Bento Part II & Avoiding Melodrama

Well, the "Bento" is done and here it is! Karaake Chicken (Delicious), Rice Balls, Gyoza (Also scrumptious), and Japanese Curry (Quite good!). There's also some Gyoza sauce and a random bowl of Cream of Carrot Soup I made. The only thing that's actually missing is the Bento itself! Mom told me she saw them everywhere, but then when I made to actually make one, I realized she had only meant online. So then I had prepared all this stuff for the Bento, and there was no bento to put it in. :P I'm still glad I made it; it was scrumptious.

I mentioned avoiding Melodrama last time, and I thought I'd expound upon it more. For some of us, melodrama is a necessary means from getting to point A to point B. Life just seems to burst with dramatic fights, crying scenes, and suspense. Somehow, we find ourselves gravitating irresistibly towards it in our writing.

And then the main character gets unconscious. Or we "accidentally" throw them off a waterfall. Or they get violentally assaulted. Or the love interest "accidentally" becomes a sociopath. Or gets raped. Or some random unimportant character sudden starts thinking she's the main character.

Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing. Don't let your inner editor cripple you. But also don't let your inner drama-queen cripple you either. Writing a rough draft is a lot like stumbling around a room in the dark. You have a sense of where you've been, but not a very good sense of where you're going, and the best way to go is to go slowly - to move in small increments at a time. And this what I mean by that: there's a scene right now in my novel where the love interest has ticked the main character off again. I'm pretty sure it's a bit over the top, especially since the main character keeps going up and down on an emotional roller-coaster (one minute crying, the next screaming, another minute crying, more screamed, then powerful feelings of remorse and irritation, more anger, then confusion, then anger, then confusion). It's tiring and melodramatic, but one good thing about it is it's small. Across the Frozen Wasteland goes pretty slowly anyway, but part of that slowness is its aid. It creates dense amounts of information around characters and scenes that aren't always well-written or well-planned, but allow for great revising material - giving me a plethora of options of things I might need to keep or hold onto. And I never get too far off track either, because of how slow the pacing is.

Make sure you always have time for mistakes and slip-ups and that you always have "trap doors" - means of getting out of the situation or switching to a new scenario should things fall apart. One of the worst things you can do in writing is corner yourself into a situation you don't like and can't get out of without extensive rewriting. Rewriting is something you shouldn't even think about in your rough draft. Just put out of your mind completely. I've definitely learned that through this novel. Because it's so slow paced and because my only true goal is to develop Gerda's unrequited love for Kay at this point, the actual plot hardly matters as they are mainly random segments that kind of go together. Gerda and Kay have a stupid fight in this chapter? Who cares, the next chapter has nothing to do with it and then can move onto something completely different by then. The awesome stargazing scene was awkward and short? Who cares, we'll just take them on a picnic and fix everything the star-gazing scene failed to accomplish. And in this way, I continue stumbling through the darkness of my own story. It's ot always clear what you're doing, but keep your options open anyway.

Bento Part I & The Beauty of Writing Crap

A lot of people say they can't do Nanowrimo. They're too busy, they're too tired, they don't know what to write about, etc. But mainly I hear this: I hate everything I write. Everything is terrible.

That's the point.

Wait, what, you say? Isn't Nano supposed to be about good writing? Well, that's the question, then, what is good writing? Good writing is F. Scott Fitzgerald or Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway, you say! (Or I say? Or my Lit. professors say? Moving on)

You may think you know what good writing is, because you have some author you like and you think he/she writes really well. You may think they wrote that on the first try. Think again.

Final drafts do not make good first drafts and good first drafts do not make good final drafts. That is something I have learned. If you're writing what you think is going to be utter perfection, the best possible writing, the most supremely delectable prose, you're off to a bad start. You're missing a huge element of what it means to be a writer - the story. There is a story behind what you're writing, and it will emerge slowly. The characters are in the process of evolving from nothing. So what if they're inconsistent at first? So are our first impressions of people! We think we're seeing someone and later realize we aren't - we're seeing someone completely different! Yes, the events are melodramatic or nonsensical. Your characters may be doing the same things over and over again - so what? Give them time and space. But move on.

I had to learn this lesson with my first novel, The Glass Rose (will you ever be complete, my love?). First, I wrote thirteen chapters in about thirteen weeks. It was fast, it was exciting, it was thrilling! It was my longest story yet! I was going places! I was moving! But as anyone who's ever read the story will tell you, I was moving the speed of roller-coaster around a track the size of a parking lot - way, way too much going on in way too small of a space. I can't begin to tell you how many "thrilling" cliffhangers there were - i.e. how many times the narrator avoided death. Way too many. But the point of the matter was that I had indeed written something. So, I went to phase two: rewriting.

