Straight As

Finally got my official diploma in the mail for completing the one-year creative writing program, and the university sent me a separate letter congratulating me on getting straight As in all my classes. Granted, it was only eight classes (two of which were academic requirements that transferred from my undergrad degree), and let's face it, it was a fine arts diploma, which means probably everybody got straight As... but it still feels good to finally have a GPA of 4.0 for the first time in my life. 

Best rejection ever

Last September I started a two-term creative writing diploma at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland, and it was great to get me going on a regular writing schedule. I've been wanting to get some serious writing time in for a long while and it was good to have hard deadlines. And also to be surrounded by other aspiring and accomplished writers. Over the last few months I entered a handful (three, I think) of writing contests and I got rejected from all of them, including the 2015 Writers' Union of Canada Short Prose Competition, for which I submitted three short stories. 

Except today I heard that I made the short list , which means I didn't win, but the judges liked it enough to put it in the "maybe" pile before they rejected it. I came in 13th out of 400 entries. So that feels pretty good when you're a new fiction writer and have never heard anything but "no thanks" or worse, nothing at all, when you submit a piece for publication or to contests. 

So this feels like my first step to becoming a "real" writer. 

#1 - Novel Written

I did it. I started writing a novel on Friday night (Saturday morning, technically) and finished it last night. Three crazy days of creative writing have produced 96 pages,

which are currently sitting in an envelope on my desk. I will mail them in to Anvil Press tomorrow as proof of my participation in the 3-Day Novel Contest and eagerly await the certificate in the mail that acknowledges my effort, if not my talent.

Two things I learned:

      1) Writing a novel does not need to take years. In fact, it is probably easier to keep the facts straight if you don’t wait six months between chapters and forget that a character who has a broken leg in chapter 2 is unlikely to be snowboarding the next day in chapter 5.

      2) If you try to write a novel in three days you really shouldn’t expect to be in the same state of mind at the end as at the start. With very little sleep and Oreo cookies as the main staple of your diet you are going to find that the ending is trite, overly-sentimental, and maybe even incoherent because you were racing the clock and semi-conscious when you finally pounded it out.

Anyway, I’m glad I did it, and now I suppose I can cross another item off my list. Though I’m far from feeling that I no longer need to think about creative writing anymore. This experience was just an appetizer really. A first attempt. The practice round. Now I want to try to write a novel that is worthy of submitting for publication. Something that I can see one day on a shelf in Chapters. For the next one I think I’m going to need more than three days.

Seizing the Day

This morning I woke up just before 9 and realized that it's Saturday. Being unemployed for the last month or so, weekends don't really mean anything to me anymore. However, this is likely going to be the last Saturday for a long time that I will get to have this weekend feeling upon waking up.

I have decided to go for it, to throw myself headlong into the insanity that is the 3 Day Novel Writing Contest www.3daynovel.com. I'm going to attempt to write a novel. Carpe Diem and all that. (Robin Williams would be proud.) It starts next Saturday at 12:01 am and ends Monday at 11:59pm. I can only imagine the agony. And I have to be in class early Tuesday morning.

But the best way for me to write anything is under extreme pressure, and this contest is all about pressure. I have an idea for a plot, now I just need to fashion a sort of outline, determine characters, and choose a narrative perspective. First-person I'm thinking, or is that too obvious?
Anyway, this isn't exactly how I imagined myself writing a novel - I was thinking sometime in my forties, after a long life of cynical news writing, I would one day embark on a long journey through years of wrestling with my literary demons and writing, bit by bit, my magnum opus, which I would naturally love and hate and end up leaving and coming back to like a bad lover until I was in my sixties and could finally retire and find the time to finish "The Book" - but this three day thing seems so much nicer.

And it's a great excuse to drink unhealthy amounts of coffee! Nothing says "I'm writing a novel" like a big ugly mug of black brew.

To be a writer

If I could do only more item on my list before I die, I would definitely choose the first one: write a novel. For as long as I can remember that is something I have wanted to do, but have always fiddled around doing anything else instead. Why? Because, like everybody else... I fear failure. So I have never even made a start. Sure, poems, short stories, unfinished things that get shredded weeks later. But I want to write something of substance. Something that takes every single ounce of my physical, intellectual, and spiritual energy. (Surely that is the only way to write something great?) Unfortunately there are always distractions. And when there are none I invent them. Procrastination looms large.

Truman Capote started writing "seriously" when he was 11 years old. He came home from school every day and, while others his age may have been shooting hoops or practicing the piano, he wrote for three hours. Is that what it means to be a writer? Is it the time spent in the act of writing, or the number of works one has published that is important? Does it take a certain type of eccentric character? Should I start smoking cigarettes and talk to my houseplants? Wear only black?

What is a writer? I suppose the definition is vague. Many people could legitimately call themselves writers. But then there are those people in the world whose writing is of a caliber which can change the course of the lives of everyone who reads them. Nothing, not even the brightest fireworks or the most profoundly stirring music can do for me what some passages in a few novels can do. The hair on my neck stands up.

George Orwell said something along the lines of a writer being a collector of odds and ends, of snippets of conversations, themes, words, and ideas; each an important piece, like a grain of sand that, when brought together and melted down into one mass, is turned into a strong, clear pane of glass that becomes the frame through which a reader comes to see language illuminated. I want to be a collector of sand, gathering the grains together over time, observing everything that might be turned into a story. I would love to create a window pane that is so clear the reader doesn’t even know it’s there, seeing only what it frames.

Chekhov said, "Man will become better only when he sees what he is like." Some writers do make people see what they are like. And in so doing, they change the world. If I could write something that changes only one person, I would be happy. But of course I'm getting way ahead of myself, which is always the problem. I just need to start writing a little bit every day and see where it eventually takes me. And I'll still work on the rest of my list when I'm not writing!