NanoWriMo...re sleep

Dear Maria,
I am in complete agreement that one of the most fantastic parts about November is pumpkin pie. I mean, getting together with family and being thankful is great and all, but here's a little secret for you: I freaking love food. Why do you think there's a bajillion Cadbury creme eggs in our fridge? To be generous to visitors? Psh.

This has quickly gone from writing about writing to writing about food. I think I need a snack.

Alright, five million cream eggs later, and I'm ready to be all academic and whatnot (ish). This will also be my first year of doing NanoWriMo, even though for years and years, Kristina Horner has told me it's the greatest thing since coffee. And if this isn't fantastic inspiration, I don't know what is:

So while I'm freaking out a teensy tiny bit about having to pound out 50,000 words in 30 days, I realize that I won't necessarily be a failure if I don't get to the ultimate goal. As a wise friend said to me once, "it's still so many more words you had than when you started." And as a highly competitive person, sometimes it works just to have a set goal that will make me feel like this if I don't reach it:

I may have said I wouldn't be a failure. But I sure as heck would be disappointed. I think having a support group of writers who are in the same insanity-driven boat will help us not lose hope, or at least maintain some sympathy when we say "no, no I swear I'm not tired..." then crash into a wall. As the spazz of the century, that happens on a daily basis, so if you see a set of black and blue spots where my legs used to be this next month, you'll know why. I find my outer self already yelling at my inner self for even considering waking up at 6:30 just to write for an hour, but damnit, I want to skip in front of those other English majors who are scrambling to write an essay for class the night before, and go, "I have my essay, and a freaking novel [disregard quality of novel here], na na na boo boo!"

...Sometimes, I am a terrible person.

Yet there are quite a few things about this upcoming endeavor that worry me. I mean, as a person who gets greatly inspired by an idea, writes a few lines, then gets an even more easy to write genius idea, I realize my resistance to outlines is gonna make me fall short for any big project. I mean, even if I get to 20-some-thousand words, I'll realize all my characters are happy, that lonely guy fell in love with the shy girl, and I am 100% screwed. Because as quality as I am at padding up an essay to fit word requirements, it would take some serious skill to add 30,000 words of "like," "absurdly," and "ridonculously."

Okay, so ridonculously isn't a word. But it should be.

I hate planning things, but if you want to take on a big writing project, you gotta do your research. You can't become an Olympic swimmer by diving into a pool and deciding the water looked nice and pretty and you have a swimmer's build anyway. Sure, I have the signature social skills and furrowed brow of a writer, but honing in such a skill takes patience, research, planning, and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. And maybe 5% inspiration, but you're right that writers are inspired about as often as Snooki says a coherent sentence. I'll be kicking and screaming the whole time I pound out that outline, but no pain, no gain baby. It's what Jillian Michaels has always told me anyway. Also, hating sweat is apparently for the weak.

However, my most major concern is sitting down to write, ending up on facebook (why, oh why did I make fb my homepage??), responding to contraversial political statuses (oh, how I love the sound of political bashing in the morning), watching Jenna Marbles poke fun at the male species, and "awww" over pictures of cute puppies. Suddenly, it's two hours later, I'm still in my "text-moosaging" pants, and there are two words on that word document. With technology at our fingertips (literally), it's so easy to get distracted by the stupidest stuff. For some reason, I prefer to act like an old person and longhand my writing, even though it takes a bajillion years to write a page. And then when I type up what I scribbled out on paper, I feel like I'm more productive when I'm chatting with friends about cute boys and laughing at Mitt Romney memes. Remember that shudder-worthy month when I wrote L'amour Shlamore? That was all longhand. So maybe lack of distractions doesn't correlate with quality of work (or I was just an idiot in 10th grade), but it certainly helps with timeliness.

Which makes me wonder. Do I dare longhand 50,000 words? Do I risk the hand cramps and weird stares when I actually have pen and paper? Or do I just get some goshdarn willpower, and type the darn thing?

I'll think about it while I outline it up. Let the pain begin.

Peace and Ponies,
Kira 

P.S. Why Kristina Horner does NanoWriMo:

Movies? Nonsense!

Dear Kira,

I have to agree with you; scripts are vastly underrated. It's like, people don't remember Lindsay Lohan's outfits in Mean Girls (yes, I succeed in relating everything back to Mean Girls) but they sure remember when Karen was like "If you're from Africa...why are you white?". In my view, the movie is no work of art without a well written script (and yes, I'm aware I just offended a lot of people by saying that). But think about it, a book can put clear mental images in your mind without using a single illustration; a picture is worth a thousand words, but a movie needs both.

