It’s been forever since I’ve done a meme and it’s a holiday and I’m currently in a post-food stupor, so now seems like a good time to answer the “BBC Book Meme” that’s been going on around Facebook and the Crusader challenge. Now, a better name for it would be the one a dear Facebook friend suggested: “An Extremely Subjective List Of Books Someone Else Thinks I Should Have Read.” More on that in a minute, but first the list:
One of the reasons I seriously considered not doing NaNoWriMo this year was because smack dab in the middle of November, the husband and I were heading off to fabulous Las Vegas for a weekend. Now, I’m sure some people could view the vacation as a glorious writing holiday, but I am not those people. To me, travel is great, but exhausting. I spend most of my energy trying to get from one place to another on time and without leaving my shoes in the security bin. I spent most of this month desperately trying to pull ahead enough to cover the three days we’d be gone.
When we left on Friday, I was about a half day ahead of the word count.
And this is where NaNoWriMo surprises me once again. On the plane flight out, I added 2,500 words to the manuscript. The next morning, I went straight to work and made the daily quota. I put in another 1,700 words on the plane ride home. I came home from the vacation almost two days ahead of the word count. Crazy.
Here’s what I learned about writing on vacation:
Get ahead, even if it’s only just a little bit. Before you leave, try to get ahead or at least stay on target. If you slip behind, it’s easier to justify not writing while traveling and you don’t want that to happen.
Write during the non-vacation time. There are certain parts of vacation that, to me, do not count as official vacation. These include long car rides, airplane time, waiting on your spouse to wake up and get ready to go out for the day, etc. Use these times to write. If you’re traveling by air it is totally worth it to bring your laptop or notebook and use the travel time to do some writing.
Adjust your priorities. You may find it’s worth taking the focus off word count for the duration of your vacation. Make time just to write. Maybe you’ll get in a 100 words, maybe a 1,000. Be flexible.
Rest. Seriously, don’t spend all your time worrying about your word count or your story. Make your vacation enjoyable.
Of course, now hurdle number two comes: Thanksgiving. We have company arriving this afternoon, a mattress frame to assemble, a kitchen to clean, vegetables to chop, a seating arrangement to figure out. In short, crazy times. And I already burned through most of my lead yesterday when I had to run errands and do all the shopping I didn’t do over the weekend. So while I have a decent strategy for writing on vacation, I have no idea how to find time to write in the midst of family and in-laws and holiday craziness. Any tips?
As of this blog post I have 20,508 words toward my NaNoWriMo draft.
Not shabby, but as I told a friend over wine and pizza last night, it’s sort of lost it’s thrill. The first year, every round number was a milestone – 5,000 (longer than the short stories I used to write), 10,000… by 20,000 I was practically doing handstands. This year it’s a little harder to get excited about. For one thing, I need to be more ahead than I am. I’m roughly 500 words ahead of schedule. If feel like I need at least three days worth of words if I’m going to get through holiday travel. Blargh.
For another thing, I’m officially past the shiny new beginning and into the doldrums of the middle. I’ve lost my sight for what’s going to happen next. I’ve lost my enthusiasm. In short, and to borrow from John Green’s pep talk, I’m drinking from a giant bowl of suck.
I so need Jillian Michaels right now.
Anyway, not much else to report. Even my reading and viewing habits have fallen by the wayside. I haven’t read anything this week, but I did re-watch the first season of Slings & Arrows, which if you haven’t seen, you should. So funny. So like theater life. Also, makes me fall so much in love with Hamlet. Seriously. Consider it writerly research and check it out.
Happy Writing.
A couple of years ago, my husband got hooked on The Biggest Loser. I never got into the show itself (and my husband has gotten out of it since), but I loved Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels. They were awesome. I wanted Jillian to yell in my face on the treadmill and for Bob to put his arm around my shoulder and tell me to love myself more.
Never happened, of course. But for a while there, I did get yelled at by Jillian every morning when my husband and I dutifully did her workout video, The 30-Day Shred. We were devoted to the workout for about a month and it came to pass that we could do the workout with the sound off and I could recite every line from it.
I’m sad to say that in the years since we quit, I’ve pretty much forgotten the lines, but occasionally my husband will pop in the DVD and start his jumping jacks and I’ll remember the one phrase that really stuck with me: “a false message of lethargy.”
As you may have already noticed, I collect these little gems of soundbites and begin using them wherever I can and so for the months following our morning workout, I was quick to declare the following things a false message of lethargy: taking the stairs, parking further away from the mall entrance, going back for the second ice cream cone at the deli. They got sillier and sillier until I declared that driving to work was a false message of lethargy, when clearly my husband could walk the 15 miles. (Hey, we amuse ourselves, that’s all that matters.)