Rewriting was worse in many respects, mainly because it failed to be just that. I redid the first chapter again. Way too melodramatic AGAIN. I did the first two chapters again. By the time we had reached the second chapter, the grumpy side character had had a complete personality change into the benevolent attendant and the narrator had been knocked unconscious and there was someone chasing them. It was a mess again. So, this moved on to the next rewriting plan which was to insistently rewrite the first chapter as slowly and perfectly as possible.

It was a catastrophe to say the least. Instead of the plot being melodramatic, the prose was. Gushing with large, misused words, oozing with insipid poetry, boasting about as many synonyms for the word "white" you could ever hope to want, I made it about two-thirds of a page. At this point, after exhausting myself over the "meter" and whether or not the meter was perfect enough, I realized one vital thing: I no longer knew what actually happened in the story and what I was actually writing anymore.

This began phase three: outlining. Outlining is wonderful, and every writer should do it. I decided to condense each chapter into a single page. Noted symbolism and descriptions could be mentioned, but only in brief. I would simply state what happened, without lengthy prose or dialogue, and move on. Great success. I ended up writing 25 pages worth which constituted the first part of what later revealed itself to be a gigantic novel. And it was daunting, and I've had to put it on hold temporarily (though I am still indeed working on it!), but the fact of the matter was that I wrote. And I stopped worrying if what I wrote was crap. And it was crap; it was not terrific writing. But it got better. And it only got better through getting the crap out on to the page and pounding away at it until it became something better. And that's what being a good writer is all about. Writing and then rewriting. And then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. And rewriting some more. Because the first draft isn't going to be "good" in the way that a final draft can be good. So, how can a first draft be good, you may ask?

1. Put lots of ideas into the draft. Good ideas, bad ideas, just ideas. They come in handy. They may not ultimately work, but some of them surprise you. Sometimes you connect the dots in a way that seemed unthinkable, discovering connections only someone like you could discover.
2. Try to maintain a steady pace. Resist the urge to be overly soap-operatic. It comes back to bite you. If you feel yourself turning melodramatic, don't erase what you've written. Just subvert. Make your mights less serious, your crying scenes short. Ignore unnecessary murder plots and death traps. Delay overly shocking plot twists or make them ambiguous enough to wheedle your way out of. Find escape holes in your story. Don't box yourself into a corner. Find ways to keep moving.
3. Try and keep the story in tune with your personal life. It helps to poor your present emotions into the writing. It may result in an unnecessary argument and your character being martyrish or awkward sudden elation, but that's okay. Just make sure that you can keep it rolling.
4. Find mindless things to insert into your story. Recipes are a must for my story. I love looking through cookbooks and magazines and saying "Oh, look! Gerda could bake that! Oh, that's cute!" Baking helps Gerda and I both express our emotions in a unique way, hence why I've added recipes here. Fairytale retellings also a must in the story. Both the retellings and the cooking are things I can describe to both stimulate emotion and also when I don't have emotion. Are they cop-outs? Sure! Do they help get me writing? Absolutely!

So, how did I take my own advice? Well, I recently began my own attempt at getting back into AtFW, which is never easy since it's been months since I've touched it. I left off at an awkward place I knew absolutely nothing about. Ruda has just asked Kay to go off with her to a bar with him and he's just agreed. I had no idea what to make of this. While Kay would be the type to go off to the bar under peer pressure, would Gerda be the sort of person to fall for him? Not seemingly. However, if he didn't like the bar, then there'd be a way. So, I'm simply going to have him not enjoy the bar. In the meantime, I decided Gerda could have a new type of dish to work on, breakfast foods. She's mentioned them previously, and what better opportunity to divert her attention! Is it badly written? It's odious. But it's written. And I still don't know how to reveal Kay's name yet to Ruda, and I still don't know where Kay and Gerda are going to go after this. Probably for lots of long chapters including detailed tutoring session. BO-ring. But accessible. And boring is okay. Boring can be chopped down during rewriting. But no writing?

You can't do anything with nothing. No writing means no mistakes and no successes. No writing means failure. And if you stop writing just because you've hit an awkward spot or the story seems to be stumbling off course or you've hit a dull, unappealing wall? You can say goodbye to all those potentially awesome chapters waiting just after them.

On a side note, here's a picture of the first part of the bento I made today. The chicken is called Karaage Chicken - it is a delicious Japanese Fried Chicken and is pretty decent for you as far as fried Chicken goes! The rice-balls (Onigiri) are from a recipe a friend of mine gave me - no where near as good as hers, mainly because I substituted bison for steak to help with the fat. Big mistake. The small rice-ball is an avocado one my mother requested. The drink is the anomalous, but fabulous Watermelon Agua Fresca. You simple mix 1/2 cup to 3/4 sugar with 8 cups of strained watermelon juice, the juice of 4 limes, and sparking water. It's a big hit over here; I'd highly recommend it.