Since 1999, November has been National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript between November 1 and November 30. My first novel, The Grave and the Gay, which was published in 2012, was
begun—though not finished—during NaNoWriMo 2006. If you are taking part in this endeavor for the first time, here’s some of what I learned from my
experience.
1.NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing
Month. I wish it was National Novel Starting Month (NaNoStarMo). The
point is to motivate aspiring authors, but the goal of actually starting and
completing a novel in just one 30-day month is both stress-inducing and
difficult to achieve, and may even be counter-productive. How many great novels
were written in just one month? Novels typically take years to write. I would prefer
an emphasis on starting the novel in November, rather than completing
it in November.
2.NaNoWriMo writers always focus on word counts—how
much they’ve written per day. A day in which 2,500 words are written is
considered very successful, a day in which 500 words are written is considered
bad. Yet how many of those words will actually survive the rewriting process?
It could well be that Monday’s 500 words are much better than Tuesday’s 2,500
words. Quantity is good, you want to get words on paper, but don’t judge your
progress by quantity alone. My first novel took me three years to write, and
three years to rewrite. A lot of words—even the good ones—didn’t make the cut.
As Hemingway said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
3.A truism that I was told and didn’t want to
believe was: Throw away your first three chapters, and then you’ll have the
true beginning of your story. Writers tend to want to work like film directors,
spending a lot of time on scene-setting. Directors will begin their movies with
aerial views of the countryside and sweeping panoramas of the landscape,
gradually honing in on the house and then the character, and it may be a couple
more minutes before the character actually speaks. That’s how I originally
started my first novel. It was beautiful, cinematic prose describing in lush
detail the environment in which my story took place. I was told, “Get to the
action sooner.” Readers are impatient and so novels these days tend to begin
with the main characters doing or saying something right away. You can fill in
the scene-setting details later.
4.Have fun. This is not a competition. This is a
personal challenge and it doesn’t define you. Use the month to pick up good
habits in terms of making time to write. But also make time to take walks. Good
writers are observant, they eavesdrop on conversations to learn the rhythms of
how people speak. Don’t be a hermit. Make writing part of your life, not a
break from it.
My favorite anecdote about George Harrison is one that I’ve
heard told by a few members of Monty Python. The comedy troupe was desperate
for funds after a key backer of The Life
of Brian backed out, afraid to be associated with what was certain to be a
controversial movie. Harrison was friends with the Pythons and offered to put
up the money himself. When asked later by an interviewer why he agreed to fund
the project, Harrison replied, “Because I wanted to see it.”
It may well have been the most expensive ticket sold for
that classic film, but in a very real sense Harrison’s motive is the key to
today’s trend towards crowdfunding. A leading exponent of crowdfunding is
Kickstarter, which provides a platform by which artists can solicit funds in
exchange for various benefits after the work in question has been produced.
That could mean an autographed CD or DVD, a poster, t-shirt, private concert,
face-to-face meeting, credits in the film or CD booklet, etc. The key to
crowdfunding is to convince the crowd that they want the finished product so
badly that they will pony up and contribute to the costs of production.
The Kickstarter website claims that “Over 10 million people,
from every continent on earth, have backed a Kickstarter project,” so
apparently a lot of people are happy to plunk down their money in advance.
I myself have contributed to Kickstarter campaigns, and for the
very reason mentioned above: I want the ultimate product. The most recent
example was for a documentary with the compelling title, The Rabbi Goes West.
The restless rabbi
The work in progress of two Boston-area filmmakers, Gerald
Peary and Amy Geller, the film focuses on an odd character: Rabbi Chaim Bruk, a
devout Hasidic Jew who leaves the familiar but cramped environs of Brooklyn,
New York, for Bozeman, Montana, a state 14 times the size of Israel with only
1,300 Jewish families. His mission: to place a mezuzah on the doorpost of
every Montana Jew.
To no Jew’s surprise, the biggest objections to Rabbi Bruk’s
efforts (in a sneak preview scene I was able to view, he refers to himself as a
salesman who is selling Judaism) come from fellow Jews: reform and conservative
rabbis who feel he is treading on their territory and not giving them their
theological propers, and those who for various reasons may not want to “come
out” as Jewish in Montana.
Along the way, we will meet his wife (who comes from the
same Orthodox upbringing as Rabbi Bruk but insists she is a feminist) and their
five adopted children (not that Bruk needs any other ways of being conspicuous,
but one of his children is African-American). Oh, and like TheSound of Music, the
fun gets broken up by Nazis.
We're Jews: we ask questions
Ultimately, the film explores religious and political diversity,
both in-group and among diverse belief systems, and the sense of “otherness” as
experienced by the Bruks, who are strangers in a strange land. The filmmakers
are asking an important and timely question: In today's ideologically
fractured world, how can empathy and compassion find a place?