But Jillian’s message about a false sense of lethargy is actually a pretty serious one. Check this out:
“People are so placated by groups that say, ‘Start by taking the stairs,” says Michaels. “What? That makes people think, ‘I’m so fragile, I can barely take the staircase.'” In fact, she says, the human body can withstand a lot—and increasing the intensity of your workout is one of the fastest ways to burn calories and lose weight. “The more we hear this false message of lethargy, the more we believe it,” she says. “As humans, we have evolved to the point where the sky is not the limit. Your capabilities are, in fact, limitless.” (source)
We writers are very much aware of these false messages of lethargy. We know them as “excuses” and we hear them and use them daily. Well, I do anyway. Some examples from my own writing life:
For years, when people asked me if I was writing or had written a novel, I’d tell them I was a short story writer; I didn’t have the attention span required to write a novel. How would I know? I’d never even tried at that point. But it sounded true. And it also meant that no one would be expecting me to write a novel, ergo, I didn’t have to try. False message of lethargy.
When it comes to writing, I like to get my head clear with morning pages. If I don’t get a good 750 words in, something feels off all day and more than a few times I’ve used this as an excuse not to write or revise for the day. I convince myself I’m not in the right headspace to write. False message of lethargy.
I hear these messages from other writers and would-be writers. “I’ll write the novel when the kids are grown and out of the house.” “I’ve never written anything, so maybe I should start with short stories.” “I’ll never get published anyway…” “I’m so tired from the day, my writing will be crap anyway. I’ll just watch The Biggest Loser.” False messages of lethargy, all of them.
Now, I am the last person that should be pep talking other writers about giving up their excuses. I am far too comfortable with my excuses myself. But maybe that’s exactly why I can talk about it. I need the reminder just as much as everyone else. Sometimes I think I don’t need Jillian yelling in my face while I’m on the treadmill, I need her yelling in my face at my writing desk.
“Is that all you’re going to do today? 1700 piddly words? Half of them suck, are you just going to leave them like that? Is that sentence the best it can be?”
Something tells me I wouldn’t make it five minutes with Jillian.
I really wish that writers had personal trainers, though, to kick our butts into staying in the chair. Into revising that sentence one. more. time. To remind us that our capabilities are limitless. Someone to call us out when we fall into believing those false messages of lethargy.
What excuses to you tell yourself? What would your personal writing trainer be yelling at you about?
As of this morning, the word count on the draft I’m writing for NaNoWriMo is 8,691. I’m not quite done writing for the day, but there you go.
As expected, I’ve been NaNo-ing I mean, engaging in the narcissistic commerce of writing all week long, with very little narcissistic commerce of revising to speak of. (Thanks to you, Ms. Miller, I have finally learned to spell narcissism correctly.)
Since there’s already enough negative NaNoWriMo energy going around the blogosphere these days, let’s talk about some of the great things NaNo has done, yes? There are many benefits to NaNoWriMo including encouraging discipline, getting a first draft out of it, bringing together a community to cheer you on. As for me, the biggest benefit of NaNoWriMo this week is that it has shed some light on my process as a writer.
I mentioned in a previous entry that I had two ideas I was kicking around for NaNo: one that was just a seed of an idea and one that was more fleshed out. I went with the seed. It just felt right. Now, rewind to earlier this year. My SCBWI chapter had a run of talks about scene and structure and there was a lot of talk about the benefits of plotting out your novel before you write it. (For a crash course in plotting, check out Hélène Boudreau’s blog, “Plotting… OCD Style”
So, on the heels of all this great advice, I decided I was going to write my next novel outline style. I took a week and mapped out the entire thing. I made chapter summaries;I had an inciting incident, and plot points 1, 2, and 3; I knew the ending. I sat down to start writing and made it through the first chapter before taking a couple of days off. I wasn’t feeling it. I started it up again, trying to cheer myself on with the reminder that I already had a climax and an ending. I wrote a couple of scenes into chapter two and was just done. Between the move and everything else, I never went back to the project.
And now I know why. I like surprises. I like fly by the seat of my pants drafting. I like to follow my characters through twists and turns . It’s happened to me every day this week. Just as I think about moving my characters from Place A to Place B, one of my characters picks up her backpack and takes off to Place M. And suddenly a whole other piece of her world opens up. It’s kind of awesome.
