Don't Leave Yourself Behind

I have a piece out in The Atlantic today! For me, this is a huge milestone and also a very important piece, so give it a read.

A chocolate cake with red jello balls on top.

It’s the day before NaNo and all through the house… I’m throwing around drafts and outlines trying to get settled in.

As usual, my writing mind is exhilarated by the constraint and the mad fury that is writing 50,000 words in a single month. I’ve been working on a lot of shorter projects and have tried to build my discipline with research, writing, pitching, etc. But I am drawn to staying in a character’s head for a longer period of time, testing worldview and characteristics for pages and pages rather than paragraphs – even if much of it gets chopped later on.

Armed with a few earlier draft pages, I’ll be growing my story during quick timed exercises. I tend to work better with an overly formulaic structure that pushes me to think creatively within it. I also tend to work better under the cover of night with a bright screen in my face. We’ll see how annoyed my family members become with the cranky, somewhat sleep-deprived version of me that will undoubtedly show up by the end of the month.

I turned 24 this past week. It was a silly sort of day. Here in Dhaka, my family doesn’t really do birthdays. A cake was delivered; a biryani was cooked; several truly terrible jokes about age were told. In the evening, I started a new small notebook and wrote down a birthday intention for the upcoming year. This year: don’t leave yourself behind.

I spent a lot of age 23 in boom-bust cycles. I moved three and a half times – across NYC, across the country, across the ocean. I changed jobs four to five times. I attended births, organized events, grew a magazine, survived yet another long winter… And although I did a lot of great healing work for myself during that time, I also felt like a large part of it was spent worrying.

The challenges of living abroad are simply different challenges. I still worry, of course. But I am blessed to have more time and energy to invest in myself and my own work. Though I don’t have the expectation of returning to the US an entirely changed woman (I will certainly still be a workaholic and a chronic list-maker), I hope that I can return with the skills to hold space for myself no matter how intense the world around me.

With that in mind, let's take a deep breath and start novel-ing!

Hesitation, Authority, and Building the World As You See It

Graffiti of a wooden rowboat in black on a wall.

This week I learned about Bengali magicians working to preserve their mentor’s home. I’ve been reading folktales about jealous queens and urban studies papers about the development of Dhaka high rises. Photographs, art pieces, old magazine ads -- I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of research.

Research is actually a very exciting part (says the eternal nerd). Like research for an academic paper, I am starting wide and then narrowing my focus based on what calls to me. Unlike research for an academic paper, I don’t actually know what I’m looking for or how much any one thing will influence the end result. Tabla music could teach me how to set the tone and pace of the novel. I could write my characters into the black and white photographs I’ve been looking at. Or both, or neither.

You can probably already see how easy it is to get overwhelmed.

I have a huge set of possibilities – and responsibilities. I agree with Wonderbook author Jeff Vandermeer: sometimes fantasy worlds are easier to construct than real ones. In the real world, I feel clogged with my assumptions and reactions. I’ve read empathetic and complex depictions of Bangladesh and the United States by now, but I’ve also read a lot of generic national histories, a lot of savior narratives, and a lot of just factually inaccurate pieces (several travel guides come to mind). And sometimes instead of absorbing the research, I get seduced by the image that I have for my characters, based on whatever approximation that I’ve read in other novels. There’s a difference between a pastiche of techniques and Frankenstein’s monster.

I needed a way to systematically think about the way I was creating worlds and the characters that inhabit them. Someone online suggested a series of essays called Writing the Other, and I inhaled them. They gave me the much-needed structure for how to go about research; they offered ways to re-evaluate and interrogate myself as I am drafting. Most importantly, they gave me back some confidence in my process.

One can never absorb all aspects of a society. Our social position – class, gender, race/ethnicity, to name a few – changes our access to materials and experiences. There’s no such thing as an impartial observer. I hold that tension in my head all the time as I write, hoping of course that it pushes me as I write my wriggling first draft.

The Car Window

In the backseat of Aj’s mother’s green truck, we looped our way back around California hills in the pitch dark, studded only with the stray lights of houses in the distance. This was before her mom’s hips and knees started aching too bad, before the injury and the swelling stopped her from getting out entirely. I was a little kid by anyone else’s standards – but Aj and I held on to the word ‘preteen.’

“What if there was a guy on the road?”

“What if there was someone tailing us?”

“What if a hand came out of nowhere and pressed up against the window?”

I grabbed Aj’s shoulder hard and we both turned to look. I could see the paper-white hand reaching out of the darkness. It was worse than the horror movies that I couldn’t bear to watch because my imagination didn’t know when to stop embellishing.

“What if—”

My shoulder collided with the hard front seat. I heard Aj squeal and her mother let out a breath like a pressure cooker. Then the slow crunch of gravel as the truck rolled gently forward again.

