7 Days, 17,000 Words and no sign of a story yet...

It's been a while since I've done it, signed up for NaNoWriMo (for non-NaNo-ers, NaNoWriMo is short of National Novel Writing Month.  Every year hundreds of thousands of would-be novelists pledge to write a 50,000 novel during the month of November.) I wrote my first published book Thin Space during a previous NaNoWriMo and I am a big fan of the challenge. 

There's something inspiring about tapping out a story while hundreds of thousands of other writers are tapping out their stories, laboring in coffee shops or stealing words during lunch hours, waking at the crack of dawn to scrawl out a chapter by hand or typing bleary-eyed on their laptops well into the night. 

I'm also pretty realistic about what a writer can actually accomplish during a thirty-day period. A polished book ready for submission by December 1st?

Um, no. Not even close. 

But if you'd like to end up with a messy, meander-y drafty first draft, something that's ready to be broken into pieces and reworked over the next many months...

NaNo might be the gig for you.

End of October this year, I did a bit of pre-planning, opening up a calendar and calculating my target word count. (note: If you write every day for thirty days, you'll have to write 1667 words per day to end up with the desired 50,000.) I know going into it I won't be able to write for all 30 days. Thanksgiving's coming up (must say here that the NaNo creators really dropped the ball when they chose November, but I digress) Take away Thanksgiving and the days surrounding it, and I'll be lucky to write 21 days.

My target word count: a hefty 2381 words per day.

Bring it!

Day One. I am up early, raring to go. No social media until I get my words down for the day. No talking on the phone. No cleaning. No nothing except writing. I know my tendency to procrastinate and I am not going to fall into that trap-- not on Day One, damn it!

I have a rough idea of what I'm writing. Several potentially interesting characters. A setting. One very bizarre plot point.

Do I have an actual story arc?

Nope.

I write 2721 words and I'm finished by 11:30. Boo yah.

Day Two. Up and at'em. Still have no idea where this thing is going, but I am trusting the process, jumping off the cliff without a net, driving my car into the fog at night, dunking my head into the dark pool--

by which I mean I have no idea what the hell I am writing.

Noon, I hit 2592 words.

Day Three. Why am I writing this story again? I can't remember.

2700 uninspiring words.

Day Four. This is hard. HAAAAAAARRRRRRRRD. Plus it's Friday. It's nice outside. My daughter's home from her semester abroad and wants to go to a movie with me. I want to go to a movie with her. This story I'm writing is stupid anyway.

Somehow I pull 2751 words out of the recesses of my brain lobes by 1:00 and we're off to a movie. Go, Me!

Day-- What day is it? Five? Yes. Day Five. Saturday. I'm signed up to canvas for the upcoming election. Do I really want to write today? answer: no.

Should I write?

answer: eh, ok

I knock the heck out of 31 doors in my town, head home and scrounge out 2665 words. Take that, Donald Trump.

Day Six. I'm signed up to canvas again and it's going to take most of the day. On the plus side, it's Fall Back, so I get an extra hour. On the minus side, I use the extra hour to fret on social media about the election.

I squeak out 1649 words. None of them are good ones.

Day Seven: It occurs to me that I have reached 15,000+ words and I still don't know what my story is about. For the past week I've churned, labored over, played with, banged out, lovingly pondered and still,

I don't know what I am writing. I don't know where it's going. I don't know why I'm bothering.

This is the point where most people throw in the towel. But weirdly, I have never been one of those people. It takes me nearly all day but thirty minutes ago, I ended my writing session up 2656 words.

There's a story in here somewhere--

maybe what it is will hit me... tomorrow.

I am starting a new book today...

I'm tucked away in the loft of a barn at a writing retreat, curled up on a cozy chair, my laptop on my lap.

Ready to go.

I've got everything I need up here. A bowl of mixed nuts. A blank notebook. A glass of water with a slice of lemon. Three pens and one pencil. An inspirational book on writing that I found earlier gathering dust on a shelf. My reading glasses. A journal where I've been brainstorming.

