Emily Gilman

Making Stuff Up and Writing It Down Since (Before) I Learned How to Write

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NaNoWriMo

I don’t do NaNoWriMo.

I have friends who do NaNoWriMo. I’ve had Friends Who Do NaNoWriMo for over a decade now. But I don’t do NaNoWriMo, because I write slowly and I can’t make stories come together to deadlines and November’s a crazy month and and and.

All of my reasons for not doing NaNoWriMo are good ones, and they make a lot of sense for my usual approach to writing. This weekend, though, I was talking with a friend about her novel draft and my novel-thing and I realized that I’ve already done a lot of planning and plotting and character building for this thing. (I’ve been working on it off and on since late fall of 2008, after all.) And it’s already non-linear, so my usual need to let the first draft grow organically (and in order) doesn’t apply so much with this project. And my friend’s draft was peppered with notes about scenes for her to write later.

Sometime in the past 36 hours or so all these facts came together in my head and I realized: I don’t normally do NaNoWriMo, but maybe this year I could. And it sure would be nice to make some meaningful progress with this thing, to have a complete enough draft that I can actually work with it.

So I guess I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year.


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In which I am about seventy pages from the end of Dune.

So I’m reading Dune. I’m nominally reading it for work, but I’m also reading it because I meant to have read it ages ago (if a certain former professor of mine is reading this, I’m sorry), and because I write fantasy more than science fiction but it’s still an important work in the field, etc.

Also, I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of friends who love Dune. They love it intensely. It is possible I have recently seen a picture of a toddler holding a worm with an appropriate Dune reference as the caption, because I am friends with the kind of people who do that with their kids. My friends are also all smart, interesting people for whom I have a lot of respect, and whose respect and affection I value highly.

Which is all to explain why I feel more than a little nervous and/or guilty admitting that I keep expecting to love Dune, and I just . . . don’t?

Let me clarify what I mean by that, or rather what I don’t mean. I don’t mean that I’m finding it dull: on the contrary, I’m finding the interplay of religion and politics and ecology very interesting on an intellectual level. I don’t mean that it’s poorly written: the writing often feels abrupt to me, but in a way that suits the harshness of the physical and social environments depicted (and I’m generally a fan of writing whose style either reinforces or complicates its subject). I don’t even mean that I’m sorry I volunteered to read it for work, though my friends could tell you that I seem to do a lot of putting off reading in favor of re-watching Leverage or (finally) reading Questionable Content. (Though, actually, there are a whole lot of Dune references in QC, many of which I would be missing if I weren’t reading the book right now.)

When I started the book, however, I expected to love it. I expected to start reading and get hooked and be unable to put it down. I expected to immerse myself in the story and refuse to come out. I expected to be reading it a lot faster than I have been, and I expected that by seventy pages from the end I’d be anticipating rereading it someday.

Instead it feels like homework. I mean the good kind of homework — the kind that has you continuing to think and learn on your own so that you have something to discuss when you come to class the next day — but homework nonetheless. Maybe it’s because I’ve been slowly working on educating myself about Islam and about the Middle East but am still in the early stages of that process, so a lot of words are jumping out and snatching my attention away from the story. Maybe it’s because when I started reading Dune I was reading in small chunks, so I never really built up momentum. Maybe it’s because the language suits the story but isn’t the kind of language I personally fall in love with, nor is it the kind of language I find next to invisible. Maybe I just have too many other things I’m excited about right now.

Reading it has, however, had one unexpected benefit: it’s been the kick in the butt I needed to get working on my own writing again. It’s kind of funny, actually — I’m used to the art that makes me want to write being the art that I do love. Instead I find myself reading and thinking, “Yes, this is very interesting, but the parts that interest me mostly do so because of how they relate to this other story in my head, and right now I’m a lot more invested in that other story.” I find myself thinking that I’d probably get a lot out of rereading the book at some point, but the thought of forcing myself to do so just makes my research reading look that much more appealing.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here, though I’m pretty sure it’s not the obvious moral. (“Read your metaphorical vegetables, kids, because they’re good for you even if you haven’t developed a taste for them yet!”) Perhaps I wish only to confess to you, my brothers and sisters (and siblings of non-binary genders), my failure to get it. Perhaps I’m waiting for someone to say that thing that will cast the book in a new, more flattering light, like that time I was complaining about having to read The Song of Roland again and my friend protested, “But it’s awesome! It’s like an action movie!” and suddenly the verse after verse of interchangeable guys cleaving each other in two from their heads through their horses clicked for me.