(Not that I’m knocking the outline, by any means. Novels need structure and writers need to impose structure on their novels. I just find that it’s a more useful tool in revising than drafting.)
I suspect I’ve always known this, I just lost a little confidence in my process. The unknown can be scary, but for me it works. I’d like to write another thousand words today. Just this morning, my protagonist decided to cut school, outran the security guard, jumped in her truck and high-tailed it out of town. I can’t wait to find out where she’s going.
Reading:
Paper Towns by John Green
Watching:
Still with the Rock Band mania here. The Clash at Gallifrey is about to start our regional tour!
I have a new favorite phrase this week. It is “the narcissistic commerce of writing.” I’m not sure what it means, but I love it anyway. Now instead of telling people that I spent my day revising or writing my novel, I’m going to say that I spent the day engaging in the narcissistic commerce of writing. Make that into a hashtag, Twitter.
Anyway, if you’ve made it this far without clicking the link, let me spare you the trouble. The link goes to a Salon article by Laura Miller called “Better yet, don’t write that novel: Why National Novel Writing Month is a waste of time and energy,” which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the article. Not only does the author completely miss the concept of NaNoWriMo, but also she pretty much slaps any would-be writer in the face and basically says that if you can’t get the job done without NaNoWriMo, then you’ve no business trying to be a writer.
Wow. Snap judgements much?
It isn’t like I haven’t heard this sort of derision before and not just about NaNoWriMo. What is it about writing that brings out the hateful in other people? Why is writing the only hobby that requires a measure of success beyond simply doing it and enjoying it? Why are there no articles deriding the narcissistic commerce of cooking or the narcissistic commerce of crocheting. (You know, I’ve used this phrase three times now and I still have no idea what it means.) And why is it that so much of this contempt comes from other writers? (Ms. Miller appears to have a couple of book credits to her name and isn’t the article proof that she herself engages in the narcissistic commerce of writing?)
I’ve wondered if it’s jealousy. I know what jealousy feels like. I know what it’s like to be writing for 10 years, to receive one rejection after another from lit mags and then to watch an acquaintance get a handsome book deal from her blog. Oh yeah. I know jealousy. But what I don’t understand is stomping on other people’s dreams.
In a couple of hours my husband will come home from work and get an earful about the article. He’ll likely nod and shake his head in disbelief at all the right places and he’ll probably ask me why I was reading some jerk’s opinion instead of working on my own novel. A little while later I will go out for drinks with my girlfriends and I will tell them all about the article and we’ll all roll our eyes and share our stories of jerks who try to crush our dreams. And they’ll ask me how NaNoWriMo is going and how my revisions are going because they care. Because they know that just because I haven’t been published (yet) doesn’t mean I don’t take what I do seriously.
I’m pretty lucky to have people in my life that support what I’m doing, but not everyone has that support system. I read something like this article and it’s water off a duck’s back (after a significant amount of ranting, of course), but what about those people who don’t have that support system? What about the college student that dreams about writing a novel, but is going into accounting because her parents want her to have job security. What about a housewife who has a great idea for a romance novel, but doesn’t think she can find the time to write it? Now imagine that two days into making a crazy attempt at fulfilling a dream, they read a discouraging article like this one.
When you’re surrounded by other writers and people in the writing industry, it’s pretty easy to forget what it’s like to just start out. It’s easy to forget that writing can be a big scary thing, so scary that many people want to, but never do it. NaNoWriMo isn’t for the pros; it’s for the people that need to just take a chance and follow a dream. I think some people have forgotten that.
It’s been a busy week. Actually, it’s still a busy week and I’m writing this in between my volunteer gig and making a mad dash to an afternoon happy hour (priorities, people!) and I don’t even have the time to come up with a sub-title for today’s ‘fess up.
Revision continued this week. I noticed today when I checked my to-do list that I’d anticipated editing up to chapter 10 this week. Ha. Hahahaha. How does that saying go? I love deadlines. I love the noise they make as they go flying by? I didn’t make it to chapter 10 this week and considering that the revision project is a total of 17 chapters, I think I was setting my expectations a little high thinking I’d be done with it in a week.
Actually, I got through chapter five this week. That sounds way more impressive than it actually is since the first five chapters are pretty darn finished. They still need polishing, of course, but I’ve yet to encounter any place within those chapters that is obviously missing a scene or something.
