Tag, You're It!

I wonder if anyone actually enjoys these blogs or not.

When I sit down to the write them, I usually don't have more than a slight idea of what I want to talk about; I just follow my stream of consciousness where ever it goes, because it, first of all, fills space, second, is easy to write, and third, is a good writing practice, at least in my opinion. So basically, it makes for an easy-to-write blog.

Just wanted to explain that as much to myself as anyone who is actually following this blog. Because apparently some other people in my class use their blogs to flesh out their in-class writing assignments and are super-creative and well structured, whereas I'm just like, eh, lemme just blog the way I think a blog is supposed to be.

Anyway, just wanted to mix things up slightly and talk about the novel I'd like to write for Nanowrimo, since October is supposed to be the planning month. By the way, Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month--it takes places during the month of November, and the idea is to try and write a 50,000 word novel within the month. Kay, here goes:

So my idea is essentially a giant game of tag. Props to Will Houlette for sparking this idea when he tagged me in class and the following recollected conversation took place:

Will: Tag, you're it. No tag-backs.

Me: Well that's not fair, now it's going to be awkward for me to tag anybody.

Will: No it won't. Everybody knows how to play tag.

*cue cogs turning*

So I started to think about what an excellent novel that would make--every chapter would take place from a different person's point of view, the point of view of the person who has been tagged. As soon as they tagged someone else, a new chapter would start and the view would shift to the new person who has been tagged.

So then I started thinking about what kind of characters I could have, and since I'm taking this creative nonfiction class, I kind of really wanted to use my actual friends (and not-quite friends) as characters. I want to flesh out their characters as I have observed them and I think I could make for some really excellent points of view. My notes on characters (with their original names changed, obviously) and who they tag/are tagged by are as follows:

Ina tagged originally by Will.

Kailyn tags Liam

Liam tags Kendra

Russo tags Lena over facebook, gets tagged by

Winston

Nona tags Cloud

Luke tags Nona

Jude

Lena gets tagged over facebook by Russo, tags Luke

Kendra Russo

And it just occurred to me that I forget which names I assigned to which actual people, because I failed to make a list, once again trusting my memory only to have it utterly fail me. Ugh, and I also forget the details of the tagging that I wanted. Same thing happened with a previous story I tried to write.. I had the details in my mind, then failed to write them down, trusting my memory, then left the subject for a while, only to forget my brainstorming. Gah.

Anyway. My only concern is that I'm going to try and present my characters as honestly as possible as I see them, and unfortunately I am an extremely critical and analytical person so I see all their flaws and faults, I want to present those--but I'm afraid that they'll see this novel at some point or ask to read it, and then hate me forever for presenting them in such an honest light; because I do know that many of things I intend to highlight are things that these people choose to ignore or hide.

I guess a solution to this might be to let them read what I've written before adding it to the novel and see what they think, maybe gaining some of their trust in the process rather than just having them randomly stumble upon it someday and get offended. Suggestions are very much appreciated as to how to deal with this situation.

Additional notes: Some chapters will be long, and others may be a paragraph short. Some characters may be people I've made up, or composite characters. This is going to be a mix of creative nonfiction and fiction (isn't most fiction like that at least in some way?). I'm also going to be a character, if I can do it objectively enough. The game will start (well not really start, as I'm going to propose that this is really a never-ending game, with no beginning or end -- this is just where my characters happened to come into the game, and spread it among their friends. Funnily enough, this plays into how my own friends, although from different backgrounds and social groups, are all interconnected in one way or another) with Will, and end with Nona's tagging of Cloud. The game will span across distances, through the internet and via traveling from one place to the next, through chance encounters and long relationships, through light taps and vigorous punches. Oh, and there are no tag-backs.

That's all I've got for now. I'm kind of hesitant to post this onto the web, because I don't really want anyone to steal my idea. But I'll go ahead and trust the World Wide Web for now.

Can't wait for 12:01 on November 1!

~Dale B.