It took a long time before I ever thought of myself as a writer. The first time it hit me, I was writing outdoors in Seattle on an idyllic August day. I spent a summer in Seattle, and rain got in the way of my daily writing practice more than one time.
Seattle has a funny optimism about summer. Everyone knows it rains year round, except for Seattleites. I lived in Seattle for four months, from April to the end of August. Where I’m from, Toronto, Canada, those months go from warm and fresh to hot and stinky and the humid atmosphere holds the heat from morning through the night. In April in Seattle, everyone told me that the drizzle would stop in a week or two. May was more perfect in Seattle than anywhere on the planet, I was told in the grocery store line, at the vegan cafe, at the local ice cream store, and at the park where I brought a paper notebook to sit and write but was foiled again by distant rain clouds and grass damp from the rain’s morning shift. May was drizzly, but I was promised at my favorite third wave coffee shop, Trebant Coffee in the university district, that June in Seattle was unparalleled. June was merely overcast, its precipitation misty; it was wet enough to rain me in. I wrote at Trebant, gazing out the windows at the drops that tapped like fingertips down the glass. July, I was promised, would be a heavenly vacation: floral, pastoral, buzzing with bees and humming with birds and butterfly wings. There were a few clear days, I’ll give them that.
In August a heatstroke sweltered North America, and finally Seattle had heat. The rain clouds parted to reveal jungle vegetation, a hundred shades of green that had been muted in the light of the overcast sky. Leafy plants crept over the urban streets as if the vines had minds; the University of Washington campus crawled with students and glorious weeds. After three months of rain drop dodging, I took my notebook for a walk to the U Dub campus. I lay on the thriving grass, which was no longer damp, and I wrote about a downtown taken over by wilderness. And that’s when it hit me, filling in a two hundredth page of notebook paper, halfway through drafting a novel. That I was really doing this. I was a writer.
When I think about what it took to create a first draft, and a second, I think about Seattle weather. How I poured word after word after word onto the page. And then one day, when the clouds pulled back, I noticed a change. Just as Seattle was so grayscale that I hadn’t noticed the proliferating plant-life thriving and green, I didn’t realize how much I was learning about the writing process. I had to pour a lot of water on that garden before I could see any buds growing. Suddenly, there they were.
That’s what I like about National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November. It’s all about pouring as many words as possible onto the page. I have participated five years running. The goal is to write 50,000 words in thirty days. The goal is not to write 50,000 good words, or to write a story that makes sense (necessarily); it’s to write any words. Crap words, useless words, wordy words, the kinds of words you will trim and cut. The quota comes out to 1,667 words per day.
This year, I captured a story idea for November lying awake in bed one night. I try not to think about writing right before bed. If I get too excited, I might not be able to sleep. But that night was different, because I wasn’t sure I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, and I was facing the disappointment of telling myself no. As I tossed and turned, and stared at the ceiling, wide awake, I picked up ideas and tossed them aside, brainstorming sans paper and pen. Inspiration hit me and I picked up an idea that I couldn’t let go.
Now here I was getting excited. It was getting on past one in the morning and not only was I up late, I was allowing myself to consider signing up for “a month of literary abandon.” I had a feeling that only comes along every so often. That I was on to something. As I let my mind wander, inspiration was coming to me, and if I didn’t draft the story on November 1st, I might lose it.
The problem was, I already had two completed manuscript drafts — two flawed, unpublished, unedited, messy novels. Did I really need another?
I had made a donation, like I have for the past five years, to the Office of Letters and Light, the nonprofit behind National Novel Writing Month. I had received in the mail as thanks for the donation a goody package of stickers, bookmarks, a thank you note, and a poster with a simplified game board that snakes down the page from start to finish with thirty days of writing motivation. I was almost committed. On the other hand, I had promised myself that 2017 would be the year I finished revising my first novel, Stars and Stopped Clocks.
During the summer I had spent in Seattle, I was halfway done drafting Stars and Stopped Clocks. It was a medieval fantasy trying to be not too ‘fantasy’ and not too medieval; there was little magic. The main character was not a knight, but a count, and lived not in a castle, but in a Victorian manor. A king was dethroned by a usurper, albeit through semi-democratic means. I drafted a query letter for potential agents. Writing the query was hard, and I threw out dozens of crumpled paper drafts. What I finally came up with for the query made me want to rewrite the whole novel from the beginning. I sent the letter to ten agents, and I was asked for opening pages from one. The problem was, as I knew in my heart and was assured by a later rejection from that agent, the idea in the query didn’t reflect the opening pages of my novel. I didn’t love the actual novel, but I liked the hook of that query:
“Every morning the sun rises over skyscrapers in downtown Soliara, but one morning dawn rises a few hours early. Business men and women in the streets stop to look up at the sky and then down at their wristwatches. Most of them, puzzled but disbelieving, chuckle at the funny ideas in their heads and adjust the hour on their timepieces, hoping they aren’t late for their meetings.”
I was almost finished the novel when I realized that I didn’t want anything medieval, and I did want magic; I wanted business towers and business people carrying briefcases. I wanted wristwatches and possibly cell phones. I wanted magic and technology to coexist and accelerate the rate of advancement for modern conveniences. I wanted a company to conduct magical research and development.