So yeah, it's kind of unfair that the director and the actor gets all the credit. For example, Leonardo DiCaprio did not create the profound epicness that is Titanic, he just stood around and looked pretty (so very, very pretty).  And yet, he is what everyone remembers about that movie - oh yeah and that redheaded chick too (what was her name? Lily, Lavender, Daisy, something with flowers). But I digress. As my English 200 class would say, this is all about capitalism. It's more fair to acknowledge everyone's contribution to the movie, but in the economic sense, it needs to have a creator. Like toaster strudel needs a creator (last Mean Girls reference, I promise).

But anyway, it's almost November and you know what that means...turkey, wait, no, that's not right, I meant to say pumpkin pie, I mean NaNoWriMo. But actually, pumpkin pie. I'm really excited for my first year of participating in NaNoWriMo; I wish I had started doing it earlier. But, to be perfectly fair, I don't think I would have been able to write a novel in a month a few years ago. This is because I used to have this weird, freaky idea that you needed to be inspired to write (air quotations around inspired). To quote someone (actually, I can't remember who said this but it wasn't me), inspiration is for amateurs. At some point, you just have to suck it up and sneeze something out, you can worry about editing it later, but the most important thing is that you sit down and write. Maybe it's just me, but if I sat around waiting for inspiration to strike I would never have written this blog in the first place.

Peace out, dude, 
Maria

May the forcefulness be with you

Dear Maria,
If you're the Queen of sarcasm, I'm at least the princess, y'know, 'cause princesses are cool and they get to wear shiny things. But I don't at all find sarcasm bad...I mean, I'm still technically a teenager here. I still have a year to revel in my biting sarcastic responses and blame it on adolescence. Now excuse me while I become ever so thrilled in the bills I have to pay.

Yeah, I'm sure every thirteen year old has the same kind of sarcasm...

But I digress. I don't think there is any way to be truly original anymore in writing. When Inception came out, everyone was all "oh my gosh!" about the fact that a plot no one had ever thought of before was in theaters! I mean, a dream within a dream? Clearly that is the most original idea in the history of the universe. No one has ever presented plots about dreams before...

in your dreams. Ha, ha, ha.

So although every basic idea has been covered by previous great artists, doesn't mean you can't find a new way to reflect on "boy rescues girl," or "girl finds power," or "everyone in the world sleeps with everyone else and all wreaks havoc." The idea is only a tiny portion of what makes a piece of writing great. I have a strong belief that presenting original characters, dialogue, and voice makes for a new light on an idea that has been written to death. Also, combining ideas can make for originality. For instance, lots of stories about students falling in love with a teacher and their facing morals have been told, as have stories about lesbians facing intolerance, but I recently wondered, "well, would the same consequences hold for a young female student who falls in love with a female teacher? Or would they be more hush-hush about it?" For all I know, this book has already been written, and I'm just fooling myself about this whole combining ideas thing, but I like to think I'm witty and clever sometimes. But only on Thursdays. This idea boils down to conflicting morals vs. love, but the task of the writer is to find a spin on it that will be interesting and thought-provoking for the audience.

Speaking of thought provoking, we've been watching a lot of...erm...contraversial films in our English class, and I found that the director gets a heck of a lot more credit for creating such a masterful piece of art. But--hello--the screenwriter has the idea, she makes the darn contraversy! Last I checked, lighting and costuming was great and all, but it wasn't what made "entering the conversation", like every English teacher in the world wants us to do. The written word makes art in poetry, novels, and even plays, but the art of film seems to be distracted by fancy lighting, special effects, and big celebrity names. So I'm just wondering, can people ever see the art in a script? Or does the art of a film hold elsewhere?

Peace and Ponies,
Kira

Sarcasm is Something That I Do

Dear Kira,

First off, I'm kinda concerned that you think sarcasm is bad. I mean, sarcasm is what I do. You ask me if skydiving from space is a good idea? Oh yeah sure, it's a great idea, not dangerous at all! I think that if everything I said was taken seriously, the CIA would have me in a dark, little room for questioning right about now. But actually.

Anyway...

I guess that the easiest way to answer your question would be to refer you to T.S. Eliot's essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent but I'm not going to do that because that would be cruel and too much like my English 200 midterm for comfort. So, to make a long, long, LONG story short, my answer is no, I don't think it's possible to create a "unique" writing voice because, let's be honest here, every writer is influenced by the writers that have come before them. I don't think that's neccesarily a bad thing, or that you need to be too worried about it because, my experience is that, over time, you develop your own distinct writing style from the bits and pieces of literature you've been exposed to.