The idea is hovering around the edges of my brain, not quite coming through, but I can feel it there, a naggy itch.

I went for a walk this morning. There are woods on this retreat. Hiking trails. A stream. Supposedly there are brown bears loping between the trees. I haven't seen one (thank God!) but I did see a snake. It crossed my path and slithered off into the leaves at the edge of the road before I even had time to be afraid.

It's a weird thing about walking alone. Especially when you've got a book flickering around in your head.

I kept looking for signs of it along my walk and then I stopped looking for signs and looked for snakes.

And bears.

Sometimes I am terrified of being in the woods. The quietness that isn't really all that quiet. The stillness that isn't quite still. How the moment you step in, the temperature drops ten degrees. The way the leaves on random trees flicker and twitch even when there isn't a breeze trailing through them.

I am the only one out here. But somehow, I am not alone.

The road bends ahead and disappears in shadow. Where does it go?

My sneakers crunch on the gravel. The woods surround me, dark and impenetrable.  I think lines from random poems. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep/ but I have promises to keep/ and miles to go before I sleep...

And weirdly, an old song from Girl Scouts pops into my head. Which gets me singing the song in time to my feet slapping the ground. I wasn't always afraid of the woods. I'm not afraid now. I'm not.

I'm not.  

Around a bend, a farm. So that was unexpected.

And then back into the woods. No closer to figuring out my story. It takes me a year to write a book. It is a crazy-making level of commitment that starts out with good intentions -- to find balance and joy and trust the process and just write for the sake of writing and yadda yadda ya,

and inevitably ends with a manic stretch of ranting and never changing out of my pajamas and forgetting to brush my teeth and who gives a crap about vacuuming. Or making dinner. And disappearing so far inside my own head that some days it's hard to claw my way out.

It's no wonder I have to gird myself to begin. I heard the author Jane Resh Thomas speak once about what it takes to write a book.

Why THIS book? she asked. Why have you decided to devote a year of your life in service to this particular story? You won't be the same person on the other side of it, you know that, right?

Oh, yes, Jane. I know it.

My feet keep smacking the road.

Another dark windy section of forest. A stream somewhere hidden behind the trees, burbling over rocks that I can't see.

Boom, a cornfield. Also, unexpected.

Who plants a cornfield in the woods?

And then I am back in the woods. A shadow walking on the road. Searching for my story. Walking.

walking

          walking

         walking

back to the barn

up the stairs

to the loft

where

I begin

Sparks and Sticks and Who the Heck Knows Where Ideas Come From or How to Write a Book Anyway

A teacher friend asked me to speak to her creative writing class on how to begin a story.

Which got me thinking about how, exactly, I begin a story.

I can talk about craft, the writer's "toolbox" as Stephen King calls it. Throw out words like Hook and Inciting Incident. Stress the importance of the opening paragraphs, the creation of characters and conflict and setting. Dialogue and sensory details. Oh, I guess we should talk about Theme. Bluh.

But I suspect the students in the creative writing class have heard all of that before. They've read stories and deconstructed stories. Written book reports and analyzed symbols. Taken tests on What's the Main Idea? and List the supporting details.

All of this stuff is helpful to know -- when it comes to understanding how a story works (or doesn't), but I'm not sure how helpful it is for the writer facing a blank computer screen or gripping a pen against a notebook page.

How do you begin a story?

Where does an idea for a story come from? And once you have that idea, how do you go about developing it?

The answer, I am reluctant to admit to the creative writing students, is: I don't know.

The author Sid Fleischman has what he calls the Two Sticks Theory. Just as it takes two sticks to make a fire, it takes two ideas to spark a story.

The theory rings true to me. I can go back through stories and books I've written and trace the genesis of them back to two ideas-- or more. But that's clearer when I've already written in the story.

