Building Roman, a day at a time

2011-11-04T22:48:00.000-07:00

Day 4: Chapter 4: 5,143 total.
(Over 10% complete!)

I have been writing in the afternoon all week and, partially as an experiment, I decided to try writing later tonight. No good.

I got an 30-45 minutes or so in, 700 words, and my mind started wandering. Now, the good news is I am all set up for tomorrow. Chapters 4 and 5 are a fairly elaborate action scene and they will bring me right up to my first real benchmark. I already have ideas how to flesh out this and the previous chapter and am fighting the urge to do more than leave cryptic two word notes for later.
snake charm
pinecone batter
red strap
hollow stump
admit it
"Don't tell anyone"

The old saw is that you should stop for the day when you still know what is happening next. Percy is running from the war, about to set the fire, and is moments away from getting kissed with a bat.

I started today having no idea what was next. He meets Shelly, eventually. I guess breakfast first. Shelly must have a family so they have to come over maybe. Do I want to introduce an entire family? What kind of breakfast? What about the ransacking and the dream fish?

So, at the apex of this spiral, I just wrote down the ugliest yet cryptic line I could: "Run, Piggy!"
So began the game of run'n'catch.

Asking a writer where he gets his inspiration only shows that you haven't written. Inspiration comes after most of the words are already on the page.

Today wasn't the most productive writing day but it is the day that I figured out the beginning relationship of my three central characters.

Soundtrack: DJ Shadow - The Private Press,
Childish Gambino - EP,
Jack Wall - Mass Effect 2 Sdtk

2011-11-03T16:24:00.000-07:00

Day 3: Chapter 3: 4,451 words total

My word count is low today. About 500 words short of the 1666 per day.

I wrote in the office today and was interrupted by a student. This happened right before a natural chapter break. Then I taught, came home, and its now. I may try to thicken this chapter up tomorrow. It seems important to take place on less than four pages.

I have always had a problem cursing in print--not in speech, by god--and I have to wonder if I am over doing it here. I will probably lose most of it in revision but it IS how the 15 year olds I knew talked among themselves. I don't want to polish the turd of adolescent communication. This is important because I am delving into the toxicity of young men and that means--as do elements of the plot--using the language of casual homophobes. It is a little frightening wondering how I'm going to handle this without offending those who share my worldview or back away from this and forcing a Chasing Amy ending.

Let "and Percy and Gordon do it" be the "Hermione dies" of this experiment.
The alternate ending that nobody wanted to want so much.

Wrote in the office. About 1.5 hrs. Listened to the new My Brightest Diamond.

2011-11-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

Day 2: chapter 2: 3460 words total

I'll keep it shorter today.

I figured I'd keep track of a few points: time and soundtrack

Day 1: about 3 hours writing time, in two pulses. 600 words in the office and 1000 at home.
Listened to: The new Decemberists EP, Long Live the King twice.

Day 2: about 2.5 hours, including a twenty minute break where I smacked the dog around and did dishes. Just over 2 hours of writing.
Listened to Espers - II.

Music is distracting in the first hour but, once I start thinking about the dog or dishes, it helps focus me. I'm finding myself drawn to softer, folky stuff right now, as compared to the more energetic stuff I listen to when I'm writing reviews or class materials or the instrumental stuff I prefer for poetry.

My history as an obsessive music collector is paying off once again.

The obvious influence are obvious. I am happy to be meta enough to have young Percy already reference Stephen King (particularly It) and Catcher in the Rye.

And, as a child of the '80s, I have to say that the whole Spielberg-based worship of the 12-13 year old has to color what I do. Goonies, E.T., Stand by Me, The Explorers, and Empire of the Sun. Spielberg and King pushed hard on this argument that who you will become is cemented at the cusp of your teen years. I have this in mind as Percy and Gordo are just beginning to define themselves at 15.

