A Happy NaNo Loss

So I’m officially not going to finish my novel in thirty-one days. And I’m finding that I feel less guilty about it than you would expect.

I do not have a finished novel to show you. Instead, please enjoy this photo of a panda reading a book.

I didn’t write 50,000 words this month, but NaNo did light a fire under me to do a bunch of other writerly stuff:

1) Read with the same intensity that I used to before this whole “English major” experiment. Even in the middle of midterms. Even in the middle of a crowded train. Even at 2 in the morning when I really should have been asleep. And that’s some pretty powerful NaNo to get me feeling so motivated (and some pretty powerful books).

2) Write a heck of a lot more words than I would have done otherwise, and–better yet–gotten me excited about the stories I tell myself in my head.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as words on a page, except perhaps, for when a granule of an idea takes root in your mind and you can’t not write it down. Some of it. Whatever it is.

3) Given me the motivation to struggle through and stick one word after another even when that granule of an idea does not take root. And then delete it all the next day. I’m pretty sure this is the definition of insanity, or that there is a special place in Dante’s hell for writers who rewrite… as they write… and that I may have been living in it these last three weeks.

We’ve still got eleven days to press through, and I do anticipate (fingers crossed) making some substantial headway during the Thanksgiving break from school next week. Or I may actually spend some time with my family. Because, you know, Thanksgiving.

Either way, Happy NaNo-ing everybody. This is the homestretch, and even if you’re like me and are (probably) not going to get to the 50,000 word mark, well, at least we have each other.

–Marie-Irene

Syntagonism and Other Words that Don’t Exist

Do you want to know what depresses me? There are no two words for “rivalry” in English.

It doesn’t exist! I just looked it up.

I think that the absence of words in any given language is telling of larger cultural forces. Think about this: the word “privacy” does not exist in the Modern Greek language.

There’s an ancient Greek equivalent (at least according to my father from what he remembers from his days as a high school kid), but no Modern Greek one. And if you ask anyone in my big fat Greek family, there is no such thing as “privacy,” conceptually, in the Greek culture (as we experience it) either. Everybody’s in everybody else’s business, affectionately, lovingly, or otherwise.

Now let’s backtrack to “rivalry.” In Greek there are at least two words for it–“syntagonismos” and “antagonismos.” The one is for a productive rivalry and the other for the destructive kind. The one is for the kind of rivalry that makes both people better; the other is for the kind of rivalry that has one person get ahead. But when I was trying to express this at work some months ago, all I got was blank stares. Because there’s only one rivalry, right?

In high school, there was this kid who really wanted to beat me on the SAT. But it wasn’t enough to beat me. He wanted me to be hard to beat. So he made sure I was taking a decent SAT class. He offered me a free course that was advertised at his synagogue. And you know what? I wanted to beat him, too. So we both studied hard. We both did well.

So there I was at work, telling this story to try to illustrate productive rivalries, but all anybody could tell me was, “Well, that’s because he obviously liked you.” But all I could think was, “You’re kind of missing the point.” I don’t really understand why I have to justify myself here, but he did have a girlfriend. We had been friends for a very long time. There was nothing else to it but some good ol’ fashioned syntagonism.

But, of course, this fact did not compute.

I have a formal (informal) proposition for Mr. Oxford English. Or Mr. Merriam Webster. Or whoever it is deciding to add new words into the dictionary each year. Instead of adding another “hashtag” to the annals of officiated language, why not consider “syntagonism” as an option? Why not give the rest of us an alternative to “antagonism?” Let’s diversify rivalry.

And, please, let’s get “privacy” added to my Greek-to-English dictionary.

–Marie-Irene

Procrastination Techniques

If only I had the answer….

I have become a professional procrastinator. Not from schoolwork or from work…work (internship work? I don’t know what to call it)–I’ve had too many sleepless nights trying to meet deadlines to play around with those commitments. No, I’m talking about procrastinating from writing.

I’m about 4,700 words into NaNoWriMo after cooping myself up in my room ALL DAY yesterday to try to get some headway into this story.

And, I mean, on some level my day was plenty productive. I downloaded and started using Scivener, which is kind of now my new favorite toy. I set up a tumblr account because why not (follow me if you’d like at badpoetreeblog.tumblr.com). I even linked my WordPress and Twitter accounts together so that all five people who follow me on Twitter can stay up to date on my WordPress happenin’s (I am an exceptionally poor Twitter-er-er-er). But I only wrote about 1700 words yesterday. And I outlined a whole bunch. What?

It’s not even that I don’t like the story. It’s different from what I’ve written in a long time, more of a children’s story I think than anything else, but it’s fun to engage with these characters that have only ever been in my mind so far. So why do I write so darn slow?

