NaNoWriMo finds a title!

I am trying again this year to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. So far, the results have been dismal, but I have been unsettled at best.

I thought I had a storyline with characters, setting, and plot up and running--until October 29th when I totally lost interest in the story and decided there was no way I could carry the dead weight of it over that many words, over that many hours of work, over that many days. I had everything but no title.

Panic set in very soon after...

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I have wanted to be a novelist since I actually wrote down my first story when I was in fifth grade.

I had been making up stories for years before that; we all had as children. All children do, I think, just as all children draw pictures and make play-do figures and sing songs they make up the very moment they open their mouth. But they forget they can do all those things as they grow up or are told they can't or aren't good enough or develop inferiority complexes because they can't write like Charles Dickens (who'd want to?) or they can't paint like Leonardo daVinci (that would be kind of cool!) or they can't do any of the other creative endeavors children love and adults think they can't possibly do any more...

Some of us never learn that about creative things. We know we can write stories; we are compelled to write stories or poems or plays or lyrics. We are compelled to paint or sculpt or carve or chisel or weave or weld. We have to sing or act or stand on street corners and shout out our words or go crazy. So we do our thing.

I'm like that.

But I doubt too and I worry that I'm not good enough and I'm afraid that I'll be laughed at.

A lot of creative people get laughed at, it seems, because they don't conform. I got laughed at because I was shy and because I was smart and because I couldn't read at first in elementary school and then when I could read in junior high and high school, I read things that other people in my school didn't ... War and Peace, Ben Hur, Andersonville, Johnny Got His Gun, 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, The Bell Jar, Siddhartha, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

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When I first started writing down story ideas, it was usually just lists of characters and descriptions of settings and plot outlines. I wish I could say that I wrote every story that I wrote up characters for but that's not at all true. I've had thousands of ideas and only a very minuscule output of actual stories.

I could say that I'm a perfectionist and that would be partly true.

I could say that I'm incredibly undisciplined and, dare I admit it--lazy, and manage to find everything else to do beside writing, and it would be partly true.

But honestly I am subconsciously afraid to write them because then that would ultimately lead to the expectation of submitting them for publication which would surely lead to rejection.

(And who wants something so incredibly personal and heartfelt to be rejected? Even if it's by someone who probably spent all of a minute scanning it before stuffing a form rejection in the SASE you sent along.)

I know it's all about believing in yourself, but sometimes it's really hard when all you can hear echoing in your head is the laughter and snide remarks of all the ugly people who've ever belittled you in your life. They may not have even been laughing at you about your writing, they may have been laughing about you having toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe but that hyena laugh is still there...

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I know. I sound like a lunatic and there are ongoing discussions about the relative sanity of creative individuals. I am inclined to think that all of humankind is insane so I don't like to single out just the creative for the distinction of depressed or bipolar or schizoid or whatever.

I think we notice the creative individuals who have mental issues because they tend to talk about their issues--a lot!

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But back to the problem of my 50K of words for November.

I have files of story ideas.

I have the story I worked on last year and never finished. (I didn't realize last year, my first year of participating, that the idea was to finish an entire story in 50K words. I was about 3/4ths of the way through my story at 50K.)

I have several other worlds I've created for stories over the last two years.

The first story I wrote was a fairy tale/fantasy about a princess named Germaine who had to disguise herself as a boy to reclaim her kingdom. And, over the years, I have tended toward the fantasy and science fiction genres although I wrote contemporary literary fiction in grad school and was working in historical literary fiction for my thesis before I drifted away from it.

My three most often reread authors have been J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Jane Austen. (I would use that as the best gauge for favorite author.) That should give some idea of what I like.

So I looked at those worlds and characters and stories and found that most were too developed.

Too developed?

Yep, I have gotten so far into the creation of the worlds and multiple story lines that it would have taken me a week to get back up to speed with the governments and religions and creatures of the worlds. Too involved to start over with them.

50K is a relatively short novel so I needed a smaller idea for the story.

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I found a folder with three pages in it. A list of names and two pages of an story line. That's kind of rare because I don't always write out a story line like that and sometimes have to extrapolate the plot from the descriptions of the characters. (I always think I'll remember everything about the plot because it's so fresh at that moment but I inevitably forget.)

And I had a title. Dance with a Dragon.

A title can be a good jumping off point. A great cliff from which to throw yourself.

Ray Bradbury once said: First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down.

This is what a title is like for me.

How does one dance with a dragon? Why would one want to? What would it accomplish? Is it a metaphor for something else--the dance? The dragon?

Oh! Oh! Oh! It's practically orgasmic when things start to click like that, when whatever it is that's inside you that lives to make up something new rises up to break the surface of the water of creation and looks around and smiles at the world...

... is it the dragon?

Pinky thinks it must be!

(Too bad I can't count this in my 50K worth of words!)