The year of writing faster

I did have one huge good thing I did with my writing this year, I finished half a novel. In participating in NaNoWriMo (the month of November 50,000 words novel writing event) I finally realized I can pound out vast quantities of sentences and chapters. Remember, I'm a poet. We're talking a page of writing short lines with lots of spaces. After NaNoWriMo was over, I knew two things. I should have written it in first person and I'll need to throw a lot more misery and conflict in my hero's path. You just cannot be nice to your main character. There is no get-out-of-jail card in fiction if you want to keep things interesting. All those touching scenes and sweetness that I wrote, ugh, I was channeling some sort of Waltons rerun. Gack! I can't smooth things for my characters and behave like their stage mom. I am the supreme being, that is to say, the plot master. So I started researching just how someone coming of age in Brooklyn in 1912 would talk. I need my character to appear subservient but have a lively funny inner dialogue that will eventually be part of her overt character as she grows up. Oh yeah, one other thing I learned, when you write a lot, and really let it happen, some unexpected riffs happen. It is rather wonderful to give up the illusion of control and be rewarded for it.

I wish all of you, this coming year, a chance to write a galloping first draft of something, with no slowing down for quality or consistency. Write it fast. Rewrite it slow. Later, we'll workshop.

A Creative New Year

For reasons too sad and too numerous to go into, members of River Writers are no longer allowed to name years. When we were younger and more foolish, we used to name years things like, "The Year of Having Our Books Published," or, most catastrophically, "The Year of Getting Famous," and what would invariably follow were series of disasters which cost several further years to recover from. (The only exception was one year which Claudia and I entitled "The Year of Adventure," which included a really amazing reading by W.S. Merwin and a concert by Blossom Dearie - apparently if you leave years unspecific enough, and are nonhubristic, the Fates do not hound you in the same way.)

So I will not venture to title 2009, but I am nonetheless having a strong intuition that it is going to be a very good year for creative ventures. Sometimes you just know. 2008 seemed like a year for working things out - at least here at River Writers, we all seemed to be trying things out and stumbling up against some road blocks - not the most prolific year for even the most prolific among us. But I think things did get worked on and are at least beginning to be worked out, and I am now officially expecting Great Things in the New Year. Although we did end the Old Year with a really splendid draft of Bill's new play, which I do not yet believe has a final title, but is a brilliant meditation on changing roles within families over time. (Or if it does now have a final title, Bill, tell us!)

Although I don't believe any of us think of ourselves as particularly political artists or writers, I can't help wondering if the mood of the country over the last year has affected our writing and our mood more than we really have acknowledged, or at least discussed. Up until the very day of the election, gloom and anxiety were hard to avoid; and since the election, we all seem to be on hold, still hearing persistently dark news, but hoping at least, for the best. On the one hand, all the news fed to us seems to be bad; on the other hand, we have lived through several decades of unbelievably rapid change - social change, economic change, political change, and it seems like almost anything could happen, even a drastic change for the better.

But in any case, even more than most new years, I think this is definitely going to be a time for finishing old projects and beginning new ones. We won't label the new year, but I think we will begin it with ideas and energy, and hope that it's a time for going on to the next new thing.

No Gifts?

Your Christmas actually sounds kind of peaceful to me, Claudia, very adult and civilized. It is my theory that we should enjoy these moments while we can, as the pause between generations is brief. Just as we get adjusted to nice quiet evenings with a little seasonal music in the background, the unsettled cries of babies and toddlers who haven't yet grasped the joys of Christmas begin to ring out from the next room. Gather ye eggnog while you may.

And speaking of eggnog - does anyone make it from scratch any more, or is it too scary? I have been contemplating eggnog, but somehow, in the interval between when my dad used to make it with many eggs and clouds of whipped egg white on top, and the current moment when it all seems to come pasteurized and homogenized out of cardboard containers in the dairy section, I've lost or forgotten the recipe. Are we still allowed to eat raw eggs?

The holidays just get more complicated all the time.

No gifts, no kids, no fuss, no huzzah

My husband and I will be going to my Aunt's house tomorrow for the holiday. It will be good to see my parents and cousins, but I will miss having any kids around. Mine will be with their father this year in New Jersey. But my girls are young adults--I meant kids as in under the age of ten...somehow the holidays without any wide eyed participants just seems a little flat. I look back on all the years of my girls being girls and it seems like it went by too fast. At the time it was not rushing by. Every day had its tides of small dramas. Ah well, this is middle age, and it is my turn to look forwards and back, to see both shores and know this too is temporary. I also know I am lucky at my age to have parents and even a grandmother around. Lucky to be able to love them all through another year.