I read somewhere that to write an extended piece, you have to give yourself the right to suck, at least at first. That novels write themselves in the revisions, but you can’t get to the revising part without first getting through the drafting part. Logically, I know these things. But that still doesn’t stop me from going back and reading and re-reading and revising everything that I’ve written up until this point, often reading my clumsy words out loud into the night to better catch my mistakes until my voice starts to get hoarse. Just a little bit obsessive, I know.

Also, the slightest bit masochistic because this whole process still manages to be entirely voluntary and for the most part enjoyable. Don’t ask me why. I’m still trying to figure that part out.

Maybe I really am just obsessed.

–Marie-Irene

Conversations with Virginia Woolf

“A woman must have a room of her own if she is to write.”

The first time I read A Room of One’s Own I was alone, and the totality of that silence frightened me, sucked the initiative right out of me. A point I used to press when I was younger is that there is a difference between isolation and loneliness. The one does not imply the other, said the introvert in me, because a piece of me has always drawn its energy from the silence inside myself, that meditative place you graze your finger across in the stock still moments before bed, the piece you can only really tap into when you’re already half asleep. But somewhere along the lines, the distinction has faded in my mind’s eye.

The really beautiful thing about writing about reading is that the isolation of both acts is not so total anymore. I’m not so alone anymore reading in my room.

The second time I read Virginia Woolf, I read it for you.

There are so many things that strike me about this remarkable essay. How personable and colloquial her voice is, the great Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway was my very first experience with modernism and whose extended streams of consciousness were like riddles I could not quite dissect. But it was beautiful. I did not always understand what I was reading but I understood that it was beautiful.

And so I read A Room of One’s Own for the second time in a room of my own and I wonder at the power of her simple and beautiful words, so different from what I had read of her before. And I wonder at the power of the genderless “one,” not a “we” to align ourselves with one another, not a “you” with its purported femininity as the all-wise teacher dictates her sermon to an audience full of women, but a “one,” neutral and uncomplicated by the power dynamics of “we” and “you” and “she.” And even the “one” becomes beautiful.

And I think about all the women writers who I admire–Virginia Woolf and Penelope Delta and Nora Baker and L.M. Montgomery–and I think about all the ways they might have constructed spaces for themselves in which write, rooms of their own, for all the “ones” that they espoused. I have no way of knowing what they might have looked like. And maybe that is part of the point. Maybe the point of a room is to be private, enclosed, and unadulterated, and the writing is the piece that is meant to be shared, the key out. And how incredible is the democratizing power of the internet to create these spaces for everybody with access to a computer.

All you’ve got is a friendly neighborhood blog, a little corner in which to write, and automatically you’ve got all the company you need to read.

–Marie-Irene

Deserted Fictions

You  know the story–the one that you’ve spent about all your free time and mental space agonizing about, get out about 2,000 words and then put out of your head forever. I am so guilty of doing this, telling myself stories on the train, writing down a couple of paragraphs, and then forgetting about them altogether.

Barnes and Noble must make loads of money off of dreamers like me buying up all their beautiful notebooks to fill with the stories they tell themselves.

Finding them in Google Docs months–or, in this case even years–later is like being on a treasure hunt. The prize isn’t gold exactly, the writing is too rough and the idea too long forgotten for it to be gold. But it’s certainly interesting. And it’s certainly fun to steal lines from the old stories that I’ve written or dig up a granule of an idea from about five or six years ago. It’s like visiting past versions of myself by revisiting old characters and story-lines. Mostly, it involves a lot of wincing because as hard as I try my mentality degenerates from “look how far I’ve come” to “look how much I sucked.” Which is only a hair’s breadth away from “do I still suck this much?”

I think I’ve got a very finite room for mental activity in my head. And the more space I spend memorizing useless stuff, like the lyrics to “I Could Have Danced All Night” (because you never know when you might have to sing along to the soundtrack of My Fair Lady) or like the exact order that theories on the relationship of culture to organization performance are brought up in my OB textbook, the less room I have for things like developing more three-dimensional stories that I can come back to in five years and not be so incredibly embarrassed that I ever wrote upon rereading them.

Anyway. You can only get better, right?

In my more obnoxious philosophical moments, I like to think that it is the tendency of human consciousness to want to be more than just the sum of its parts. For this reason we impose arbitrary meanings, we find patterns, we tell stories. It’s because we live to tell each other stories.

So I go on telling myself stories on the train. And for now I go on writing them down on the back of napkins or in my little purple notebook. For now I can’t not.

And for now that is enough.

–Marie-Irene