Or maybe I just needed to say, “Hey, this is where I am right now, but I need to hold myself accountable for those last seventy pages before I can move on to something else.”


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Good Things

I can tell it’s almost the end of the school year by how tired I am. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like the end of the school year because the weather’s been so mild. (Not that I’m complaining, mind you! I’m just as happy to save the hot weather for when I can wear tank tops and sundresses and not worry about work clothes.)

I have at least one entry that’s been rattling around in my brain for a while now, but I’ve been too tired and too busy to actually write it and have it make sense. I’m getting impatient, though, so to tide me over here are some things that have made me happy lately:

  • I just read Mikki Kendall’s story “If God Is Watching” and holy cow are there a lot of things to like about it. You should just go read it, but I especially liked her narrator’s strength and the way she tries to navigate what she can do vs. what she’s willing to do. But I also love the narrator’s parents. And her brother. And her friends. And why are you reading this when you could be reading that? (Unless you already have read it and are coming back, in which case thanks.)
  • Galen Fitzpatrick is a friend of friends whose music I’ve been hearing about for years. After hearing his song “Mud” I finally sat down and really listened to his album James McGovern about a week ago, and I’ve been listening to it pretty much constantly since. To be able to listen to the same seven songs on repeat for days and not get bored? Bliss for those of us with music addictions and obsessive tendencies.
  • I generally prefer paper books to ebooks (“prefer” might be putting it mildly), but a recent conversation with an old friend finally convinced me to invest in an ebook copy of Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics in addition to my paperback copy. My hope is that this will make it easier to work on story research whenever I find myself with a few minutes of downtime without having to lug a textbook around everywhere. I’m also finding the book fascinating in its own right, since the areas and cultures it covers were so poorly represented in my formal education. Which is all to say: hooray for increased productivity and hooray for new things!
  • I also found a copy of The Jerusalem Bible for a quite reasonable amount of money! As a former literature-and-theology major whose hero-since-she-was-thirteen has been Mary Russell, it’s great fun to have a different translation of the Bible that is full of scholarly notes. I’ve also been slowly working my way through a translation of the Qur’an, and while I am very much enjoying the text itself, the version I have is also just a beautiful book from which it is a pleasure to read; it’s nice to finally have a Bible of which I can say the same. As if that weren’t exciting enough, the copy of The Jerusalem Bible I found is the same hardcover-with-slipcase (in the same color, even!) as my mom’s copy that’s been on our shelf at home my entire life, so it’s very satisfying to see it there on my own shelf looking The Way A Bible Should Look.
  • I got to go to my five-year college reunion a couple weeks back. It was great to reconnect with people I still like a lot but haven’t kept in touch with. I loved the fireworks, which were gorgeous and so close and especially satisfying since I’d missed them at my own graduation. It was good-but-strange-but-good to walk around a campus that is still so familiar and that I still love deeply and see all the big and small changes both in the campus and in myself. (More on that next time.) And I got to both acquire and show off my newest tattoo, which I’d had to postpone after car troubles prevented me from making my original appointment. The tattoo ended up looking a little different from how I’d pictured it in terms of size and placement, but it is perfect and I love it, and it’s probably good for me to be reminded every so often that when things don’t go exactly the way I plan it’s sometimes because they turn out even better.

That’s enough for a post, right? And, I hope, enough to put off the I-must-write-NOW impulse for a couple more weeks while I let that other entry finish coming together in my head. While I work on that, what are some things making you happy, dear readers?