After my whiny post of yesterday, I did some serious moping around, and then got a little less grumpy, and finally calmed down enough to get some perspective.
First of all, NaNoWriMo was supposed to be a lark; why on earth was I making such a big deal about it? So my novel sucks; what of it? I've learned some stuff about fiction-writing, I've written a number of words that I'd be impressed with in any other month, and I've had some fun as well as some distress. Let's call it a success and move on. (Justine Larbalestier has a great post on exactly this point today.)
Here's a potentially productive line of thinking from yesterday: It occrured to me that, in all of my thinking about this novel and other potential novels, what interests me is a particular cultural moment; that's why all of the ideas I've had have been historical fiction. But I never have a particular STORY I want to tell; I just have cool STUFF that I want to share with other people -- how people dressed, what they ate, what ideas they had, how they interacted with other folks. Really, these interesting things bring out the teacher in me rather than the storyteller in me; or at least, if I actually have any storyteller in me, she is always a servant of the teacher in me. And historical fiction is a great way to communicate those cool things and teach readers about interesting moments from the past, but it's not the only way. Popular nonfiction is another way to communicate such cool things and is a genre I've long been interested in possibly writing some day. So maybe the next time I think of a cool topic that I'd like to explore, maybe I could think in terms of nonfiction rather than fiction.
Now, admittedly, such a decision is giving up a dream of mine, one that I've long held, the dream that some day, after I was tenured, i would spend my summers in a mountain cabin somewhere writing genre fiction.
But you know what? That dream wasn't ever very realistic, since it turns out that a mountain cabin is about the worst place I could possibly go to write. Long stretches of unstructured time without social interaction is a terrible combination for me, leading to sluggishness and self-pity. So this very specific picture I had of WN, Novelist, was really just a pretty little fantasy but not in line with the person I really am. So maybe I can create some new dreams that have a lot more to do with my reality. Not that I'm ditching for ever and ever the idea of writing a novel, but I'm giving myself a bit of a break here.
Then my brain started churning again: Okay, if I'm going to write nonfiction, I need to think of a new topic Right Now! I must have something I'm working on! I actually stewed about this for a couple of hours, feeling almost frantic as my mind skittered around from topic to topic, until I caught myself and realized what I was doing. Oh right, I remember that frantic feeling; it's the one about needing to come up with a good dissertation topic! Except, um, I already wrote a dissertation and never need to do that again. Indeed, even if I never write anything again, I've got my degree, my job is in no jeopardy, and there is no "publish or perish" in this world of mine. So chill already, WN.
By the time I woke up this morning, I had realized that I'd been putting wanting to write ahead of having something to say, which is very much putting the cart before the horse. So I made three resolutions this morning:
- I will recognize that my true passion in life is teaching rather than writing; I would be deeply unhappy without the first but often live just fine without the latter. So I resolve to think of myself as "a teacher who sometimes writes," which means that when I'm not writing, it's just not one of those times. No big deal, and it needn't affect my sense of self (which is what was happening this past week or so, when apparently I was thinking of myself as "a writer whose day job is teaching").
- When I have something to say, I'll say it, but I won't put pressure on myself to find things to say. And I won't decide on genre or word length or any of the rest of these details before I decide what I want to say and how best to say it.
- I will let myself read and study the things I'm interested in without putting pressure on myself to write something about them. It's okay to learn just for the sake of learning; life is not a graduate seminar in which I need to produce a paper to justify all of the interesting reading and talking I did. E.g., last summer I was all set to give myself a couple of months of reveling in Victoriana without needing to write anything at all, but I panicked a little about that and wound up giving myself a writing project after all. And since I'm an Americanist by training and had decided that writing was the end-game, that meant I dropped my Victorian project altogether.
And having firmly decided on those three resolutions (which I should print out and post somewhere, i realize), I graded five exams and then lay down on the couch to read a book on pedagogy I've had for months now but had bogged down in the first chapter of: Robert L. Fried's The Passionate Teacher. Once again, I found the opening chapter tedious, but it gets better as it goes along, and as I read, I had a few ideas about things I want to do in my classes -- not actually suggestions from Fried, but simply reading about pedagogy was cranking up that part of my brain.
And then I started thinking about an assignment that I like to give, one that can be modified in various ways to serve a variety of functions. And then I remembered that a colleague of mine had said to me not two weeks ago what a great assignment that was, and we talked about how she could use it in her course. And it occurred to me that this assignment is something that I cooked up a couple of years ago, in my first year of high school teaching, and that I was actually proud of how well it had worked in a variety of contexts with students of different levels. It's not brilliant or anything, but I guess it's not something that everyone does, and it occurred to me that it was an assignment that I'd be happy to share with other folks.
So this morning I wrote for an hour and a half or so and wrote 1300 words of a draft for a pedagogy article that I'm now planning on submitting to English Journal, the journal that had the privilege of publishing my very first article written as a high school teacher. The nice thing about an EJ article is that it should be 3,750 words or fewer, so I'm a third of the way there just in my initial writing today. There's a relevant call for manuscripts for a special issue of the journal with a deadline of Jan. 15, which feels very do-able. I wrote my first article for EJ in about a month, it was accepted maybe three months later (peer review and all!), and it was then published within six months of acceptance -- from my original idea to publication in just under a year. It was a revelation and actually kept me from getting sick and tired of the subject, which is what has happened with every other article I've ever written.
And this experience of this morning is how my NaNoWriMo whiny-ness of yesterday has become my Thanksgiving post of today; I'm grateful for the opportunity to remind myself about what I really care about, for the leisure to figure out what I want to say, and for the craft to say what's on my mind. Not too shabby, really.
A happy Thanksgiving to us all!