Before I begin, I just have vague strands and snippets floating around in my head. A barefoot boy. A Celtic belief in thin places. A girl moving to a new town. A ghost hovering over a bed. The crappy gray weather that is November in Columbus Ohio.

How do those strands and snippets wind themselves into a coherent story?

I'm back to I don't know.

There's the BIC philosophy of writing a book...

Where you, um, put your Butt In the Chair and write the book. For more info on how to manage this feat, check out the reams of manuals written on discipline and motivation, how to break through writer's block, how to beat back resistance and bang out your novel.

If those books sound too militant and hard core to you, check out the woo-woo-y books on inspiring your inner artist and nurturing your creative self and finding joy in your process and meditating (or walking or showering) your way through plot holes.

Ask any writer for a word of advice and you'll hear stuff like:

Write every day
Don't write every day
Write a shitty first draft and worry about revision later
What? Are you nuts? Outline that sucker first and then write!
Wake up early
Stay up late
Hand write
Type

And I am back to I Don't Know.

Maybe in the end it comes down to finding the thing that works for you and doing it until it doesn't work anymore and then trying something else. You write because you have a story to tell and it gets rejected and you quit

or you keep writing and you get better. Your stories are published and they do well or they sink like stones and disappear, but you keep writing because what else are you going to do

and in a few weeks you'll start a new story and you have your vague strands and snippets bobbing around in your head and you're not sure what to do with them yet, but whatever, you'll figure it out.

First, though, you've got to change out of your pajamas! You're visiting a creative writing classroom in like, an hour, and you need to plan what you are going to say.

Thinking About Writing a Book in 30 Days? (Here's a bit of advice to get you started...)

Last week I did a presentation at two local libraries for writers interested in taking the NaNoWriMo challenge this year. NaNo, in case you are wondering, is a cool writing site where participants pledge to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. It costs nothing to join and you get to be part of a cool community of writers all chugging along on the same crazy journey. At the end of the month, if you meet your goal, you win a virtual badge (WOO HOO!) and the satisfaction of knowing you've got a finished first draft to play around with later.

Tracie, the awesome librarian at the Upper Arlington Ohio library who'd asked me to give the presentation, introduced me as a writer with lots of wisdom to share.

I had a hardy laugh about that. Yes, I may have won the virtual NaNo badges (For the record, I wrote four novels during previous NaNos and one of those novels turned into--after multiple revisions--my first published novel.) but in many ways I am still a beginner. Each day's writing is just as hard (if not harder) than the day before, and if I have learned anything over the years, it is that I always have more to learn.

Anyhoo, a few writers emailed to say that they could not make either of the presentations but would love it if I could share my notes. I'm not sure how useful these will be, but in the spirit of sharing "wisdom," here goes:

1. The nitty gritty. Get out a calendar page of the month of November. Look at the days you will realistically be able to write. Count them up. Divide 50,000 words by that number. The answer equals the number of words you will have to write per day if you want to win. To put this in perspective: if you plan to write all 30 days, you will need to write 1667 words per day. I NEVER could do that. There's Thanksgiving to think about. As well as life in general. My daily word count goal was always something nutty like 2800 words.

2. Every book begins with an idea (or two).

• There's a saying that it takes two sticks to light a fire and two ideas to create a story. Sometimes these ideas are unrelated on the surface. For example, my book Thin Space began with the idea of a girl moving into a creepy old house AND the Celtic belief in thin places, where the wall between our world and the world of the dead is thinner. 
• I read once that there are only two basic plots--the hero takes a journey or a stranger comes to town. That's it. Every story, movie, book you've ever heard boils down to either of those two plots. The hero takes a journey, for example, would be like Luke in Star Wars or Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. An example of a stranger comes to town is Jaws. That story, of course, has both plots. The stranger (Jaws) comes to town, and the hero (Chief Brody) goes on a journey to kill him. 
• Another way to look at your story is to ask a question. Will Luke defeat Darth Vader and restore balance to the universe? Will Dorothy find her way back to Kansas? Will Chief Brody overcome his fear of the water (and what a goofball that guy is living on an island!) and kill Jaws?
• You can also ask yourself: Whose story is it? What's happening? What is at stake? 