And so, not very long after lying on my stomach, feet in the air, pen scribbling words as fast as my little fist could write them and deciding that this made me a real writer, I needed to rewrite my novel. From scratch.
At the end of the summer, I went back to school, to the college town of Waterloo, Ontario. Waterloo doesn’t have anything on Seattle — except the four seasons. Fall is one of the best. It stays hot through September, decreasing in temperature until the end of October when the leaves fall orange and yellow and brown. We would run outside in our Halloween costumes and freeze — I wish I had thought to dress in the leggings, armings, and fur-lined vest that Princess Lea wore on Hoth, the ice planet. Cute but warm. Missed opportunity.
Waterloo, though, is drab. It only has three or four good pubs. In Canada the drinking age is nineteen, so I started drinking craft beer young, but Waterloo only has two independent breweries: Waterloo Brewing, known only for Waterloo Dark, and Lion Brewery, which crafts twelve different IPAs that all taste like lagers. There’s none of Seattle’s second wave coffee, or third wave for that matter; the downtown is squat, lifeless, bland, lacking art, culture, music; the students take over, drinking gross Rickard’s Red or Molson Canadian and studying in mediocre coffee shops (except for Death Valley’s Little Brother — shoutout). I was trapped on an uninspiring, gray, boxy campus, and I was daunted by the task of rewriting Stars and Stopped Clocks from chapter one.
As winter set in, and the days grew shorter, colder and more overcast, I started to draft a little something during the breaks between classes. I was compelled to write about a mental patient named Aurora, starting with a hallucination she has the night before her wedding rehearsal, and weaving in the narration with a psychiatrist interview, which suggests that she may have murdered her fiancé, Bill. Aurora’s story is bleak; it uncovers not a crime of passion but a cold, detached, twenty-something serial murderer with a delusion that anyone who has committed a sin or a wrong no longer has a soul. She finds others with like-minded ideas, and they commit a number of murders. Readers from my Writer’s Craft class were disturbed that they liked Aurora; the working title, Soulless, was harsh — an unfair accusation against my sympathetic serial killer protagonist. Aurora proved relatable, morbidly funny, and crazy. The manuscript still sits unfinished in a backed-up file on my computer for a rainy day. Maybe if I move back to Seattle.
Drafting Aurora’s story gave me plenty of writing practice with every word I added. Just one day at a time, a few minutes here or there, I was flexing my writing muscles, trying new things and discovering my voice. I also discovered Aurora’s voice. Writing from the perspective of a snarky serial murderer taught me how to capture different points of view.
It was a few months before I returned to read the beginning of Stars and Stopped Clocks, and when I did, the writing in the first chapter didn’t feel like my own. It didn’t sound like me. It didn’t have my voice. It never had. When I started writing, I wrote like someone else. I mimicked someone else’s voice. I wrote it the way many fantasy writers would write it. Only, when I picked the draft up to read it, I realized it was really, really bad. Writing Aurora’s story and discovering my writer’s voice gave me another reason to go back and write a second draft for Stars and Stopped Clocks, because I wanted to improve the writing. And since I knew how to write not only in my voice, but in the voice of a character like Aurora the serial murderer, I could now compose Stars and Stopped Clocks in the perspectives of a number of different characters with distinct voices, tones and world views.
I live in San Francisco now, which has been great for National Novel Writing Month experiences. Two years in a row, I attended a productive event held by an employee at Medium’s San Francisco office. It was cool to write in the offices of a company that merges writing with technology, and it included a free lunch. We chatted and socialized over delicious cafeteria offerings — kale and sweet potato salad, duck fat fries, smoked beef brisket — and then we got real quiet, pulled out our computers, and ignored each other for an hour and a half of silent writing — keys tapping in a frenzy of communal concentration. I love NaNoWriMo because it brings writers together in our lunatic passion and our commitment to solitude. We share our ideas, then we block each other out and get to work.
The online pep talks provide a community of support. Many authors have taken a stab at NaNoWriMo, and sent out motivational messages. Fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson admits that he’s never won NaNoWriMo — a small victory for those of us who have won, over a celebrated, published author. He did, however, use November’s spirit to finish The Way of Kings. The start of an anticipated epic fantasy series, it debuted at number seven on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list. The author Erin Mortgenstern used NaNoWriMo to begin her first novel, The Night Circus. I ran out to buy her book, on shelves everywhere with a stunning black and white and red cover illustrating a circus tent in the palm of a hand. Mortgenstern’s pep talk inspired me that a writer could win NaNoWriMo and go on to publish the product. The writing most participants compose in this thirty day frenzy often creates a work of 50,000 almost nonsense words written in a euphoric and manic state. She was able to polish and publish hers.
