I became willing to write fiction...

I have two more nights dog-sitting before bink & Maura return from Greece. I'm looking forward to getting on with settling into my new place, which doesn't feel like home.
I feel like I don't live anywhere, exactly...

I intend to do another round of cleaning this week, including pulling out the fridge. I usually do that about once a year? I think this fridge perhaps has never been moved... It should be satisfying, if possibly horrifying, to clean underneath. 

My home-owner may not clean under her fridge, but she's whiz-bang at business stuff!
I'd told her about a country program for low-income homeowners that replaces old windows painted with lead. She applied the very same day I sent her the link, the assessors came right out, and now her house is approved for free new windows.
(Besides being low-income, qualifying applicants must have young children who live with or visit them, and her two grandsons do come and stay sometimes.)

I'd never have gotten on that so fast. We're going to be good housemates along those lines.

I'm still getting used to living in someone else's house. Nothing's wrong, but it's going to take a while. 

A big thing is, I need to make sure I take more time alone. 
To help with that, I've decided to sign up for this year's NaNoWriMo. I'm not going to sign up officially on the super-cute site, but between me and me, I am agreeing I will try to write fiction EVERY MORNING in November.

"Agreeing to try..."
Heh. How's that for hedging my bets?
But it's not really; it's more like the smart 12-step phrase, "I became willing...". *
It's not an iron-clad thing, setting myself up for  "I am going to force myself to..."

I did sign up for this one year, but I wrote for only one day.
But now I have an extra reason to try.
Being willing to write fiction every day will work as a double-organizing principle:
to give me time alone,
 and to try, try again to write fiction.

I've been reading Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.

She spells out the thing about fiction I am so bad at:
its sensory nature.

I blogged not long ago about Flaubert's introduction of the young Emma--
how Charles Bovary first sees her sitting inside on a hot day darning a sock and cooling her hands by placing them every so often on the cool metal of the fire irons. 

I couldn't stand to keep reading, knowing Emma's eventual doom, but after reading only Flaubert's first description of her, I remember her.

I have no idea how to use words to create sensory reality like that.
I usually skip the sensory altogether. 

I do know adjectives are not a writer's friend.
For instance, I like Frank O'Hara's sensory poetry, but I would drop "fluorescent" from this line I quoted here the other day:

"partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches"

It's distracting. I want to question it. Are the tulips fluorescent because they are lit by the sun? Wet from rain? Or are they a certain type of tulip?

Is this really where the poet wanted to direct my imagination?
I don't think so. O'Hara doesn't spell out "snow-white birches" after all.
"Orange tulips around birches" is sufficient.

Writing well takes that nit-picking care. If it's not taken, it shows.
I don't want to read books like the Koontz one I mentioned the other day, in which the character "unavoidably" leaves wet shoe prints.
If the character isn't real enough to tell the author that he, the character, could take off his shoes, he's not going to be real to me either.

I think it will be fun to try to write some sentences (and they don't have to be ficion, come to think of it) that make something real in a sensory way---without being overblown. You want to touch lightly, not to bruise the reader.

Also, how boring is it to read unnecessary physical descriptions? Who cares if a character has "thick brown hair and bright blue eyes" if it doesn't mean something?
 
Flaubert chooses to show us Emma cooling her hands not because she really did (she doesn't exist), but because he's conveying something meaningful about her--or, rather, he's getting us to enter into a certain kind of relationship with her.

_______________________

* "I became willing..."

That's from Step 8 & 9: ...to make amends to all people I harmed, except when to do so would harm them or others.

I know this from my short time in OA, Overeaters Anonymous. There's some good stuff in that program, including, for me, the phrase, "I am a compulsive overeater."

I use still use it, like if someone says, "Please take home the rest of this pan of brownies!" 
I say, "No, thank you. I am a compulsive overeater and I would eat them all."
At which point, the person who is trying to pawn off the brownies on me says she is too. I am not above suggesting we just throw the damn brownies out.