Happy Thanksgiving!

     I love holidays. I look forward to seeing my globe-traveling family (Korea, Japan, Philippines, Italy, &c) all at once, to taking the 3-hour road trip, to sleeping in the living room of my sister's house,  to shopping, and to eating turkey, dressing, pumpkin pie, and cranberry bread. I know it's a very special thing; not everyone gets to celebrate Thanksgiving like this!
     Today, a few things I am thankful for are:

What about you?

Deadlines and Freewrites

          It's a good time of year to be thankful, and I'm thankful today for deadlines. They make me work. There's the end of the month for NaNo, the end of the semester for college, and the end of this week for my creative writing group. I decided to submit a poem, rather than a short story, since I can write them in a shorter amount of time.

          With poems I usually start by free writing. I try a few different themes or descriptive phrases until they come to dead ends or I find one that yields to my shaping. Riding my bike to and from campus almost every day, I've gotten to see fall turning to winter step by step. From the leaves starting to turning red to them getting brown and curling, every change is beautiful, and beauty is the theme of my poem, "Maker." It is a spin off of a very strange, modern Gertrude Stein's prose poem called "Picasso," an excerpt of which you can read here.

To read "Maker" click here.

What are you thankful for today? 

Day 12: A Late Start

     Look! I'm actually writing! What with the conference and not being able to decide whether or not to really do NaNo this year, I got a late start, but started I have!

     I spent the first 8 days character-sketching and outlining. Inventing the major plot points was the hardest part, and now that it's over…I still have the whole mountain to climb! I'm a slow writer, and 50,000 words is a lot.

    But, I am glad I'm at the point of writing. I'm glad I decided to try this. And now that I've begun, I hope the rest will come easier.

     The novel I'm writing is about Wynna, the dragon-rider. As part of my pre-writing I studied the driving factor of fantasy novels: conflict. This is something I'm bad at writing. I tend to take recycle the same conflicts (war brewing, the people unhappy with the monarch because of heavy taxing), or I just keep my characters happy and far from discomfort.
     This blog post: Conflict in Fantasy, was really helpful in establishing that conflict is necessary and in showing what it is, the different types it can be broken down into, and how they all work.

   Even if you're not writing fantasy, check it out! And let me end with an inspiring quote for this frigid Wednesday:

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."

--Robert F. Kennedy

Poetry: October

     Reading poetry in front of an audience was somehow different from making speeches in public speaking class. My hands almost didn't shake, and I actually enjoyed it. I felt like I was telling my poems they were at last really ready to go out into the world. Which is really providential, since it wasn't until six a.m. the morning of the literature conference that I finished writing 2 of the 3 poems I read.

      Interesting fact: I learned in American Lit II today that there is no such thing as silent reading. Even when your lips aren't moving, your larynx is vibrating.

       With that in mind...

As for NaNoWriMo, I decided I'd rather try and fail than not even try simply because I'm afraid I might fail. I'm not off to a great start, I'm at zero words right now, but I'm not going to freak out.  I created my writing space, I'm getting solid pre-writing done, and I have a Saturday on which to novelthon. Besides, nothing's impossible, is it?

And the Results...

     ...I placed! I'll be reading "Many Are the Masters" at the university literature conference on Saturday (plus two more poems, if I can speed-polish them in time). :D

NaNoWriMo: No More Excuses

      Seems like I'm always writing about the passage of time, but really, November is right around the corner. That means we're only a week away from National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.

     NaNoWriMo begins at midnight on November 1st and ends midnight of the 30th. Those daring souls who embark on this adventure write furiously to meet the daunting word count of 50,000 before the deadline. That's 1666 words, or around 10 pages double-spaced, per day. NaNo isn't about polish or beautiful turns of phrase--it's about getting the words onto the page. Editing can come later.

    The pressure and accountability from NaNoWriMo might just be my ticket. I've made way too many excuses not to write. But as the last October days drop like flies and the time to register grows nearer, I alternately have imaginations of myself half-asleep and squinting at the manuscript on my computer screen in the silence of 2 and 3 a.m., and a less triumphant version in which I'm shamefacedly writing a post about how I just didn't have the time and..."maybe next year."

     I gave myself a test today. I did the writing prompt from a few days ago on The Write Practice, where you lock in and write a complete work in one hour. I ended up with three-fourths of a page of exposition and about a page of outline for a short story. It didn't boost my confidence.
     I'm afraid I'll start half-heartedly and not end up doing it. But that'll be a stinky little excuse when December rolls around and Wynna's story is still trapped in my head.

     How do you commit to big endeavors?

A Vision of Your Own: William Wordsworth

free image of Tweed River
courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

     The Solitary Reaper" is one of my favorite poems. Today I found out it's part of a collection of 16 of Wordsworth's poems inspired by his trip to Scotland in 1803. In that collection I discovered "Yarrow Unvisited," an interesting reflection on the difference between imagination and reality. In it, the speaker and his friends are traveling all over Scotland, and one of them wants to see the famous River Yarrow. But the speaker says toward the end of the poem:

"Let beeves and home-bred kine* partake

The sweets of Burn-mill meadow;

The swan on still St. Mary's Lake

Float double, swan and shadow!

We will not see them; will not go,

To-day, nor yet to-morrow,

Enough if in our hearts we know

There's such a place as Yarrow.

"Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown!

It must, or we shall rue it:

We have a vision of our own;

Ah! why should we undo it?

The treasured dreams of times long past,

We'll keep them, winsome Marrow!

For when we're there, although 'tis fair,

'Twill be another Yarrow!"

What's  your Yarrow?

*beeves and kine/beef (pl) and cows