Which brings me to chapter six, which is obviously missing a scene. Ugh. There’s definitely something missing just after the ending of chapter five and the beginning of chapter six just isn’t cutting it. So I spent a good deal of this week trying to figure out what will go there. And of course, patching a hole in a manuscript is not like patching a hole in a pair of jeans. You can’t just cover it up and then have it be “fixed.” If you do it that way, it will always stand out. (Hm… maybe it is like patching a pair of jeans.) No, changing chapter six is going to change everything after that. I’m practically sewing a new pair of jeans.
Or, I’m just being overdramatic.
Anyway, as I’m sure you’re sick of me telling you, NaNoWriMo starts next week. I have no idea what to expect yet when it comes to blog posting, but I’m pretty sure you won’t hear from me again until mid-week at the earliest. Good luck to my fellow NaNo’ers! I can’t wait to hear about your progress.
Now for the fun stuff.
Read:
Watched:
Nothing. Hubs and I have been playing Rock Band 3 pretty much non-stop. We are awesomely nerdy.
Or, the obligatory National Novel Writing Month tip post. They are all the rage these days, as they should be. I love reading about writing tips and tricks and so I’m offering you some of my own, specifically for NaNoWriMo. Please add your own in the comments!
1. Start writing on November 1st. If you’re really a diehard, stay up until midnight and get the first few paragraphs down. If you’re less of a diehard, get up before everyone else in the morning and start writing. Don’t put off writing your first batch of words because there’s nothing more discouraging as playing catch up on day two or three. Inevitably each year I have one writing buddy that doesn’t start on Nov. 1 and sends me an email on Nov. 3 or 4th, lamenting how far behind they are. Don’t be that person.
2. Round up and build a buffer. If you’re writing daily, you need to write 1,667 words a day to make the word count required to win. But I like to round up a little more. Aiming for 1,670 words a day is a good way of doing that, but if you’re going to round up, consider rounding up to 1,700. Not only does this stretch your writing muscles a bit more, but it also helps build a buffer in case of a mid-month emergency. And, hey, if you keep it up you’ll have bragging rights to a 51,000 word manuscript.
3. Reward yourself for completing small goals. Okay, the big reward for winning NaNoWriMo is that you’ll have a completed draft, you can download a web banner, and you’ll even get a discount on an absolutely awesome piece of software. But sometimes, those rewards seem so far off. I like to reward myself for accomplishing various milestones along the way. They don’t have to be big rewards,* but you should set them ahead of time so that it gives you something to work towards. For example, this year, I’m giving myself the reward of one cheesy 99-cent mp3 download for every week that I meet my project targets. Overall, I’m only spending about $4 on my reward, but my eagerness to finally own “Your Love” by The Outfield is priceless.**
*Honestly, I’m ashamed how much the promise of lunch at Chick-Fil-A will pull me through a particularly difficult week.
**Yeah, I know. My musical taste leaves a lot to be desired.
4. If you can’t resist the internal editor, then let him out to play . . . on another manuscript. I admit, I have a big problem turning off the internal editor. I don’t revise extensively, but I do make frequent use of the delete key. If you have a hard time keeping your internal editor in check, try distracting him or her with something other than your NaNoWriMo novel, like a draft of a novel you’ve been meaning to revise or a critique partner’s manuscript.
5. Rules, schmules. In the end, your only competition for the NaNoWriMo win is yourself, which makes some of the rules seem a little arbitrary. You know how you write best, you know what goals are important for you to consider yourself a winner. If one of the rules of NaNoWriMo is getting in the way of your goal, consider breaking the rule. If on November 1, you suddenly have the hankering to write a collection of short stories, go for it. If you’ve already got a first chapter written, but you’re dying to tell that story, I won’t tell anyone. In the end, NaNoWriMo is about writing for YOU. Use it as you see fit.
It’s that time of year again. One week from today marks the start of National Novel Writing Month, that one month of the year when hundreds of writers commit to contributing at least 50,000 words towards their novel by November 30.
I first heard about NaNoWriMo while in the MFA program, around 2001 or 2002, but at the time dedicating a month during peak midterm grading and finals preparation to a novel just didn’t seem feasible. I joined the site in 2005 with grand aspirations of participating, but it wasn’t until 2009 and being faced with the possibility of being shown up by a class of eighth graders.
Here’s the story: A friend of mine is a middle school English teacher. Every year she’s incorporated the NaNoWriMo Young Writer’s program into her curriculum and because of the way her school is set up, at the time she brought this up, she’d had one class that had completed three novels over the years that she taught them. This was the group of eighth graders. And at the time, I was futzing with my short stories, had an MFA degree, but had never even written one book. Nothing motivates me quite like pride and envy and off I was on my first NaNoWriMo attempt. I won (take that eighth graders) and had so much fun doing it, I vowed to do it as often as possible. 2010 will be year three for me.
