST: 
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,293 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)

• • #17 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Horror > Dark Fantasy

 http://www.amazon.com/LUCIFERS-ORPHAN-JOURNEY-LOST-ebook/dp/B00FVGDTN8/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1382715051&sr=1-1&keywords=lucifer%27s+orphan%3A+JOURNEY+OF+THE+LOST

ALSO:

 Creole Knights by Roland Yeomans narrated by Charlie James audible.com/pd/?asin=B00G0… #SciFiFantasy

THE DAYS ARE PRECIOUS_A GHOSTLY DISCUSSION OF NaNo

Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway (their ghosts rather) and I were playing poker at my table at Meilori's.

Dorothy Parker took a sip of her whisky and smiled at me. 


"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style.

The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

"Bah!" snapped Hemingway.  "The lemmings are throwing together words just as fast as they can to create hovels of novels."

Mark lit a cigar and grinned, "Well, I certainly believe in using the right word not its second cousin.  Hemingway, did you mean to rhyme?  Weren't you a poet, too, Dorothy?"

Dorothy bent down, grabbed a rubber doll whose throat was torn from ear to ear, and tossed it to her poodle -- who faithful even beyond death -- lingered beside her mistress.



"Ha! My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

 My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated—as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture."

Fitz, as he liked me to call him, took a sip of his own champagne.  "Never confuse a single failure with a final defeat."

Hemingway gruffed, "We are all defeated in the end.  It is only the struggle that matters and why you struggle in the first place."

He glared at Ratatoskr who scampered from ghost to ghost, looking at their hands and whispering in my ear.  "He's telling you our cards, isn't he?"

I shook my head.  "He's merely teasing you and telling me terrible jokes."

"How terrible?" frowned Twain.

I sighed, "What did Jay-Z call his girlfriend before they got married? Feyoncé."

Dorothy groaned, "Ouch!"

I said to her, "It’s a popular supposition that there was much more communication between writers in the twenties. The Round Table discussions in the Algonquin, for example."

"Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You’re all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We’re lost.'

 Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, over there and the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time."

I asked, "Did the “lost generation” attitude you speak of have a detrimental effect on your own work?"

"Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. Dammit, it was the twenties and we had to be smarty. I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense."

Fitz sighed, "At eighteen, our convictions are hills from which we look.  At forty-five, they are caves in which we hide."

Mark Twain nodded, "Each day is like a coin.  We can spend it any way we like.  But we can only spend it once."

Hemingway lit his own cigar and puffed out the smoky words.  "The living think they have more days than they do.  They look out at a thousand lives.  At the end, they'll turn around and find only one --

and if they frittered away precious days investing in work that is inferior, that one life will be inferior."

Fitz looked into the shadows.  "All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath, knowing it will not last."

Ratatoskr looked up at me from the table top.  "What do you think of this NaNo nonsense, Roland."

I smiled sadly.  "Some of my friends are for it.  Some of them are against it."

Dorothy asked, "And you?"

"I'm for my friends."

Ratatoskr groaned.