3. Once you've got your ideas/basic plot/questions, the next step is

To outline

Or

Not to outline

It's perfectly okay during this pre-NaNo time to outline your story. I'm not talking the formal outlines you did in seventh grade with Roman numerals. Simply write out a list of your characters, a few of your ideas, the conflict and questions. Chart out scenes, etc. Some writers I know write very detailed outlines that go one for 50 pages.

I am not one of these writers.

The beauty of NaNo is that you can start writing your book with very little plotted out in advance. Take your two ideas or your question or your basic plot idea and just see how it all plays out as you write.

4. Now, for the BIG SECRET TO WRITING A BOOK.

Once upon a time I went to a writing conference where the brilliant author Jane Yolen told the audience of 1000 people that she was about to share her secret to writing a book. She paused, and you could hear all 1000 people holding their breaths and leaning forward eagerly.

The answer, Jane Yolen said, is BIC.

Another pause.

And then she smiled and said, "Put your Butt In the Chair and write."

Yeah. The truth is there are no short cuts and no magic answers. But know this about NaNo, and about writing a book in general (and this probably applies to anything in life--such as running a marathon or losing 20 pounds): if you chip away at your goal by writing those 1667 words per day, in the end you will make it to the finish line.

5. To get yourself warmed up each of those days

Read books on writing. (See the list below for helpful books on craft, inspiration, writer's block, etc.)

Before I begin a writing session, I read a chapter from one of these books.

Or journal the junk out. Every morning write for ten minutes--all the gibberish-y stuff clogging up your brain and keeping you from thoughtfully beginning your work for the day. Anxieties, snippets of dreams, arguments you're having with the comment section of a Yahoo news article, bills you've got to pay, etc. Get it on the page and out of your head.

Do whatever you need to do to get your daily word count done. Set an alarm. Flip an hour glass (my little trick). Leave the house and write in a coffee shop. Stay in the house and lock yourself in a closet. Or mix it up and try a different motivational strategy each day.

Don't forget to reward yourself at the end of a session. Writing 1667 words in a day may not seem like that big of a deal, but do it today, and the next day, and the day after that... and you deserve a piece of chocolate. Or a bag of Doritos.

6. Biggest nugget of wisdom I know: Resist the urge to revise as you go. NaNo is about quantity NOT quality. Get the words down (crappy as they may be) and worry about fixing things later. If it helps, keep a notebook on the side of all the things you want to delete/change/fix later. DON'T WORRY ABOUT THAT STUFF NOW.

And finally, remember E.L. Doctorow's true words of wisdom:

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Good luck. And meet me back here in mid November for a middle of the month pep talk.


Some helpful books on writing

Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, and Thunder and Lightning by Natalie Goldberg
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See
One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher
Wired for Story by Lisa Cron
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
On Writing by Stephen King
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
Elements of Style by Strunk and White

PS. Here's a post I wrote last year on why you should NEVER EVER send your "finished" first draft out to a publishing company or an agent on Dec. 1.

NaNoWriMo aka Traveling through Texas, Stepping off a Cliff without a Bridge, Driving in Fog (Pick your Metaphor)

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” --E.L. Doctorow


It's November 1st and apparently most of the writers I know have signed up to do NaNo.

NaNo, for the uninitiated, is short for NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, in which clueless--excuse me. I mean ambitious--writers pledge to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. There are no prizes, but you do win a nifty virtual badge if you complete the journey. No one on the site reads your 50,000 word effort. Alas, no agents or editors will dig through the entries looking for the next Great American Novel and offer you a contract on Dec. 1. You could conceivably write the word "Bluh" 50,000 times if you so desire and still win.