I get mixed reactions when I tell people that I’m doing NaNoWriMo. I’d say most people are supportive. They think it’s cool or fun or they just see the crazed look in my eye when I talk about it and humor me. But there’s always a nagging minority that doesn’t see the point and isn’t afraid to say it. “Why would you want to do that,” they ask, but what I think they’re really saying is “why aren’t you taking this writing thing seriously?” And I’ve heard that a lot, from writers and nonwriters alike. And I can kind of see their point. It’s a game, a lark. It’s got a cutesy acronym and in one month you’re done. Moreover, it encourages the writer to write with abandon and to put quantity over quality.
Why would anyone take it seriously?
I’d argue that the naysayers are probably underestimating the number of people who do take it seriously. I’m sure there are a good portion of NaNo’ers that have no thought of being published and just want to write a novel in a month, but so what? Are they really hurting the craft of writing by participating? Sure, there are those that write “The End” on November 30 and ship the entire manuscript off to an agent or editor on December 1st, but that doesn’t hurt the rest of us any more than the usual slush pile does. At least, I don’t think so. I don’t know… what do you guys think?
Myself, I take NaNoWriMo very seriously. While for 11 months of the year I’m good about cranking out my morning pages and working on a revisions or a draft, I am never as disciplined and eager to write as I am come November 1st. I The first NaNoWriMo got me writing a story I’d been kicking around in my head for five years. It taught me that despite years of whining that I can only write short stories, I am, in fact able to write a novel. It got me sitting at my desk daily, facing the page and feeling guilty as hell on days when I don’t.
And it all happened because I didn’t want to be shown up by an eighth grader.
** If you’re interested in being a NaNoWriMo writing buddy, I’m registered on the official site as Chicklit. Come find me!
Well, now. THIS is what a week is supposed to be like. I finally kicked the cold/allergy/alien infection or whatever it was that kept me down for the last couple of weeks and got back to work. Since then work has been divided into two distinct categories: revision and maybe.
The revision is pretty straight forward, though very slow going. After I finished the second draft of Prodigal back in May, I printed out a copy, put it in a three-ring binder and let it rest for a couple of months. This week I pulled it off the shelf and began reading it just as I would any other book, but with a pen in hand. I covered about half the book, spending quite a bit of time making notes as vague as “put more stuff here” and as specific as changing language and rewriting entire pages. I think I’ll call this the hard copy phase of my revision process.
I realize it would be way more efficient to pull up the document and do all this revising on the computer, but I seem to work better off a hard copy. For one thing, it helps me turn on editor brain. I’ve trained myself to have writer brain in front of a blank page on the computer screen and I don’t want to confuse the two. Also, I find it’s better to let my proposed revisions marinate before making them permanent. I’ve learned this one the hard way, but that’s another story for another time.
The other thing I’ve been dealing with is the approach of NaNoWriMo. I’m doing it for the third year and possibly against my better judgment. Unfortunately, I’ve been wrestling with which idea to work on in the allotted month. There are two contenders: both contemporary YA pieces. One has been floating around in my head for about a year now and exists in snippets of freewriting here and there in my notebooks. The other appeared within the last few months and has no plot to speak of and several significant characters are missing names. I’m not even sure of what it’s about, though I am exploring that in my morning pages.
Anyway, all this thinking means that when wasn’t revising this week, was in the land of maybe. The land of maybe (apologies to Russell T. Davies) is that happy place where the ideas are flowing, but have not yet wilted by having to commit them to paper. It’s a lovely place to be because it means you can zone out in front of the back window with an apple slice at your lips until your husband comes along and asks what exactly you’ve been doing, staring into space for the last ten minutes, and then you get to say, “writing.” In the land of maybe, anything is possible. Your hero can be a magician or a ninja. Or both! Your characters are alive and real and not marred by the inconsistencies between chapter 2 and 12. And you are the Best Writer Ever. As I said, great place to be, but you can’t live there and I’ve only got another week before I have to start making some very real decisions, starting with which idea to work on.
So that’s what a semi-productive week looks like around here. Now for the obligatory media consumption:
Read:
The Astonishing X-Men Omnibus by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday
X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga by Chris Claremont
Watched:
X-Men
X2
(Yeah, there’s a theme. When I get hooked on a topic, I get hooked bad. Playing in a different genre sandbox than what I’m currently writing in is also a little helpful.)
Shellie Faught 