N.K. Jemisin, who became the first African American writer to win a Hugo award in 2016, wrote a NaNoWriMo pep talk that similarly drove me to run out to the store and buy her book (and to purchase an ebook omnibus of her other series on Amazon, more a matter of clicking through the Kindle store on my e-reading device). While working on her newest series, the first volume of which won the Hugo that year (the second won a second Hugo this year), she writes that she became convinced that the story was horrible. The Fifth Season is a fantasy about a world ending in earthquakes and the oppression of nature and earth itself, a reflection of the oppression humans impose on one another. Jemisin worried that she had “written the worst novel that had ever existed.” We’ve all been there, but we haven’t all drafted a future Hugo winner. She explained, “It was too strange, too rambly, a hot-ass mess, and I was pretty sure that I lacked the writerly skill to tell the story as it needed to be told.”
She wrote in her pep talk, with poetic modernity, that she had almost emailed her editor and threatened to delete her manuscript from Dropbox. Yes, Dropbox. Because today, deleting a manuscript isn’t as simple as ripping up pages and lighting them on fire, or hitting the delete key. What about the cloud? Deleting the manuscript from Dropbox, now that’s true permanence. Dropbox is your backup. Your failsafe. If you delete the manuscript from Dropbox, it will truly cease to exist. When Jemisin wrote metaphorically that her writing mentor had to talk her out of the Chasm of Doubt, as she puts it, I really felt the pain. Every writer knows about that chasm, and we back up our work to protect the labor of love from our most destructive desires. I was brought to tears in an episode of The Sopranos when Christoper Soprano labors for over a year to write a screenplay, and after a bad experience at an acting class for writers, he deletes his screenplay from his laptop, ejects the floppy disk, cuts it in half, and dumps it along with his backup disks into the trash. Not content to go back to bed and sleep on it, he takes the trash to the dumpster in the middle of the night. Tragic.
There are days when I could do the same. There are days when I worry that my work is the worst. I worry that it’s a “hot-ass mess.” I fall into the chasm of doubt. The spirit of NaNoWriMo taught me to keep writing anyway. When award-winning authors express the same feelings, I know that I’m not alone, and I should keep trying, just like they did.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for three years now, and it’s been just one long, unchanging season. In Northern California, there’s no fall, winter or spring. The weather is consistently that of a cold summer. I’m always inspired to write about the cities and atmospheres in which I find myself. The funny thing is, Stars and Stopped Clocks mirrors San Francisco in a way I wouldn’t have expected, because I didn’t live here when I started to write it. Characters in Stars and Stopped Clocks are immortal, and the central theme of the story is the stagnancy that comes from the natural cycle of birth, life, and death being stopped in its tracks. Power systems and hierarchies become similarly frozen. The young never get a chance to have their voices heard, and the elderly never get a day off, let alone a well-earned retirement. To a girl from Toronto, in San Francisco it feels as if time never moves forward. There’s no snow, no summer heatstroke, no falling leaves in autumn colors, and hardly any rainstorms. It’s always a little bit chilly, there’s always fog, and I always need to bring a warm knit when I go out for the evening. The three years that I have lived here have begun to blend together. Without seasons, I don’t know how to mark time.
I couldn’t have chosen a better city to be stuck revising a book about immortality year after year than San Francisco; my entire life here has taken place over one never-ending season. The advantage of participating in NaNoWriMo year after year and entertaining every new idea, even if it takes me away from revising my first novel, may be that I have taken the time to feel a similar stagnancy to what my characters feel. At this point, the frustration is beginning to set in, and I’m dying to move on. Before I was ready to finish, I had other ideas to entertain.
I started two novels during NaNoWriMo in past years. One is the next book in the Constellation Series, after Stars and Stopped Clocks. Characters in the Constellation universe come from Earth and pass from one world to another as secret tourists. Book two takes place in an alternative reality in which a magic-toting 30s-style mafia runs San Francisco. Magic has been made illegal, making its practitioners criminals, just as prohibition made those who sold alcohol lawbreakers. A crime syndicate operates with magic, which allows its members to evade police detection and control the city, selling magic itself on a black market. At 109,000 words, it’s almost complete. The problem, of course, is that book one of the series is not.
The other is called Not The End Of The World. It tells the story of Sal. Sal suffers hilariously from an extreme anxiety disorder, based on my own experiences. I tried to make his story funny. His girlfriend makes him nervous, he’s afraid his coworkers are conspiring behind his back, he’s afraid he’s being followed. The log line reads: ‘Dying of anxiety: In a city on the brink of revolution, the end of the world might be the best thing for Sal’s sanity.’
As November came near, I tried to talk myself out of participating. I needed to focus, I needed to revise, and I had enough words on my plate without adding 50,000 more. Maybe if things went well, I would lose NaNoWriMo, and only manage to write a couple thousand new words. Maybe I would finally whip one of my other manuscripts into shape. Unfortunately, the idea I had that sleepless night haunted me, and I woke up on November 1st to the fear of another project fading to obscurity, another idea I didn’t have time to entertain.
Just casting my mind out to snare a random concept for a possible month of “literary abandon,” of “writing like the wind,” of “stifling my inner editor,” all NaNoWriMo catch phrases, I accidentally caught something. San Francisco, like many cities, makes me want to write. Even if it’s messy, unfinished, flawed, and even if it means another 50,000 words on my plate. On November 1st, nothing was going to stop me from writing like the wind.
