Still Sick..

And housebound. I am munching on dry toast and home alone, at last.

With all the illness I have fallen behind on my word count for NANOWRIMO. But I wanted to share--for any fellow NANOWRIMO writers who may stop by, the strange and cool thing that has happened to me this time around.

Depite all the time you put in, the whole process is nothing but a huge, month-long experiment. Once you accept that your standards can drop appropriately, and you can plow forwards.

One of the biggest lessons I got from my writing group this past year was that I needed to let the events unfold for the reader. They had to feel--as they read--that they were in the middle of it. That everything was not already resolved.

Part of that, as I wrote in some earlier blog, is my newspaper training. Each day, as you write your story--even if the event is still unfolding--you write as if YOU are the definitive account. You take what you have. You start with the most important thing and grab the reader's attention, and tell them the punch line just in case they do not have the time or inclination to carry on to the end.

But as I read over what I read last year, I realize something else. There is something about my writing that is indeed backwards looking. I have been told through my life by various people that I am "a disillusioned Romantic" (John Rechy), that I am "wistful" ( an L.A. Times colleague) or that there is something sad about me when my face is in repose (true!).

My writing is like that. Even my non journalistic writing has a nostalgic, wistful, poetic quality to it. That is also in the music I like, the poetry I read, the books I devour, and part of how I see myself. It is the wabi-sabi of existence--I try to capture those exquisite moments of beauty or pain. Underlying those descriptions, I suppose, is the notion that most of life is pain.

So now I am writing my novel as the events unfold. It is hard for me to click into this mode. And yet how fun! How liberating! My characters are walking off and doing things I never expected! The story is much more powerful, even if the writing is much worse. I thought I knew what was going to happen--and I must get back to a particular point--but now everything is a possibility.

It is as if, in the process of writing this novel, I am retraining my brain to think forward, instead of backwards. I am looking at the possibilities of the future, rather than reviewing and reliving (however poetically in my own melodramatic mind) the past.

I am about to turn 43, and perhaps for the first time my brain is truly shifting, down to the molecular level, as a result of rewriting this novel. And, like a daily exercise regimen, I will have to keep thinking this way, for at least an hour a day, for the next 23 days.

How astonishing!

How does your mind work? Has writing ever changed how you think?