What you do get out of it is a cool, committed (and possibly you should BE committed by the end of the crazy month) group of writers all trekking along on the same book-writing road. You can friend them on the site and follow their progress and of course they can follow yours too, keeping everyone motivated. If you're a floundery sort of writer, who needs a little push to get going each day, (and who doesn't?), NaNo provides a clear cut deadline. They'll send you helpful tips and inspirational emails written by various successful authors. And there are other fun perks. My favorite is the colorful graph that shows your growing word count with 50,000 at the top. Mine always looks like nice even steps. I like that--a neato visual reminder that each day I am getting somewhere with my writing.

Of course, what you are actually getting, if you make it to the end of NaNo, is a big ole mess of a first draft. Don't let anyone fool you. Even the few writers who have parlayed a NaNo project into a published book will tell you: YOU WILL HAVE TO REWRITE THIS THING.

MULTIPLE TIMES!!!!

NaNo will teach you fairly quickly (I'd say on like, day 4 or 5 it should hit you) that writing a book is freaking hard. Forget the part about having a cool idea. Forget how creative you are and how you love to read and how you once wrote a story in college. What you're going to need to complete NaNo is some serious discipline. Every day you're going to have to go back IN THERE, into your cobwebby head, into your pathetic mess of a book, that by day 10 is probably not even the book you thought you were writing anymore, and, uh, keep writing it.

Also, there's Thanksgiving to think about. Really bad timing for many of us, thanks NaNo people.

So for the record, I have "completed" NaNo and won my badge four times. My NaNo project number two will be published next year (after MULTIPLE REVISIONS). I am not signed up to do it this year (I'm knee deep in revisions of a different NaNo project), but I confess that I am a tad envious of those of you about to embark on this crazy fun relentless journey today.

You might be asking yourself at this point: Why?--Why would I be envious when I just made such a big deal about how hard NaNo is. Last night I was following a YA Lit Chat on Twitter about NaNo. There were a few agents on there griping about how much NaNo annoyed them. What happens, I guess, is that every year in December they get deluged with a bunch of crappy NaNo novels. Don't query them with that junk, was their main point. Some of the writers, newbies just about to dip their toes into the NaNo waters, were immediately discouraged and bummed out. The night before Nov. 1, no one wants to hear that the awesome idea they have for a novel is going to inevitably be a giant ball of suck in 30 days. Sheesh, some of them whined. Why should we even do this? 

A twitter chat doesn't give you much space to work with, so here's my response to these wavering, formerly gung ho newbies about why they shouldn't be too bummed out by the agents:

1. Agents are NOT writers. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say they don't understand the process. (No offense, agents.)

2. Writing a novel is hard, but you have to start somewhere. Committing yourself (there's that crazy word again) to getting something down--something with hopefully a beginning, middle, and end, rough as it may be--is a worthy goal. Laraine Herring compares writing a book to driving through Texas. It's a ridiculously long journey, but if you keep driving, you will eventually reach the border.

3. Doing NaNo will kill (or at the very least, muffle) that pesky internal editor voice that streams along in your head as you write, telling you that what you write is crappy and stupid and pointless. You don't have time for that voice during NaNo. If you want to finish, you are going to have to keep writing those crappy words. NaNo is about quantity not quality. Repeat that after me: quantity not quality. Write it on a sign and tape it to your computer screen. No, you are not writing the word Bluh over and over, but some days it will feel like it. Whatever. Keep writing anyway--

4. --because a finished first draft is a beautiful wonderful masterful amazing thing simply because it is finished. There is a saying that you can't revise a blank page. Come December first, congratulations! You've got a whole bunch of pages to work with. In January. Forget December. Really. Just give yourself a break that month. You just wrote a freaking 50,000 word novel for God's sake.

