structure

I haven't been writing my blog as much because I've been working on nanowrimo. I'm not on track to meet the goal of 50K words by November 30, but I'm making steady progress and working on my book every day. 

It's different from what I've always thought writing a novel would be like. It's more like I'm writing a kind of non-fiction - depicting my life experience and my thoughts about it, but doing it in a way where I feel free to bring things together that weren't together in my actual life and also to introduce elements of stories from sources other than my life ||| but I'm not really doing so much of those more creative things, actually. 

especially in this first draft, when my writing really starts to flow, it's because I'm writing very directly about my inner and outer experience. that's why it doesn't feel like I'm writing fiction. 

I don't know whether it's convertible into a story/ a novel/ fiction. but I'm encouraged that I've gotten further in writing a novel (what I'm calling a novel) than I ever have before, and, all going well, I will keep going. I might even finish the 50K words by November 30. in any case, I will have a decent draft some time in the next couple of months. 

Hopefully I will be able to shape it as a story as I go - I will be able to fictionalise and storify it. that's what I've been consistently trying to do....that's the idea I start with, but, like I said, when I get going and write a few hundred words, what I'm doing is kind of like what I do in my blog ￫ writing what I think and writing about my life. 

it's different though, in that it has a structure...there is a kind of arc. my blog posts tend not to be related to each other, but the different parts of the book I'm working on are related to each other.  

it's still not really a story, though. 

In a way, writing this is like when I was learning to write a proper essay at uni. I was lucky enough to be taught how to write an essay by an especially brilliant linguistics scholar....she really nailed it, and I will never forget what she taught us because, as an arts student, writing essays was one of the main things I did, so I was able to put into practice what she taught us pretty much straight away, and I've been practicing it and teaching it ever since. 

but I remember the struggle /// having all my ideas about what I wanted to write about, based on my thinking and research...and my thinking isn't structured like an essay, and it was a struggle to manipulate it into that structure ||| I felt that tension. I still feel it, I think. 

and now I have some ideas about how to structure a novel and what a novel is, and I have my ideas about what I want to write about, and I'm producing text, but it's not in a novel form, but that's OK. I keep finding new ways to add to it. I wonder whether what I'm writing is even a novel. I suppose it must be because I'm deliberately conflating and distorting things. I'm using my ability to write in a kind of reflective, thoughtful way add to the text, but I'm cognisant that I'm writing something creative and I can experiment with ways of expressing stuff. 

This is one of the underlying principles of novels and other forms of literature - that sometimes we can express truth more clearly by making something up.

but authors do research to write novels. there's a seam of facts running through the composition.