Wrong Suitcase

I know that wrong suitcase feeling so well, Hilary - every time I gear up to go on a trip - and especially around the holidays - I am in a complete panic that I will somehow get it wrong. I won't bring the right suitcase, I will forget all the presents, I'll lose my ID or tickets, I'll bring all the wrong clothes - the list goes on.

The funniest part about it, really, is that on those rare occasions when things have gone all wrong - flights missed, baggage lost, medication misplaced, no coat brought and a blizzard in the offing - it always gets fixed. Clothes can be bought or borrowed, doctors and pharmacists can be called, and there's almost always another flight in an hour or six. But we almost all approach trips as if we were in the final scenes of a Hollywood movie, where if the flight is missed, the person not found immediately, we have lost our one and only chance to ever fly to that place or see that person. If you don't catch your boyfriend/girlfriend/fiancee/spouse/master spy at EXACTLY that moment before their plane takes off and they leave forever, you will never see them again. Apparently, in the movies no one has cell phones, email, or even a Post Office Box at which to receive messages about missed flights and opportunities.

And that's exactly how I feel before trips, even if they are to a conference half an hour away on the commuter railroad. Anything I don't remember is lost to me forever. And maybe that is just what Claudia was saying about holidays: if we don't remember, who will?

Is God gonna bring me a suitcase?

I hate vanishing dolls and headlines that print themselves but what I was going to add to Debbie's blog was that 

once upon a time a long time ago, my daughter had a doll named neither Barbie nor Strawberry Shortcake but otherwise was like any other little girl's doll in Istanbul.  I think her name was Vivian?  Megan?  At any rate, my 4-yr-old daughter, Alexandra, was completely satisfied with the wealth of wardrobe enjoyed by her doll, but she had nothing to put all those doll crinolines in when Megan went to bed and so needed -- for Christmas -- a suitcase.  (Megan had written it in her letter to Santa.)  At the same time, Alexandra's Sunday School was preoccupied with the religious story of Christmas, to which end the visiting English padre (bearded as any proper Santa Claus  -- or Heavenly Father, for that matter -- would be) had come to explain to all the children the lovely story of the Nativity --

 & not unnaturally. Alexandra  had all of Christmastime's Principal Players mixed up and that would be all of my comments on Debbie's comments on Christmas, although I might have added comments in re: last week's NYT editorial, commenting upon all the lovely layers of belief upon which Lewis bases Narnia....and all of these comments would have agreed with Deb's excellent comments  as Christmas is indeed, a bittersweet event  -- except I wanted to add

that we are programmed, genetically, I think (Claudia, you are the expert) to take all our holidays with a Grain of Salt, to add  to any expectationa sense of forboding brittle hope, which was mostly in Alex's facial expression not in her words, of course, and --

I don't know what in the world I am talking about....

Except I am panicked, packing for Christmas in Boston, where the youngest among us will be 13 (Alex's daughter, Elizabeth)worried  that we will somehow all be disappointed (like there won't be enough suitcases to go around, or I've chosen the wrong suitcase for one of us --)

MERRY CHRISTMAS , Andrew, Bill, Debbie, Claudia! 

 I love you all, and I will never never knowingly  (aye, there's the rub) bring you the wrong suitcase,

Hilary

Writing through the Holidays

Up until Thanksgiving, I was moving along merrily, working each Saturday on my novel, and on my other works in progress on Sundays and during the week. And then - I was scrambling to get something done for the last workshop - and, truth be told, without the workshop to give me a deadline, almost nothing would have been written before the New Year. And I don't think it was just me - we probably set a record for the shortest River Writers ever this week.

What is it about turkey and trees and holiday lights that slows us down so much? (I notice, for instance, no one has been blogging here either.) Well, unless turkey has long term effects not yet identified by science, I guess it has to be mood and memories. I don't think it's just that Christmas was a time of such great anticipation as a child; I think it is an ongoing sense of loss that settles in as we get older, loss of all the people who are no longer with us as we gather to celebrate. Grandparents, parents, the generations behind. When I was ten years old, I visited a nursing home with my class at Christmas time and met a 102 year old man who was born during the Civil War. I was thinking of him this week, and thinking he was born almost 150 years ago. That's a lot of Christmases. It's not exactly that I miss the Christmases of my childhood - it's that my childhood is receding through time, becoming historical, subject to sentimentalization and ossification. If I had a time machine and could go back and ask that nice man a few questions, one would be if the Victorian Christmases we see on our cards and Christmas windows today have anything at all to do with his memories.

Oh well, this too shall pass, the New Year will arrive, the roar of the crowd from Times Square will wash over us, and writing will become easier again. But it probably won't make next December any easier - maybe we should just declare a writing holiday and dedicate ourselves to consuming cookies instead!