THE GREAT GADFLY:

Infinite Pest

So I hit the wall just a little bit with my NaNoWriMo project. I'm at a little over 24,000 words right now, which leaves me with 12 days to write the second 50+ percent of this story. The freakish thing is, I honestly think I can do it.

Here's the thing with this NaNoWriMo project - I'm not doing a bit of editing to my story until I get the entire plot out of my head and into my hard drive (get outta my dreams, get into my car). I'm not looking back at what I've written since 11/1/2002 for fear of turning into a creative pillar of salt. I'm not worrying about silly little things like continuity, detail, character development, or even necessarily making sure anything is spelled correctly. To Hell with it! The only thing that matters is hitting 50,000 words by the end of the month. That's it. Crappy or not, here I come.

It's really liberating to send the editor part of my brain packing on a month-long vacation. I mean, REALLY liberating. Still, I wish December could be NaNoEdMo, and we'd have a month to make sure the misspelled word count were down to zero and to make sure that the one-legged newspaper guy in Chapter One doesn't somehow re-appear in Chapter Twelve as a tapdancing street performer. (Hey, you know - people grow new legs sometimes. It can happen!)

I'm hoping to get to the end of my story before I hit the 50,000 word mark on 11/30, mainly because I can't wait to go back and expand on what I've hacked out in this story so far and flesh out the first round of writing with a fresh new layer of detail and meditation. I feel like the story I'm writing this month is keyed out in a personal shorthand, and that each word is a seed full of compressed sentences and description that can be watered and nourished and fed. Sorry to get all "Alice Walker on Writing" on yer asses, but it's kind of exciting like that.

Meanwhile, without saying too much about the story I'm writing, I had a look at David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" over the weekend, and managed to snag a used copy at my local used book store for eight bucks. I did a little research on the style and direction and "genre" of my story, just to see if my presumption of originality was a waste of time. It turns out that I'm in good company with the setting of my story, both physically and culturally, though the integrity of my plot still seems to hold promise. This "Infinte Jest" was one of the books I researched, obviously - the thing is huge - dictionary sized, to say the least - and just reading the first page has been such an amazing illustration of how to decorate a story with detail - something I'm really horrible at doing successfully. Plot? Hey, I'm great. Exposition? Yeah, I manage. Dialog? I'm the man. Metaphor? You got it. Detail? The doggie was brown, with two eyes and maybe some black. The End. Blearrgh.

I may wait to read "Infinite Jest" till after 11/30. I tend to perform better when I'm not in the throes of getting my ass kicked. I had to put down the other book I'd been reading which strangely mirrored my NaNoWriMo story - "The Savage Girl" - because the parallels were too creepy - the author is a Chicagoan who moved here from NYC, fer Chrissakes - and while the direction of the story is exactly where I DON'T want to go, the familiar rhythm and style of his writing to my own syllabic tendencies were just a bit too skeevy for comfort, particularly at a time like this.

I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from music - from the urban absurdist gloom of "Diamond Dogs" and the strange galloping wordplay of The Residents. Yeah, usual suspects, I know...but hey, whatever it takes, right? The more I write of this story, the more I'm writing poetry as prose and paying attention not simply to what I'm writing, but how I'm writing it, and how it sounds running through a person's head or spoken out loud. I've never attempted to write narrative with lyrical rhythm in a short story before, and with this exercise, it comes and goes, but when it comes, following the rhythm and musicality of writing all but throws me into a trance. Neeto.

I'll most likely nickel and dime my way to barely 35,000 by the end of the month, then after taking a final mini-vacation from the project for Thanksgiving at my 'rent's house in the Land That Time Forgot (a/k/a Hoosierland), I'll spend the last few hours of the last day cranking out the remaining 15,000s in a feverish keyboard clacking bonanza.

Has Starbucks figured out how to market crystal meth yet?