Personally, I’d like to engage with that question through
this movie, which is why I have supported it via Kickstarter. While most of the
filming has been done, there is more to shoot, plus editing, scoring, and other
necessities of film production. Peary and Geller are looking to raise $40,000
by August 10, 2018. Consider doing the mitzvah of kicking in a little
something.
Thanksgiving time again. My favorite holiday, bringing
together my favorite things: food, family, and football. Not to mention
friends, family, and a few fingers of fermented grain mash (aka whiskey). In my
family, Thanksgiving is a beloved tradition and something I always eagerly
await. This year, I’ve decided to express my love of the holiday by compiling
my personal Thanksgiving Mount Rushmore: a four-headed tribute to the people I
think of each and every year at this time.
At the outset, I suppose it behooves me to acknowledge that
even referring to Mount Rushmore is problematic, given the cultural genesis of
the holiday being the peaceful and cooperative interactions of the Pilgrims and
the Native Americans of Plymouth. After all, Rushmore is carved into the Black
Hills of South Dakota, which are sacred to the Lakota Sioux. An 1868 treaty
between the U.S. government and the Sioux gave the latter permanent rights to
territory that included the Black Hills. But as early as 1874, General George
A. Custer led an expedition of miners who found gold in them thar Black Hills. The
U.S. government then forced the Sioux to give back that portion of their
reservation (who’s the “Indian giver” now?); the dispute led to Custer’s Last Stand
two years later and continues to this day.
So given that disclaimer, let me say that the first head on
my Thanksgiving Mount Rushmore would be Squanto (a nickname; to his own people
he was known as Tisquantum). When I was young, I took a book out of my
elementary school library called Squanto:
Friend of the Pilgrims. I’m not sure why, but I fell in love with it. I
guess I just felt so bad for the guy. The Patuxet was captured and brought to
England in 1605, where he learned English. He continued to go back and forth
from the Old World to the New World, usually against his will. When he finally
made it back to his homeland in 1619, he learned that his people had been wiped
out by an epidemic the year before. When the Pilgrims arrived, he was indeed a help
to them, though other Native Americans were suspicious of his friendship with
the white settlers. Some reports claim that his death in 1622 was due to
poisoning by the Wampanoag.
The next head is on Rushmore already: Abraham Lincoln. It
was his Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 3, 1863, in which he asked his
countrymen to “set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a
day of thanksgiving,” that led most directly to the current holiday. Lincoln
was not the first president to declare a day of thanksgiving (Washington
declared one in 1789) but its annual observance on the last Thursday of
November stuck, right up until 1939. In that year, the last Thursday also
happened to be the last day of the month, and retailers were worried about a shortened
Christmas shopping season. Responding to their entreaties, Franklin Roosevelt
moved up Thanksgiving by one week, to the fourth Thursday, and in 1941,
Congress made it official and binding. But Lincoln is still considered the
father of the American Thanksgiving holiday.
The third head (and by the way, I’m going in chronological
order by birth year) would belong to my mother. This was her day to shine, and
she never disappointed. For years, my mother made the entire meal: turkey,
stuffing, vegetables, salad, lemon meringue pies, and her famous apple pies (as
many as six of those). She always made the crusts by hand, from scratch. She
peeled and sliced Cortland apples, then she would mix the sugar and cinnamon in
a bowl. As she did this, she would walk up and down the hall, stirring and
smelling, and adjusting the quantities of one or the other until it was just
right to her expert nose. When the pies were in the oven, she would listen to
them. Somehow, they told her when they done because she used no other method to
gauge their progress.
I would go to sleep the night before Thanksgiving with the
scent of fresh baked apple pie in the house, excited about the big day of
feasting that would come soon. Despite my excitement, it was nice to sleep late
the next morning, to be awakened by the smell of a turkey in the oven. I would
get dressed, go downstairs, and watch the Thanksgiving Day parade on TV. My
sisters and I would hang around my father when he carved the turkey, and when
he was done, we would start picking at the carcass until we’d eaten every last
bit of meat off the bone. Before the meal, my father would say a few words of
welcome and then we would dig in. There was always a ton of food, no matter how
many guests we had. And when the apple pies came out, people just flipped.
Everyone would shower my mother with compliments. After meal was over, we would
sit and digest, my mother would begin cleaning and we would help – but from
beginning to end my mother did the most work.
The fourth and final head on my Thanksgiving Mount Rushmore
belongs to none other than Arlo Guthrie, because listening to “Alice’s
Restaurant” has been a Thanksgiving tradition for me for as long as I can
remember. Actually, though commonly referred to by that title, the song is actually
called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” Alice’s
Restaurant is the name of the album. The song tells the true story of a
Thanksgiving meal Arlo had on November 25, 1965, thanks to the generosity of
his friend Alice; to pay her back, he offered to take the post-meal trash out
to the dump. Finding it closed, he dumped it illegally. He was subsequently
arrested and, in a delightfully ironic twist, it was due to that arrest on his
record that he was declared unfit for military service during the Vietnam War.