Still, I know how it feels to think you're "copying". What really concerns me is that there are supposedly only four "plots" in literary history: tragic, comic, romantic, and ironic. That makes being original hard. What am I supposed to do? Write a story about buying a gallon of milk? That would be a real thriller. I don't know, maybe it's possible to be original in literature. What do you think?

Sigh,
Maria

Hearing voices

Dear Maria,
As I've been writing these blogs, I've noticed that my voice becomes increasingly sarcastic. I mean, I don't walk around the HUB telling people who wish they had more time, "yeah, well I wish I had a pony," but my writing voice gets more of an edge to it. Lately I've been reading memoirs with this sarcastic bite to them, so I'm wondering, is my own style developing as a writer, or am I copying the voice of those I read?

I've found these memoirs to have really strong imagery and it's easy to relate to Tiny Fey when she talks about her ex-boyfriend sucking face with a hot blond, and in Yoga Bitch I nearly fell off my chair laughing when Suzanne Morrison described when her yoga friends in Bali thought it cleansing to drink pee (side note: This did not happen in Colorado, or you would have heard some "get me out of here"s from my end). So, after a quality reading experience, I wanted to evoke that same sort of imagery through my own writing.

But then after reading a classic or two (hey, it happens), I end up writing much more flowery sentences with sophisticated vocab and all that jazz. Sometimes it feels like more of a stretch for me, especially when I'm trying to bang out some poetry that doesn't sound like a freaking soap opera, but then I think "hey, this is feelin' pretty natural. I could get used to this." My keyboard must be so confused, not knowing if I'm a Tina Fey or Ernest Hemingway wannabe. You know what, keyboard? I don't know either. We can both be in this goshdarn identity crisis.

So can you create your writing voice, or is it natural? I guess it goes down to the nature/nurture debate...psychology class, you can't escape me.

Maybe that's why I like blogging so much...It's a socially acceptable form of being outrageously random and sarcastic.

Peace and Ponies,
Kira

To categorize your characters?

Bonjourno, Maria,
Okay, so I don't speak Italian. But I sound a heck of a lot cooler when I announce my presence in a "Mamma Mia! Pizza, pasta!" kind of way (or I'm just hungry and pining for some musicals). While I agree that the writing should be separate from the self, I always find the characters I create to be an extension of myself. Hence my weird need to constantly write about a girl and her life. Doesn't mean I'm planning on becoming a hippie who gets pregnant and has to decide between getting an abortion and losing a friendship with her Catholic best friend, or keeping the baby, but rather, the main character's reactions would be similar to my own.

But self-like or not, these characters seem to develop thoughts and opinions of their own. When I first start to write a book/short story/ambitious few lines that gets abandoned shortly afterward, I stick my characters and all their motives in their respective places, and all is right with the world. My characters behave quite nicely during chapters 1 and 2, then when I decide that so-and-so is going to do some grocery shopping and run into an ex, they tell me that they'd rather walk down a shady alleyway as a shortcut, meet some new badass friends, and get into trouble with the law because a cute guy with dreads told them to.

Well la dee, da, I tell that character, too bad your future is held at my very fingertips. But the character doesn't listen. It's as though her little feet are padding about my keyboard without my permission. Even when I tell her to get her stinky shoes off my computer, does she obey??

No, no she does not.

One of my author idols, Jodi Picoult, says that oftentimes, when she's in the middle of writing a scene, she'll call a friend and go "you won't believe what this character decided to do!" I can relate. I mean, even though I started off with the intent to fit each character into a nice box with clean intentions and they stumble upon a life-changing moral at the end of the book, I realize that would make them flat characters. Because life is messy. People can't be stuffed into nice little categories. As it turns out, characters are people too.

Or maybe I'm just too lazy to write an outline. That's entirely possibly too.

Peace and Ponies,
Kira 

Critics? Pshaw!

Dear Kira,

To respond to your question, yes, I think personal ego is very much separate from writing - not to say that I won't throw a hissy fit if you tell me my metaphors are weak and ineffective. I guess what I'm trying to convey is that, if I wrote strictly about what I knew, it wouldn't be fiction, would it?

To go all collegian and academic, let me just remind you of the New Critics (yes, I'm studying for my English theory class, you caught me). One of the major tenents of their philosophy was that the writer should be divorced from there work - that is to say that, while the author may be inspired by events in their lives, the purpose of writing is to take everyday experiences and raise them to the level of art - far beyond the author's experience.

