The Charmed Life: August 2013

I am preparing to participate in the writer's equivalent of a marathon, which is to say I am accepting an arbitrary challenge to do a whole lot of something - perhaps more than is healthy - all at once. This is hopefully not to say that it is like marathoning in the sense of the hopefully untrue but well-deployed joke that "no one would run marathons if they had to sign a confidentiality agreement first." In other words, I hope that my efforts and my inevitable occasional mention of them do not make me a bore or worse. At the least, I can promise that I won't be caught with the writerly equivalent of a "26.2" bumper sticker on my car.

National Novel Writing Month, commonly shortened as NaNoWriMo (na-noh-ry-mo) is a challenge that originated online in the late nineties. Although there are lots of details, the central idea is that one is to start and complete a draft of a novel within the month of November. I am actually cheating, in that I am as of this writing just shy of 35,000 words into one that started taking shape a couple of years ago, but has only recently seen much progress. To meet the definition of a novel for the purposes of NaNoWriMo, the manuscript has to reach 50,000 words in length, so I am starting the marathon past the 15 mile mark, which is fine with me and, hopefully, will result in the product being all the better at the expense of the brute sense of accomplishment and the ability to rightly claim the title of "Participant."

What am I doing to prepare? I am writing as much as I feel able, of course. I am also trying to train, by reading in a deliberate way. On the list at the moment: finishing the Great Gatsby for the second time, wading through Swann's Way by Proust and getting ready to read Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis for a second time. Why these? I like Proust for his having defined the modern novel, his emphasis on trying to represent the formation of experience and his indifference to plotting. Gatsby defines the American novel and was the first big novel to look under the rug of the American experience, in a way that is still painfully relevant today, and present what it found in a clear-eyed way. Bret Easton Ellis because his minimalist prose is as true a representation of what it's like to be alive today as any form I've found and because Lunar Park, although by no means his best, deals best with the stage of life about which I've got to write: early middle age. It is a haunted book, literally and in every other sense, and what capital-A adult doesn't feel haunted as we enter these teen years of the 21st century?

I honestly don't have an idea of how many friends of mine read The Charmed Life - it has been years since I have checked the visitor statistics on this page to even know what sort of visits cause my hit counter to rise - but I do have an idea about which of my friends would find this post and probably the whole undertaking a bit self-indulgent and pretentious. There are probably still some who think the title of this blog is something other than a layer-cake of irony (as I risked making too obvious when I added the discussion of Macbeth as its epigraph). I do not begrudge them their suspicions. It is good to surround yourself with people who challenge you and question your motives. Our inputs ought to be heterogeneous; this is how we learn to flourish in a real world. However, because it is my nature to have geologic-scale anxiety about alienating people (in spite of evidence you might cite to the contrary; viz., perhaps, this post), I do request your indulgence and all the benefits of your doubt. At the least please pay me the courtesy of ignoring this post.

It is difficult for me to predict how much more I'll write about the process, but mentioning it now has the enviable effect of fully committing me to the exercise. That is the best reason for this post. Otherwise, I think the occasional post here will help me add structure to the process and give some structure to my approach to the manuscript. Already I have had to justify what I am reading, which is useful. Fait acompli.

Thanks, apologies, etc.