In late November 2003 I saw a piece online about NaNoWriMo that sparked something in me. The desire to write, dormant since my teens when playing music took over the creative/expressive portions of my brain, suddenly flared up again like an old injury that throbs at the approach of bad weather. It was too late for me to enter that year's competition, but I found another project run by some NaNo vets called National Novel Writing Year, which had similar but more flexible goals. I signed up to start writing at the beginning of 2004.

But, what would I write about? I was inspired by NaNoWriMo's emphasis on outrunning your own inner critic by focusing on quantity rather than quality, a concept I later heard reiterated to some degree by writers like Anne Lamott and Stephen King. Heck, even Hemingway is quoted as saying that "the first draft of anything is shit". And the primary emphasis of NaNoWriMo was on actually finishing a novel, the idea that being able to hold your finished work in your hand (or on your hard drive) is an inspiring experience. Sure, it's not completely finished and it's not published, but it's a novel that you wrote; it has characters, dialogue, a beginning, a middle, and an end. So, I knew that if I hoped to finish this it would have to be an idea that I did not take too seriously; a story idea that I would not stress out over getting exactly right.

My mind eventually settled upon an idea that I had back in the days of my early teens, those days when I had whole notebooks filled with partial ideas for stories, movies, and TV shows. This particular story idea was silly, but had the capability of being spun into a longish novel, easily able to run the 150,000 words I had signed up to write. And so it was that on the first of January, 2004 I sat down to write a novel about two groups of warring mice who are fighting (using needles, nails, firecrackers, and bottle rockets) for control of a large, abandoned farm house.

I want to repeat that last part for those who think they read it wrong: my first novel was going to be concerned with groups of mice battling each other with pointy objects and fireworks.

The writing was fun, more fun than it had any right to be. I did only minimal world-building and no real outlining before launching into the first chapter, but the story and the characters I intended to focus on spun out of my mind fairly naturally. I had my first experience with a character taking over when a minor character stepped up during a scene and pushed the intended main character to the background, dramatically changing the story in the process.

At first my plan worked to perfection. Worry about character motivation? What motivation, they're mice! Believable plotting? C'mon, the story is about talking, upright-walking mice with cities and political structures who have figured out how to use modern warfare techniques. Dialogue that rings true in the "ear" of the reader? Well, that always has been a struggle for me, but I can always use the excuse of "this is how mice speak".

Then, it started to happen. The blazing speed I maintained for the first chapters of the book began to fizzle. I started to question whether this mouse would really do this or that mouse would really say that. I began to think in terms of story arcs and started to worry incessantly over sentence structure. As more of the story developed in my mind it started to gain layers of complexity and the simplistic and clear epic quality that I originally aimed for became clouded. The novel finally ground to a stop at around the 30,000 word mark, where it has stayed ever since.

The same thing happened with the novel I intended to write for NaNoWriMo that November. I decided that, in order to avoid the same problem, I would aim for a really lurid, pulpy tale, a story with two-dimensional characters and contrived plot twists.

That novel ran aground at about the 30,000 word mark as well, for the exact same reasons.

Last week I had one of those flashes where something I read sends a spark through my mind and ignites several unrelated things and forms them into a somewhat coherent whole. The idea of doing a medium- to large-scale online-video project (a series of movies perhaps) using my friends as cast and crew, has been brewing in my mind for a while. The idea was to release the videos on all of the major video-sharing sites and then release the scripts and all material related to the production under a Creative Commons license, like the one this blog (see the footer) and my Flickr photos are released under. Then (assuming the work was of a decent quality and the videos became popular) people could take the basic building blocks of the movies and create their own versions and variants. A kind of open source film making, if you will. Obviously, I don't have the resources or talent to take on such a project, but a man can dream can't he?

The idea that I had last week was different. Instead of a series of films, the idea was for a short-form TV show. And the nature of the original idea was such that I thought I actually might be able to accomplish it with my friends. It was an absurd concept for a show, but one that would be easy to create using available materials and people. So, I grabbed a blank moleskine from my closet and started to brainstorm ideas. I wrote questions and ideas and technical information about how the show should be done. I went to Jamendo and started scouring the site for CC-Licensed music that I could use for a soundtrack. I asked some of my friends if they would be interested in doing a TV show with me, getting all positive responses.

On Sunday, I sat down with the notebook and began the process of organizing the information in Backpack. I made pages, wrote a synopsis, and started a list of questions I still needed to answer. I filled in most of the general info that I had and sat back to look at what I had entered. As I read, the goofy smile faded from my face and a single sentence formed a litany in my mind.

"I've made a huge mistake."

It was not until then, when I saw it all spelled out, that I was able to see what I had done. The project had grown from a short-run series that would average 5-8 minutes an episode to a show of three seasons with thirteen episodes per season and an average running time of 10 minutes per episode*. The show had grown from something that would take me and my friends a few weekends to shoot to something that would take several months to write and several more months to shoot. And the necessary cast was now much greater than my circle of friends could support, even with their friends added in.

I suppose that a better man than me would see these obstacles and press on, would be more courageous and daring, would eat problems and crap solutions, or however that expression goes. A better man than me would contact the local theater group (Do we even have one of those?), badger and harangue his friend who worked at the local TV station to borrow equipment and knowledgeable personnel, and press on without concern for failure or disappointment. I, on the other hand, see obstacles like that and feel the overwhelming compulsion to throw my hands up in the air and give up.

Regardless of what some say, giving up is actually a good idea sometimes. Sometimes giving up means releasing dead weight that has been slowing you down. But, this kind of giving up never feels like that. Whatever part of my mind it is that feels like it has something to express, whether it's through music or words or dance (kidding about the dance part), protests and whines whenever I do. And it always makes me think back to the days when I worked with my grandfather doing light construction work. I think of the sense of peace and internal wellness that I felt whenever we were done with a job and would take that one last walk through the room we finished or walked across the deck we built and how amazing it felt to see that where there had once been nothing there was now something, more specifically, something I had a hand in completing. I can honestly say that in spite of the hardness of the work and in spite of how hard my grandfather was to work with at times, those times brought me some of the greatest satisfaction of my working life. And I am sure that if I were ever to finish a novel or album that the feeling would surpass all of those.

And one day, if I ever figure out what a mouse's motivation might be during a time of war, I might just do that.

*All figures are estimations on my part given my understanding of the story arc.