5. You are going to find out what you are made of when you do this--when you delve back in day after day, and keep writing, not knowing exactly where you're going, but inching along, word by word, regardless. Yes, day 4 or 5 it will hit you how insane the pace is, but if you stick with it, in a few more days, something is going to click. Your story is going to take off in a direction you didn't plan, with characters who have minds of their own. Let them GO. Follow them. This is the fun magical part of writing that the agents don't understand.  It's where you step off the cliff hoping that a bridge will be there to catch your foot. Step off. It will be there. Eventually.

6. Now I'm going to bum you out again about how much work you will still have to do when you complete your NaNo draft. In January you are going to read it, with intense nausea, as you realize just how much of a big ole mess it is. But oh well. Nothing to do but go back into it again. And again. And again. Each time it will get better. You will keep stepping off the cliff. You will keep traveling along through freaking Texas. And some day, if you do keep traveling onward, the fog will clear, the sun will rise, and you will see the glorious border of New Mexico.

7. That's when you start querying the agents. And while you wait for them to respond, there will be nothing else to do but get back into your car, turn around, and start heading the other way.

Toward Arkansas.

Good luck, 2012 NaNo-ites.

The Story of a Book

Even after all these years of writing stories I still think it's strange and cool how they get started. For me it happens when two or three unrelated ideas click together. Sometimes this takes years.

Example: my young adult novel Thin Space.

Six years ago at a school bus stop, I noticed a boy stepping off the bus behind my son, barefoot. When I asked my son about it, he just shrugged and said the guy was always barefoot--at school, on the bus, always. But didn't he get in trouble? I asked. I mean, did the school just let him do this? And what about his parents?

The mother part of me was worried about the boy stepping on broken glass or stubbing his toe or maybe catching a fungus off the cafeteria floor. But my writer brain was mulling over motivations. What did this teenager have against shoes? Was it some kind of political or religious statement? Did he have an obsession with hippies? My son had no idea what the kid's story was and nobody around seemed as fazed as I was about it. Still I couldn't stop thinking about the barefoot boy at the bus stop, as I called him. He would make an interesting character in a book...

A few months later my family was waiting for a seat in a restaurant and I was browsing through a local magazine. A couple of sentences in one of the articles caught my eye: "The Celts believed in thin places, where the veil between this world and the Other is, well, thin... In these places the seen and unseen world are most closely connected and inhabitants of both worlds can momentarily touch each other." Cool topic for a story, I thought, and tore the passage out and slipped it in my purse.

The two sparks of ideas--a barefoot boy and the belief in thin places--didn't seem related, but for some reason they churned around together in my head.

My family had moved to a new town not long before, and in the fall of 2008 (I'm putting dates now so you can get a picture of how LONG this process can sometimes take), I decided that it was the perfect time to start another novel. I signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and committed myself to write a book I called Thin Space. (Here's something I didn't realize until recently when I dug that crunched up article from purse: all those years I'd misread the quote and thought it said thin space instead of thin place. Oh well.)

Let me say here that when you're writing a 50,000 word novel in less than 30 days, it's all about the quantity. This draft was a big old mess of massive big old mess proportions. With pointless and meandering digressions and flashbacks within flashbacks. Whole chapters that droned on about what the characters were wearing and the seating placement in the cafeteria. I thought I was writing about a girl named Maddie who'd just moved to a new town. (It was a town suspiciously like the one I'd just moved to, complete with the drizzly, dreary, gray weather we were having. And of course, it was November.) Unbeknownst to Maddie there was a thin space in her new house, a doorway from this world into the world of the dead.

That's what I thought I was writing about anyway.

But on like, day four of my NaNo project, Maddie walked to the bus stop and there was a weird barefoot guy standing there. His name was Marsh and he had a secret (a secret I didn't know) From that point on Marsh took over the story and on day 24 when he finally told Maddie what his big secret was, we were both surprised. I don't even know if surprised is the right word. I remember going to bed the night before, tormented by how the whole plot was going to come together. What the heck was the boy's story and what did it have to do with the thin space in Maddie's house? And then waking up with an answer that gave me goose bumps.

End of November I won my little NaNo prize for "finishing," then closed the file and didn't look at it again until January.