Every year, along with all my blessings, I am thankful that I can get anything
I want at Alice’s Restaurant.
In the wake of the illegal murder of Cecil, the Zimbabwe
lion who now has greater worldwide name recognition than Taylor Swift or anyone
running for U.S. president, I have seen postings on social media wondering why
the killing of an animal far, far away has caused more outrage than the murder
of Sandra Bland, the latest (one of the latest is more accurate, since another
incident happened last week in Cincinnati) unarmed African American person to
be killed by police or in police custody. She was found dead on July 13 in a
Texas jail cell she probably had no cause to be in after a routine traffic
stop. There certainly was outrage from the American public about yet another
police-related death, yet less than two weeks later, Cecil’s death was all
anyone could talk about.
I have sympathy for those who are suggesting that racism or
perhaps just apathy are to blame for the fact that Cecil is outpolling Sandra.
After all, what is happening between police and black people in America these
days is scary and indicative of a larger pattern of police brutality. According
to a recent study by The Guardian
newspaper:
U.S. police fatally shot
more people in the first 24 days of 2015 than England and Wales police
have in the last 24 years, combined.
In Australia, there were
94 fatal police shootings between 1992 and 2011. In the U.S., there were
97 fatal police shootings in March 2015.
Black Americans are more
than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with
police as white people.
Some 140 black Americans
have been killed by police this year.
Obviously this is abhorrent. And yet I would also suggest
that the sheer volume of black lives not mattering to police is part of the
problem. After awhile, news fatigue sets in. Who can remember the names of all
the victims, aside from those most widely covered, such as Michael Brown, Eric
Garner, and Walter Scott? We as a public accept that there is a problem but we
have become numbed to it. There is no more shock value; we perhaps even come to
expect it. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there aren’t one or two
more black victims before this summer ends.
Furthermore, the media is always in search of a new story,
especially a new shocking story (you can’t read an article about Cecil without
being reminded that he was decapitated and skinned), and, of course, everyone
likes a good animal story, right? I count myself among those who are outraged
by Cecil’s murder. I also count myself among those who are outraged that our
police are executing Americans in numbers one would only expect in some
dystopian science fiction society – and particularly that African Americans
still are targeted by and vulnerable to the white American power structures.
So where is my outrage? It’s in both places, and not for
dissimilar reasons. There’s too much gun violence and too little respect for
life. And it’s not just happening here, and so my outrage is not confined to
these two matters. Just yesterday, an Ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed six people
marching in a Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem (which, incidentally – or
ironically – means “city of peace”). As a Jew, I am outraged that the
supposedly most pious of my religion could act in such a way that is so counter
to the “Jewish values” that were drummed into me in Sunday School.
For that matter, I have long been outraged by the Israeli
government, especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who arrogantly
continues to build settlements in disputed areas and throws obstacle upon
obstacle on the road to peace. China with its endless human rights abuses has
always outraged me. Closer to home, Donald Trump outrages me, as does just
about every Republican office holder in the country, all of whom are hateful
obstructionists, most of whom are horribly racist, and none of whom give a shit
about women.
The IRS outrages me. I’m sure I get many more notices from
them than does, say, Apple Computer, which pays next to nothing in taxes,
despite earning quite a few more billion dollars per year than I do. Reality
television outrages me. Last winter outraged me. Roger Goodell outrages me. In
fact, I’m going to repeat that last one. Roger Fucking Goodell outrages me.
Now, none of the last few outrages are on the same level as
poaching a protected animal or murdering unarmed black people, but for those
who wonder where our outrage is, it’s everywhere. There’s so much to be pissed
off about. We can’t be outraged about one thing; even if it’s a horrific thing,
it’s one of many horrific things going on in our neighborhoods, our country,
and our world. This very evening, my ex-wife, a social worker who works in the
labor and delivery department of a local hospital, told me that a barefoot woman
walked in, six centimeters dilated, ready to give birth, and she couldn’t tell
people where she lived, how she got there, who the father was, and whether or
not this was her first pregnancy. Eventually, she was able to give her name but
still much is not known. She had scabies but gave birth to a healthy boy – a baby
that is likely going straight into the system.
One could be outraged at this woman, but this woman is a
victim of the system as well. Where were the mental health services she needed?
The obstetric services? Has she been living on the street? Can you imagine a
homeless pregnant woman fending for herself in the richest country on earth? If
that doesn’t make you outraged, I don’t know what will.
So yes, I am outraged. I’m outraged at all of it. And
frankly, the thing I’m probably most outraged about is that I don’t know what to do
about it.
