Travel and Writing (Not Travel Writing)

I love to travel. I love the adventure of it. I love plunging head first into the unknown. Sure, I plan a bit. I take a map. I try to learn a bit of the language. I have in mind a few must-sees. But the best things about traveling, for me, are the surprises along the way.

Sometimes it's scary—lost on country roads in France with a huge pack on my back, blisters on my feet, and not a town in sight. Then it starts to snow. It is both beautiful and terrifying. Will I freeze to death in France?

Sometimes it's just plain miserable—finding three museums in a row closed. Is there a holiday we don’t know about?

And sometimes it is magical—hacking through the jungle in southern Mexico and happening upon stone ruins and a hidden waterfall. Sunlight filters through the canopy and we lay down our machetes to rinse our sticky skin in the cool pool.

For me, writing is like traveling. The best things come when I lay myself open to adventure.
Sometimes, afterwards, I look back and think that I could have got a lot more out of Paris if I'd had a better travel plan. But then I would have missed that flock of birds rising out of a tree in front of the Moulin Rouge that I’d just walked by without noticing. Or the funny little couple that we kept bumping into.

Like anything, there's a balance to strike.

Now that I'm slogging through revisions on my novel, I sometimes wistfully think that this stage would be so much easier if I'd started with a more comprehensive outline. As is, some chapters have to be completely re-written. (I'm talking, scrap everything but two paragraphs and fill up that blank page.) But, if I'd had a more detailed outline, Annabel would have walked right by the lovely family in the woods. She never would have met Mieka and Lumi and Nana Trots. She also might never have had that vision of her mother, the one that plays before her eyes throughout the rest of the book. And I never would have written pages and pages of back-story on one supporting character that helped me understand the rest of the story in a whole new way.

So this is my homage to first drafts, to plunging boldly into the unknown, to going forward and not looking back until you have something whole to look back on.

Things I learned while NaNo-ing

I should start by saying that I was impressed by NaNoWriMo. I remember thinking last year that it overlooked the craftsmanship in writing, that nothing mattered but word count.

This year, however, I knew I needed to bite the bullet. The revisions in my novel called for a cut and then the addition of half a novel. I needed to add about 50,000 words, and I'd been putting it off ... or writing 1,000 at a time and then revising and revising.

I love revision. First drafts? Not so much. For me, revision is safe.

Revision is Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn.

First drafts are your crazy Aunt May who thinks her blue hair looks natural and makes embarrassing comments when she meets your friends. Aunt May with the really big purse that stopped looking like leather the minute she cut off the price tag- 10 years ago.

Not surprisingly, that was one of the first lessons I learned.

NaNo Lesson #1. I embraced my crazy. I invited Aunt May over for coffee and let her eat cookies till her purple velour pants with the elastic waist grew too tight. NaNo was my chance to experiment. I got to do whatever I wanted, just to see what would happen. Or, as Gail Carson Levine mentioned in her blog*, it was a chance to be extravagant: "See what you can put in that your ideal reader- the one who most gets you, who best loves your mind- will adore."

NaNo Lesson #2. I really can just write. I'm all about the writing ritual and the writing space, and settling down to write thoughtful, insightful prose. NaNo was about butt-in-chair time. Now I realize I don't have any excuse not to write. I just need to do it. Rituals are helpful until they become excuses. My ritual had become an excuse.

NaNo Lesson #3. Middles are so much easier after the end has been written. The Slushies will tell you that I have no trouble revising one chapter (just one!) for weeks till it's just right. I learned that it is so much easier to polish the middle after you've written the end. I cannot tell you how many notes I made to myself about what I needed to do with those middle chapters. I wouldn't have figured that out no matter how much I'd revised them. I wish I had just pressed through to the end and then circled back. I know better now.

So there you have it! I'm not sure if I'll NaNo next year, but it was a great thing to do this year. How 'bout you? What do you think about NaNo? Did you attempt it? Learn anything in the attempt?

*She wasn't talking about NaNo, but that one comment sure shaped how I thought about NaNo.