That's when the real work began. First time I read it through, I was nauseated. The truth was, except for the parts where Marsh had inserted himself, the book was kind of boring. Maddie didn't really have much of a conflict and her story didn't go anywhere. I whined about all of this to my daughter, who at the time was in sixth grade. I didn't think she was interested in my struggles with this silly book but I kept ranting to her, hoping that hearing myself talk about it might give me an idea what to do next. My daughter, God love her, listened, then she looked at me and said, "So why don't you write the story from Marsh's point of view?"

"No!" I said, because that's always my initial reaction when people give me writing suggestions, and I gave her a litany of reasons why she was wrong. It was Maddie's story, didn't she see that? And besides, Marsh had this big secret. If he was telling the story, how could I keep his secret from the reader? Did I tell you my daughter was in sixth grade?

"So," she said again. "Don't tell the reader."

We were sitting in Panera Bread having this conversation and my daughter bounded up to go buy another cookie or something and I sat there blinking at her and covered in goose bumps, thinking, Huh. Maybe that idea could work.

Next day I started the book again--the whole thing over from page one, this time from Marsh's point of view. It took me three months. I finished that draft in March 2009.

There have been quite a few drafts since then. But the core of the story--about a barefoot boy and a thin space--is still there.

Today is September 10, 2012. Next year on this date, Thin Space will be on the bookstore shelves.

Write a Novel in 30 Days

Today is officially the first day of NaNoWriMo (for the uninitiated, that’s National Novel Writing Month). Participants from all over the world pledge to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I have “won” NaNo for the past three years and today I am vowing to do it again. There is no right way to do this. At the end of the month the NaNo people are not going to read your novel. They aren’t even going to look at it to see if you actually wrote something that makes sense. So theoretically you could write “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” 5000 times like the lunatic caretaker in Stephen King’s book The Shining.

But don’t do that. Also don’t stress so much about word count that you play tricks like loading up on adjectives or writing out your characters’ full names including middle names every time you mention them. Okay. If you want to do that, fine, do that too. There really is no right way to win this thing. What’s important, at least for me, is to get that first draft out and on paper so that I have something real and “finished” to work with in December. (Who am I kidding? In December, the last thing I’m going to want to look at is this mess of a first draft. I’ll leave that to January.)

My other rules (because in the end I really am a rule person) are as follows:

1. Write at least 1667 words per day (this is the minimum number to reach 50,000 by Nov. 30.) But I will need to write more some days to make up for the fact that I will not be working on Thanksgiving. Plus I just need a buffer for the days when real life—in the form of making meals, driving the kids places, and cleaning the toilets—intrudes.

2. Don’t bad-mouth what I write. This is a hard one for me. I am my own worst critic and there are many days when I read over what I’ve written and pronounce it all as crap. And maybe it is. But I don’t need to tell myself that. Would I treat a writer friend that way? Um, no. I would find something kind and encouraging to say about the crap that she's written.

3. As a corollary to number two, let my writing go where it wants. So if I go off on some weird tangent about where kids sit in the middle school cafeteria or get lost in a flashback within a flashback within flashback, that’s okay. I need to remember that sometimes those unplanned digressions lead to the real heart of a story.

4. And that’s it. Of course I also hope I come up with a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. One that has characters and a setting and a plot that makes sense. And it would be nice if it had a point. But maybe some of this will have to come with the second draft.

Here are a few final words of wisdom:
Trust the process.—Mary Casanova
Jump off the cliff without building the bridge (or something like that)—Libba Bray
It’s not rocket science—Linda Su Park
Oh well, nothing to do but start.—Carolyn See

PS: anyone out there reading this blog who signs up to do NaNo this month, “friend” me on the NaNo site, and we can root for each other. My NaNo name is jodycasella.