“Did you see it?” Aj’s mother asked.

“What?” Aj said, her voice hushed.

"That little raccoon! Damn near sent us over the side.”

She whistled and snorted with laughter and we couldn’t help but join her. I glanced out the back window, but by then the dark was complete.

In the past few months, I’ve been writing a lot of creative non-fiction. It’s been refreshing to return to fiction as a different type of storytelling, but it requires so much more follow-through. Generating material is always the exciting part, but then I have to add in transitions. By the time the rewrites and edits roll around, I’ve already bitten my nails down as far as they’ll go.

With my novel project, I’ve become more and more interested in the effect that place/space has on social practices, and on the way that’s changed over time. Specifically here in Dhaka, things like transport and access to public facilities (restrooms being a big one, but also parks and places to sit for extended periods of time) really change the way that people interact with the city. Though that’s only from my limited observation, I’m excited to start investigating what other folks have to say on the matter. Research can sometimes overshadow my drafting process, but right now it's leading me down corridors that I haven't yet explored -- I'm enjoying the thrill of it.

Posts from Memory Lane: An Excerpt from "Flames"

These posts were written during the summer while I was in Bangladesh, in preparation for the upcoming academic year. Long story short: when I looked back at the archive, I didn't have the desire  or the time to put them up. But now, since I'm coming back to the blog, I decided that some of them aren't half bad. Read on!

"Long ago, in the sky just below the heavens, there were three flames. The flame of light, the flame of knowledge, and the flame of darkness. These flames were constantly competing, everyday light, knowledge, and darkness had a race. Light was the fastest and for half the day she would always beat darkness but when she got tired darkness overtook her for half the day. Knowledge was the slowest of the three and she would always think of a way to beat her sisters. She filled the minds of all the people on a planet she named Earth. This gave her the energy to beat her sisters for at least a bit of the time. They would constantly run and sometimes they even left their bodies to converse in their minds."

Long ago, in a house in Bellevue, Washington, there was a girl who wrote stories...

This is the first paragraph of a novel* that I wrote when I was 12 years old. It's in a document shelved in my computer files waiting for me to revive it in just such a fashion (see, my collecting brain does sometimes turn out to be, if not useful, then at least heartwarming!). It's about 18,500 words and its all about the story of a fight between the three "flames" introduced here and their attempt to keep the earth from destroying itself.

I always look back and think "wow, I was writing for all this time? I wrote all of those words when I was that young?" But then I realize I'm shortchanging young people, including my own young self. They can have amazing ideas and infinite time to execute them. We as older people just need to be encouraging of that. Not to pump myself up too much, but I feel like I've been writing all my life and have learned a lot from those early pieces.

There's one big thing that this piece teaches that's not about social commentary. It's about honesty. And mistakes. It's not beautiful writing up there, and sometimes it makes me cringe to read through parts of it. Nevertheless, I am addicted. In part because it's young me trying to communicate herself to the world. And in part because it's so straight up honest. That's something that I have tried very hard to pursue in my later writing - now crowded with all these ideas about form and style and theme. NaNoWriMo really helps me with that; it pushes me to put it all down on the page first. Because what does it matter if there are tons of mistakes and it doesn't sound good? It is the world inside my brain and I'm going to describe it for you, whether you like it or not.

After all, knowledge did win out.

*I say novel because I remember clearly thinking that this was long enough for a story to enter into novel territory - but if we're going on length, it's clearly not quite there yet, haha.

CED Round-Up: Writing My Novel

This week's CED Round-up will be pretty short, due to the fact that I have consolidated most (if not all) of my creative energies on writing (all 16,946 words I have so far) of my novel for Camp National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). To contradict that last statement, here are two things I worked on this week that were not related to the novel - a VoteBot comic for the Washington Bus blog and a business card:

(click for the larger versions.)

Anyway, back to the writing.

CED Round-Up: Summer Writing Camp

This week was all about writing and on-site photography. This week I began writing a novel for Camp National Novel Writing Month, the summer version of November's amazing race to 50,000 words. It is totally nerve-wracking, but what makes it even scarier is that Camp NaNoWriMo goes on for two months! That means that I'll be writing 100,000 words over the course of two months, and I hope to do it all for the same story, so that in and of itself is absolutely terrifying. But I really want to top myself out this summer, so I am going for it. As a result, however, I have suspended work on my serial fiction The Observer until further notice. In the meantime, enjoy the miniature updates about my novel coming at you in the CED posts!
On the other side of things, I got to attend some stellar events this week - namely, Seattle Zombie Walk and the 4th of July at Gasworks Park! Pictures abound.

This is my poor attempt at being a menacing zombie for Seattle Zombie Walk.

Like The Cowation on Facebook to see more of the pics!