Camp NaNoWriMo - Day 31

(This was actually written on the 29th.)

I know what they mean when they say writers bleed on the page for all the world to see. This is the hardest novel I've ever written. And it's not for lack of ideas.

As mentioned previously, this story is a bit of an allegory. And as with nearly all my novels, there is a song driving the overall theme and/or mood. For this novel, that song is D.O.X.'s Morningstar. (I fangirl over it here.)

In that fangirl post, I mention how this song broke my heart because I know it's talking about me. In this novel, the main character in the story is me, and her biological father is searching for her -- I don't want to make this too heavy-handed or preachy, but it's a pretty clear representation of how God searches for us...

Funny how even though I haven't really spoken to God since the day my cousin died, there's still a part of me that believes He searches for us and loves us -- or maybe it's my wishful thinking, hoping that this image in my head is correct, and terrified that it's not. Maybe that's why this novel is so hard to write. The hope and the fear are threatening to pull me apart between them.

I have officially passed 50k (51,037, actually) and met my Camp goal, but I haven't finished the full storyline I had originally sketched out for this thing. Despite the fact that this novel's pre-sketched plot was probably the fullest I've ever done (usually I have sort of an opening line or maybe a two-sentence summary), I don't know how I'm going to finish this novel. Part of me is so emotionally exhausted from pulling out all my insecurities and anger and doubt and crafting it into something reader-worthy that I want to peg out as soon as the father reveals his identity to his daughter (assuming I can even get that far). But on the other hand -- this story would probably be so much richer (and the allegory factor higher) if I continue with the plotline as originally written. If I stop work on this novel now, I'll never get round to it again. As it was, it took me eight months to come back to it and add the final ten thousand words to get to 50k. I have to finish it now or else it'll never get finished.

But at the same time, my broken heart can't handle that much more of it being spilled out onto the page. It almost physically hurts to write and read back the stubborn-as-heck MC and the tender, kind father. I look at MC and see it so clearly: if you weren't so darn stubborn, he would have been able to take you in by now and you could be happy again. But even though I know it is that exact same stubbornness in me that's eating me alive, I keep being stubborn. It's killing me -- the same way it almost literally killed my MC -- but I won't let it go. Why?

I don't know. I don't know why she won't let it go, and I don't know why I can't let it go. It breaks her father's heart, but she doesn't see it. She keeps right on refusing his love. She keeps right on talking about how her father is abusive and destroyed her life and never cared about their family... if only she knew how much! I see this thread running exactly parallel through my own life -- right down to her rejection.

The thing right now is I need the daughter to accept (at least begrudgingly) is the option of living with her father -- seeing for herself that he is not abusive. But I don't know how to get her to that point because I'm not at that point. What convinces someone as stubborn as MC and I are to trust a father who we believe to be abusive -- whether or not he actually is?

Camp NaNoWriMo - Intro

For Camp NaNoWriMo this month, I decided to finally finish my November 2016 novel. It had less than 11k left on it when the demands of college finally forced me to stop working on it. But I already had the ending of the story sketched out and I wanted to finish it eventually -- preferably this year.

Since I decided this is the month I'm going to finish it, I re-read the existing draft today to refresh myself about the characters and the storyline I'd already established. Ordinarily I don't re-read my novel drafts until well after I'm finished, and always at least a month or two after that. This, I believe, is the first time I've read through a novel draft while it was still in progress.

I don't remember any of my thought process while actually writing it. I was so stressed out and so dead tired that I mostly wrote in a half-asleep but highly anxious state. Unlike Kyrie, which consumed my every waking thought (and still does draw a lot of brainpower, even two and a half years later), half the time I forget this novel exists. So I was a little stunned at what I found.

This is a highly emotional -- even visceral -- story. There's a lot more struggle, a lot more conflict, (a lot more plot points that I can flesh out when I get around to revising it for publication...), a lot more poignancy and heartbreak here than in anything I've ever written before, even Kyrie. Basically the story follows an incredibly strong-willed (and sassy) homeless orphan, trying to survive a harsh winter on her own, too proud to admit she's struggling. Death, mockery, and rejection seems to follow her everywhere she goes and she's long since hardened her heart to it. What she does not know is that her father (who she never met) is in fact alive -- and he is looking for her. Of course, there are a myriad of dangers for a ten-year-old girl -- however feisty -- alone on the streets of a major city, and her own refusal to accept any kind of charity does not work in her favour.

Lately (as in the past year and a half or so), I've been drawn to the modern-day-parable style of writing. It's a format most people instantly connect with because it's so familiar, which makes it an incredibly powerful style of writing. It's a good way to drive home a point without being patronising, and it's surprising, actually, how much you can get away with in a 'fictional' allegory.

This is the style of this novel (it doesn't have a name yet). It's basically a long-form modern parable, and even as I, the author, read the beginning of the draft back to myself, the story affected me profoundly on a personal level. On one hand it moves slower than most of my fiction, yet it doesn't get as boring as some of my other stuff. Perhaps I'm finally beginning to learn how to pace things and not be frantic...?

The story is drawn (in a distant way) from my own life at the time I started it. Now, eight months after I abandoned it, the parallel between this novel and my life is even stronger and clearer -- so much so that it took my breath away. Even the amount of heartache in this novel weighs on me more than I expected.

There is, however, more heartbreak to come in this novel. I'm writing this blog post, in fact, in an attempt to put off making things worse for my protagonists. It's one of those it'll-get-worse-before-it-gets-better things, but the fact is I still have to write some pretty terrible afflictions before the mood of the story can turn the corner. This book needs to get written. These things need to happen. If I back out now and say 'they've suffered enough' and just skip to the happy ending, the story will lose its power. (As I write this I realise that even that sentence is a metaphor for my life... I won't get into that now, though, as that'll touch off a whole other rant. Suffice to say it hurts my heart.)

Something one of my college profs tried to drill into me over my internship was "Don't just 'try' -- do."

So here we go... I must harden my heart and write wretched things.