The Digital Bonnie

Yes, I did miss a few days here.  I could go back and write them in but instead I’m going to stay here and remember and reflect on my month of novel writing.

This was my second NaNowriMo effort.  Last year I discovered the challenge and that it had been happening without me for years.  I loved the online idea and began exactly at midnight on November 1st. I  was going strong for the first 2 weeks, writing about my ladies: Jessie and Molly, loosely based on my relationship with my first manicurist. I was keeping up with my demanding daily word count and feeling great until I got to the NWP conference in San Antonio and then quickly, on the first official day of the conference, I realized I couldn’t continue. I am presenting three different workshops and there was just too many distraction.  I didn’t feel any guilt, just promised myself that I’d be back for another challenge and this year, even with the NWP conference scheduled for the middle of the challenge as it always is, I was ready to stay with it.

Paul Oh(NWP), also shared the NaBloPoMo, a monthly blogging challenge on our iAnthology site, and I thought, okay, let’s fold that in too.  I would write my daily word count for the National Novel Writing Month challenge and then reflect about it on my blog every day, inspired by my friend Nancy C. and I almost had them both done but it seems like my return home from Philly and Thanksgiving focused my energies on getting the novel challenge done. It’s good to know that the daily blog challenge is offered every month and I will be back for it.

NaNoWriMo ‘09 was great fun! Don’t tell anyone but I didn’t really write a novel.  It was more memoir: a healthy dose of life from  my point of view.

In October, when I was getting ready for the challenge with a group of writers on our NWP iAnthology, I thought look about hard about a book topic and focused on my upcoming trip to Israel where I would be reuniting with my roommate from 30 years ago, when I lived in Israel for a year (1979-80). She remained there and lived her life not far from where we met in the south on a moshav. She married and raised 3 children in that time.  I was inspired already, before we even began to pack.

On our return I realized that I had a great vehicle for a 50,000 word book, my life in Israel, during that first year at 30 and then many years later (16) when I met Tuvia and started traveling there once or twice every year with him.  To separate myself from the story I gave us fictional names- Lucy and Asher and wrote the first haft from Lucy’s point of view and then the second half from Asher’s.

I have never taken on the breath of a book before.  I  write every day.  I begin with an online journal and then move to one of my blogs, usually putting text to a photo  I upload each day.  I was concerned that I would run dry but for most of the writing that didn’t happen.  Just the last day when I was racing to finish.  Just a mere 2000 words to go.

I let the moment direct me.  I created scenes identified with a date and a place.  Yes, Israel was a major player in the piece but it was really about my rich relationship with Tuvia over our 14 years together. I moved from one moment to another and let the moment drive the scenes. As I finished one I was led to another totally out of sequence.  I am sure that some of the scenes were repeated with different words. I have written some of the moments before this writing but I never looked back.

I loved the theory behind this challenge.  We often are so caught up in revising that we never get to the finish and this way, plowing ahead each day, focused on keeping up the daily word count, moving the site’s blue line that measures the submitted word count, you have a good reason to keep going and not revising. There’s no time.

We also created a Group of the iAnthology to support the writers in this challenge and that kept me going.  Margaret Hartford and I are both retired from full-time teaching and even though our lives are busy, we were both writing into the day in the morning.  I often wrote for 3-4 hours at a time, allowing myself breaks along the way and returning often to the smoothness of a new MacBook Pro keyboard to keep going. I can’t imagine finishing if I were teaching and or raising children.

What was magical about the experience was sharing some of it with Tuvia, the other main character.  I had been sharing my progress with him but orally.  Then one day as I was working on a scene in Israel that caught me, the first time I met his sister, we talked about it and he was dying to read it so, I actually looked back and read a bit of it to myself first and then out loud to him.  He was impressed with its coherence and authenticity.  I enjoyed reading it to him.

After that experience as I moved into writing the story from his point of view I wanted to share more with him and even though he couldn’t say that was what was really going through his thoughts, it felt that it was authentic, that it could have been his thoughs. In the early days of our relationship, he read some of my early short stories and suggested that I write about his Holocaust experiences.  I refused him, feeling that I couldn’t do justice to this period or his personal experiences, walking home from a concentration camp in the middle of Russia. But our life together was a time I felt I could capture and that challenge, writing from his point of view was a wonderful and stimulating challenge.  Often, as I finished a section the scene lingered with me and Tuvia and I talked at length about our shared memories and more and more details made their way into the story.

I wrote every day, even during the NWP conference.  I wonder, now that I’m finished and won the challenge, will I miss the writing?  Of course I can keep going now  and I can return to the draft and start revising.

And then hopefully, there will be NaNoWriMo 2010.  Will I be back for more?