2003-08-05 - 8:58 p.m.
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The Man With No Name
I'm working on my novel now so I don't think I'll have a lot of time to write here. It's called Brought and it's about a guy who is dying from a gun shot wound to the stomach on the streets of NYC and as he is waiting to die, he is thinking of this girl he had a crush on that he never got to tell her he loved her and a whole bunch of other junk and I couldn't even tell you what its about because, honestly, I don't even know.
I like to turn each of my writing projects into challenges. I give myself guidelines and I don't step outside of these guidelines ever and basically those few guidelines are the only rules I ever give myself. I'm allowed to pull out all other stops I can think of. I can pull any trick I want out as long as it does NOT disobey these guidelines.
The guidelines for this novel are simple.
- I have to use a personal love interest in a completely unpersonal way
- I must not pre-plan any part of the book that is not part of the immediate moment in the book. Not even structure.
- I have to write at least 300 pages
The first component. I have chosen a long standing crush I had on someone way back that never got fully explored. I never told her flat out my feelings, although I could only guess that she had to have heard something about it since I had a crush on her since like 1st grade. I used this for the sheer fact that it is unrequitted love and I wanted to use that as a stepping stone for character depth becasue, basically, it's the easiest and I'm fucking lazy so why not use it as a basis.
However.
The second part to this first clause of writing is that I do it in a compeltely impersonal way. This is to prevent me from writing a story in much the same way fanfiction is created. The last thing I needed to do was write a story where I took my crush and I took me and I put us in a story together, especially since I don't really have a crush on her anymore and I don't really need to anyway, thank you Erin. It would really serve no purpose but mental masturbation and I don't need that. I don't need to live outside of reality in this twisted circus mirror type thing that I created to make myself happy. I can just make myself happy playing god and creating my own world from scrap.
The second restriction is that I do not map this book out. I have a tendency to overplan every little thing I do, to the point that I start to flex my legs a little and stretch out and try to create and I find myself constantly being caught up with my own plans and I end up getting frustrated because I didn't follow my own instructions and I have to change a bunch of things that were awesome but don't work with anything else in the story. It happens way too much and since this is my first novel (that I'm going to finish) I wanted those barriers down and I wanted them to not exist. I didn't even want to say "ok, this is where this chapter begins and ends and this is where this is going and blah blah blah" because it starts there and ends in me planning out meticuously every little thing that should happen and I end up writing less in the story than I do in the plans. I actaully wrote 10 pages of plans for a 5 page short story once. It's fucking sad, man. Absolutely sad.
And the last restriction. 300 pages. This is not to make it like a book report or a school assignment so that I stretch it out and make it long for the sake of making it long and it is simply just this catastrophe that is just long. 300 pages is not that long. 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke is about that long. My personal copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ends on page 215. 300 pages is a good amount of pages for a book. Hell, I think Harry Potter books are that long. But, the thing is, I am writing this on a computer and as such, the font may be bigger but the pages are definitely bigger and I find a good ratio is about 2/3 of the number of the page I'm on is about how many pages this translates to in novel form. A standard Word document is usually set in 8X11 and my margins are about 1.25 on each side so that's like 9 or 8 and a half by 8 and yuor average novel is like 3 by 5. I didnt do good in math and that's why I write and whatever that shrinks down to is whatever and I don't really care. All I know is that 2010 had about 465,000 words in it and I'm up to about 74,000 words, so I have about a quarter or so of a book right now. If I fail on this requiremnet, I am not going to make the book longer for the sake of the book being longer. I can always go back and fluff up some areas of the book when I'm done, but that's when I'm done because I refuse to revise when I don't even know where this book is going and what can work now may work either better or worse later on. Who knows. I certainly don't. This book is going to be fun for me because it is absolutely free form. And that's just fucking awesome. No set boundaries besides these 3.5 basic rules and the rest is open to my own devilish imagination.
I plan on unveiling a few chapters or so at ringinfinite.diaryland.com, my poetry diary, when the time comes to do so but until then, I won't post a goddamn thing here or there until I am done so that I can just finish the damn thing so that this novel doesn't sit like my first attempt at a novel still does, taking up space on a computer and just collecting dust in my brain.
Time to go writing.
BMC
What did you just say? - What's he gonna say next?
