For over the last month, I’ve been a woman.
It’s been really strange, because, well, it’s totally affected my relationships with men friends. That is, I think I’ve lost my men friends. More on that in a sec.
Now, I realize it’s good to have a strong lede for a blog entry, but this one definitely needs qualification. You probably thought the usual: stolen panties and bras, cross-dressing experiments, secret mail orders from lingerie catalogs…well, ah, no. Doesn’t interest me. I’ve been trying to be a woman in the fictional story I wrote during November, for NaNoWriMo.
It was strange to get into the head of a 47-year-old mother of one daughter and wife to a husband of—wait, gotta go check the notes—oh, about 24 years. I mean, holy shit, I haven’t had a tooth that long, much less a long-term relationship, like the one my character Nicky Ruskin has.
Nicky, for the desperate few who’ve slogged through my previous novella The Crowded Room, was the latent love interest of that book’s protagonist, Jeff Dunne, after Jeff has gone through an embarrassing high school breakup with his 1977 girlfriend Julie Stafford. I know, I know. Roll over Dostoyevsky.
It started when I was stuck for a new project. Some peeps said, “Why don’t you write a screenplay adaptation of your novella?” Nah, the ’70s don’t interest me in that way anymore. And plus I was 19 when I wrote the damn thing. I’ve moved on. Then it occurred to me. Last summer, after crashing a buddy’s 30th high school reunion: Yeah…I have moved on, and so have the characters. What if I set the story in the present day? And screw the screenplay (which no one, honestly, would care to read, much less produce)—why not go back to fiction writing, my first love?
So it began. I noodled how I’d do a sequel for, oh, about a year. My ex Amy read Room and wondered why I’d want to write a follow up of “that.” (One of the reasons we’re no longer together, among deeper things.) I don’t need naysayers. I actually don’t need well-intentioned advice. I need to write.
So that’s what I did all last month…wrote like the wind—from 4:30 in the morning until I left for work near 7, as the sky started to glow in the east through the kitchen windows. I stared down fears of writing as a woman in the first person. As I got further into the catalyst’s part of the story, told in third-person omniscient, I longed to get back to Nicky’s voice. I distrusted my “authorial” voice after getting to know Nicky and what she was going through. (This will be a huge issue in the next rewrite.) I could tell when I was veering away from what she would say, but noted that and kept going.
As I crawled away from 51,000 words into the draft (it still needs at least 20,000 to 30,000 more to the draft, of that I’m certain, in order to have editable material), I was really disoriented. I found myself completely distrusting men—all men, even my guy friends—hell, my own brother. This has never happen to me before. My sympathies have entirely shifted to all the things women put up with because of men—more than men probably ever realize. At the same time, it’s ironic. I’ve made more women friends in the last six months than I have in my entire life. Huh.
This small accomplishment hardly makes me an expert on women, and I’m still wary of what I’ve achieved in the draft. But I’m also emboldened to fight harder for Nicky in the rewrite, relive her world, her story, her struggle. Even till it hurts.
Sorry, guys … can’t go out. Got the cramps. Again.