In yesterday’s post, I was talking mostly about writing. I have not done much of it since my medical crisis except for my daily posts. I did try–truly I did. But it just did not come together, no matter how I tackled it. I’m hoping that it’ll be different this time–or at least that I’ll have the wherewithal to soldier through. I’m not feeling great about it because I haven’t written for a while now. Ever since getting rid of the tree in my front yard severely fucked with my sleep schedule, I have had a hard time writing.
But, it’s me making excuses, really. Back before my medical crisis, I wrote 2,000 words every day without fail. Mostly. like 94% of the time. I really want to do the anthology of short stories and maybe try out The Moth (spoken word) based on them.
My medical crisis didn’t change my life much in the long run. I recovered from it remarkably well. In fact, I’m amazed by how little it affected me except in ways I could not really see right away. (Such as how bad my memory now is. It’s slowly getting better, but it’s still nowhere as good as it used to be.) I am very grateful for that, but one way in which it has affected me, I think, is my writing ability.
I used to have whole stories in my head, and they were constant. It was one at a time, but there was always something else in the back of my mind. Now, I have the basic outline of my novel in my head, but I’m having trouble filling out the details. Or to put it more bluntly, getting from Point A to Point B. I spent 20,000 words on one four-hour chunk or so of time. That’s not a brisk pace at all.
I really need to just get it done and then decide whether it’s worth editing or not. I get tripped up in trying to do something perfectly because then I never get it finished. I need to make it my mantra, “Just get it done”. I used to be able to spit out a fairly polished rough draft because I cannot help but edit as I go. So. I want to get the rough draft of my novel done by my birthday (which is in April). That’s more than enough time, but I’m giving myself a cushion. I’m talking at least 120,000, though it’ll probably be more than that.
Funnily enough, I just Googled what the average length of a novel is these days, and it’s 120,000 words on the dot. Ha!
One thing I do if I can’t seem to get a novel off the ground is to try writing the middle of the novel rather than the beginning. I’ve even written a rough ending before and one time, when I was writing a stageplay, I just ended it by burning down the church during a wedding. So it truly was, “They all died in the end.” It was a joke ending, but it was how I felt about the characters, too.
I am warming up to the idea of writing an anthology of all my delusion stories from when I was in the hospital. In fact, I already started writing them out in one of my prior novel attempts, but it did not work. I may try just to write them out first and then see what I can do with them. I have several that I know didn’t happen. I have a few that I know did happen. And then there’s the middle ground of those that I don’t know if they happened or not (but probably not).
The thing is, I want to present them in a way that would be maximized for peake effectiveness. Meaning, I don’t want to give it away right off the bat that they’re delusions. I didn’t realize they were until I had left the hospital. I thought they were real while I was in the hospital, and I “remember” them in vivid detail. They made sense to me at the time, but in retrospect, they worked very much with dream rules. Anything goes, in other words.
I was going to write a post on what my pie-in-the-sky goals for next year would be, but I have decided I’d rather focus on more realistic (though maybe slightly stretchy) goals. I have already talked about two of them. A rough draft of my novemoir (pronounced no-vuh-mwar) and an accounting of all the delusions I had while I was in the hospital. Not even a rough draft, but just recounting everyone I had.
The latter should be relatively easy because they are still very vivid in my mind. And some of them were very easy to disprove once I was out of the hospital and not bombed out of my mind. It’s astounding how real they felt at the time, and I am very lucky that they were not traumatic ‘memories’ or disturbing ones. They were mostly just weird or funny.
K said that the way I tell them is hilarious, and that’s why she encouraged me to do The Moth. I’ve listened to a few, and I think I could do it. It’s about a five-to-ten minute talk about an enxperience, a memory, or just something that happened to the person. Or a realization. That’s easy peasy for me. I would definitely write it out and practice it, but I’m pretty good at off-the-cuff speaking if need be. It would definitely not be as hard as the one-person peorformances I’ve done in the past.
I have said several times that I would like to return to the stage, and this could be one of my stretch goals. When I do talk about my medical experience, I always start out by saying, “I have died. Twice. And I’ve come back to life twice as well.” For something like The Moth, thouugh, I probably would start out with a bit of musing on memory.
This came about because i was telling K that it’s difficult for me to talk about my medical crisis beacuse it is simply not relatable. There is just no way people can understand what I went through–and I don’t expect them to. Because of that, I tend to keep it to myself because what’s the ppoint of bringing it up? That’s when she said that I should think about writing short stories about my delusions.
Since I had already had it in the back of my mind, I latched onto it. And I thought, “Why not both?” Look. If I’m going to start writing again, I might as well go big.
That’s all for today, so I’ll write again tomorrow.