Maybe I'm not making much sense, but I think that's definitely true. I mean, if you think about it, to the average reader the piece of writing has none of the connotations it has for the author. Like, wouldn't it be weird if we all knew what JK Rowling was thinking when she wrote Harry Potter? When you put a piece of writing out into the world, you're giving people permission to interpret it in the context of their own lives/experiences. So, I guess the long and the short of it is that when someone criticizes a piece of writing, they're not necessarily criticizing the author. The writing stands by itself, which, I think, is one of the attractions of writing fiction.

Not to be philosophical or anything.

Sure, it's difficult to deal with criticism of your writing, but it's not criticism of you. Speaking of criticism, one of the most frequent criticisms I encounter is criticisms of characters. It can be really difficult to create a believable character - especially when you're writing about someone who lives a life very different from yours. Remember when I wrote that book about a Victorian ghost who was seeking retribution for the murder of her one true love? Yeah, I can relate. But seriously, I find that I am constantly trying to squeeze my characters into the great, literary archetypes (I am such an English major), but it seems to be they better serve the story that way. So here's the dilemma, do you let your characters determine there own destines to do what seems natural? Or, are they slaves to the plot?

Cue dramatic music now,
Maria

Leggo my ego?

Hey Maria,
Happy Thursday! While I should be glazing over diligently reading over this philosophical essay on abjection and other vampire-ish things (who knew vampires could be so literary?), I somehow ended up thinking about my essay for our other English class. Normally I'm intimidated by that teacher since she blames all the world's problems on our generation, but today I was doing an internal happy dance--okay, maybe it was a little external too--because she loved my essay. I had no idea what the fudge I was doing, and I just sort of blahhhed on a page (as any quality English major tends to do), but somehow that turned into inspiration ideas of sorts, and I'm kinda feeling like I won the lottery of ego massagers right here.

Trouble is, English, make that college, is not about making one's head swell up to the size of a pumpkin. It's about learning, thinking, and informing the world. I did not create the literary genius that is Nabokov's work, I only analyzed it. But since a professional said my ideas were good, I went from thinking I had written the most crap essay in the history of essays, to running around singing "I believe I can fly!" because I was in one of those moods you only see in cheesy romantic comedies. And it got me thinking--is there any way you can separate your pride/ego from your writing?

I mean, think about it. One of the first things we're told is to write what you know. And I don't make it a secret that most of my work is a reflection of myself. I mean, why else would I write a 200 page bitch-fest about a pitiful crush? You know what, don't remind me. Tenth grade was just weird. Obviously I didn't write about Lolita to reflect upon myself (only to reflect on what grade I wanted), but part of this was to get the whole "why, this is the most insightful piece of literature I have ever encountered!" reaction. Why does it matter what the reader thinks of the author? Shouldn't it only matter that the reader understands what the author is trying to get across? Writing is most certainly not a popularity contest. Yet some of the most vulnerable parts of ourselves get put out there for all the world to see. And thus, the reaction to our writing is seldom separate from the reaction to ourselves.

Peace and Ponies,
Kira

An introduction

Hello, friends from the internet and beyond. I know you're used to seeing our lovely faces stampede your news feed from "coffee, yoga and life's other necessities" and "Just sayin,'" but today we'd like a to announce a NEW BLOG! Don't all caps just make you feel the excitement? No? Grab a cup of coffee then. I'll wait.

Better? Okay, let's try it again. Maria and I are introducing a NEW BLOG! And guess what? You passed the excitement test. You are now one of us, and you win...

Hold on. I just lost my train of thought. Isn't that the weirdest frickin' image right there? I mean, I sure would like to see a train with a bunch of brains riding around it (to be honest right here, I google searched "train brains." No such luck).

So I'm sure y'all are at the edge of your seat, wondering what this thing is about. But before I tell you, let me just advise that you clear the clutter off your chair. You want to have enough wiggle room so your butt doesn't fall off. Just sayin'. But in all seriousness, we decided to write a blog in the form of letters to one another, similar to the vlog Brothers (Hank and John Green). Each post we'll have a new writerly topic that has been bothering us, making us wonder, making us cry, scream, etc (we've all been there). Throughout this blog we're hoping to 1) resolve some of our own struggles that have come about through battling the written word, and 2) reach out to the writing community of Pennsylvania and beyond. Sometimes the writing community can feel a bit scattered, and not that every writer in the universe is bored enough to read this blog (Tina Fey, why aren't you answering my emails, damnit??), but perhaps through each post, we can knit the group of writers a tad bit tighter.

Also, turtles are awesome.

That is all.