More recently, there have been other influences that I am trying to compete with.
-Freaks and Geeks, which is a better autobiography for how high school felt to me than I could write
- The Inbetweeners- which captures the toxicity of teenage boys
- Submarine
- Rocket Science these two capture the horror of first loves beautifully
- Daniel Kraus's Monster Variations
- Charlier Huston's Shotgun Rules
- Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night
and the primary instigator, Super 8, which convinced me that the stories I grew up on were still worth retelling. The idea of writing this first sparked during the zombie make-up scene.

Tomorrow

2011-11-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

Day 1: Chapter 1: 1646 words

As long as I can, I'm going to try to shape one chapter a day out of the structure. That will mean, at 30 days, 30 chapters. If something fairly big happens every 5 days/chapters, something huge every ten, then I can mimic the 30 minute intervals and 15 minute sub-intervals that you find in your Western film. There is something comforting in knowing this rough rhythm even if I have no notes and very few benchmarks in mind: Shelly, the shared cigarette, the water accident, the hollow tree, the off-switch, the boat. Small things that may drop out entirely if the story doesn't allow.

Three things were on my mind today:
1)What if? As in: What if I fail at this? What if I succeed? What if I don't get my real work done? What if? Funny enough, I spent most of the morning wondering "What if I get hung up in a 'what if?' cycle?" I got past that. Yay, decades of experience! You were good for something, after all. Who knew?

2) At its heart, Building Roman is my take on a YA murder mystery, in as much as, say After the First Death is a YA Die Hard and Super 8 is a YA Alien. I want to kind of kick the whole YA mindset around a little and write something that might have spoken to me at 15 and at 36. It also is going to have very real autobiographical elements, inasmuch as I remember anything clearly from 20 years ago. I'm cannibalizing snippets of my memories that never would have found their way into a poem. It also is just a writing experiment for me--not so much the prose part or the schedule part but the fact that I am letting revision sit until I am done with draft one (more on this later) rather than constantly polishing before I move on to the next word or line. But, most of all this morning Building Roman is a title that I hate threefold. It is a pun, it is a goddamn gerund+name title, and now I have to find out why Percy Roman becomes Roman, maybe? We're going to have to see what happens there. Short fix is to rename him "Roman Percy" or "Roman Besh," but that doesn't solve the first two problems. So yes, I am writing my first long-form prose...well, ever, if I go past 25ish pages...using some awkward, if not painful memories to guide me, trying to antagonize solid genre conventions, with some stacked literary allusions planned, in a style that I have tried to train out of myself for essentially 20 years, for no practical purpose, at a busy time in my life and the grand bete noir is the chintziness of the title. Which I like despite everything.

3) Since I am writing with little active revision, I am worried about taking a wrong step early. I started off, then, more edit-y than I hope to be through the first draft. My current first line, after one drafting of the paragraph, restarting, revising, editing, coming back to it, and a clean-up pass is "The peculiar nature of fiction is not in the lies that shout but the ones that whisper." Not a terrible line but it needs something...rah. Something. Also, the parallelism is off: it should be "in the ones that whisper," maybe. It gave me what I needed to move forward, though. This idea of obvious and subtle lying comes closely to one of the themes at the heart. I've joked before that the first draft of any of my poems starts with the line, "Fuck you."
Here is the original draft of the first line:
"Any story about a teenage boy which doesn't quickly disintegrate into masturbation is full of shit."In the interest of full disclosure, a variation of that line is still in the draft but I build up to it now. First lines kill. I am only a chapter in and I can tell that I wouldn't be looking forward to writing tomorrow if I was still operating under that original first line. If this keeps going, I am going to have to fix that line. You've seen permutation 1 & 6ish. I'll keep you informed how it changes.

Tomorrow, barring insight, I will talk about inspirations obvious and more obvious.

I hope you enjoy reading this, Amy and one person from high school who was bored enough to click.
I always had a crush on you!

2011-10-31T16:26:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, I experiment with what the format of the NaNoWriMo model can offer.

I am approaching this practically: 30 chapters of 5 pages each. Something like a three-act structure.

I will not be posting the story here--yet--but we will see what happens as the process stretches on.

I will be using this blog to chart my progress, wax eloquent on process and, perhaps, as a future teaching tool.

Tentative title: Building Roman

50,000 words to go. Avant!