Stalled

I’ve been feeling cocky lately. Writing this blog to my beginner self of fifteen years ago made me realize how much progress I’ve made since I started. I’ve been smug, thinking I had discovered the secrets to my creative process and confident that I had the tools to take my writing to the next level. And I’ve been feeling generous—eager to share with other struggling writers my wealth of knowledge about inspiration and motivation, perseverance and discipline.

Today, though, I feel like I’m back at square one. It’s 1:34 and I have done absolutely nothing toward my writing goals. I’m stalled. Stuck. Floundering with a first draft that’s really more like a tenth draft. The truth is I don’t know what to do next. My usual little tricks don’t seem to be working for this one—

I’ve put the manuscript away. I’ve read it with a fresh eye. I’ve charted out the whole thing, trying to figure out what I have and what’s still missing. In the process I discovered that what I thought I was writing about has changed. Now this realization doesn’t freak me out. It’s happened to me before. In fact it’s happened every time I’ve written a book. Somehow the point—what you think is the point anyway—sort of morphs into something else. The story takes off. The characters suddenly start acting like real people, doing what they want instead of what you planned for them to do. It’s a pretty cool moment in the process when the story becomes what it really is, and it’s probably the most fun part about being a writer—just letting it go and following along for the ride. Later, you can see what the over-arching story is and that knowledge helps you shape the second draft.

But here’s my problem. I’m not seeing it. I have glimmers here and there but that’s it. Stephen King in his book On Writing talks about how a story is always there somewhere, like a fossil underground, and our job as the writer is to discover it and dig up the pieces. The better writers are able to uncover the majority of the bones and put them all together. Beginning writers might only be able to get a few or maybe they stick the leg bone in the wrong socket. I’m feeling like a beginning writer this week. I’m not finding all my story pieces. Or maybe I have most of the pieces but I can’t figure out how to rearrange them correctly. I don’t even know if there is such a thing as correctly with this book anymore. I’ve written so many versions of it, I’m afraid I’ve damaged it or lost the heart of what it was meant to be somewhere along the way.

Over the past few weeks I’ve gone back and read some of the versions. I’ve kept a journal of all of my questions and problems and plot holes. I’ve taken walks. I’ve read books (a few great ones that made me feel overwhelming despair that I’ll never get this figured out. And a few mediocre ones that remind me that I can.) I’ve gone back and read old rejections/critiques on this manuscript. Here, I’ve been fortunate to have several editors give me some really good feedback on what’s working and not working with this story, one editor going so far as to ask for a revision and giving me specific points to consider. I’ve also talked to my generous, insightful, inspirational writing buddies, as well as to my long-suffering husband who listened to me rant and rave all weekend about my struggles with this book.

But I’m still stalled.

So what’s the answer here? I don’t know. There is a part of me that considered quitting on this book. Just saying, forget it. I gave it many years already. I certainly tried. But there is another part that refuses to let it go. I heard the great editor Patti Lee Gauch speak at a conference once. She said writers can be taught all of the elements of a story. We can learn about setting, characters, plot. We can study grammar and punctuation. We can have editors advise us on revision. But no one can help us with the heart of the story. Some stories have it and some stories don’t. I know this story has one. I can’t let it go. And I believe I’m the only one who can tell it. I have no deadline. No real pressure from anyone except myself. In all likelihood this book will never see a bookstore shelf.

I don’t care.

Time to get back to work.

Trouble Writing? Leave the House

Some days it’s harder than others to open up the file and get started. Who am I kidding? Most days, it’s hard. I honestly don’t know why this is. I have been writing 1500 words per day, 6 days a week, for the last two years. You’d think it would be easier to just sit down and write. Maybe it’s all the distractions. Email. Stupid articles on Yahoo News and the accompanying inane comments. The giant waste of time known as Facebook. But even before Facebook existed, I was the queen of wasting time. In college I rearranged my room to put off studying for a test. In my younger and more vulnerable years I watched MTV. Okay. So that dates me.

The point is there’s always going to be something else you can do besides writing. Unless you have an editor breathing down your neck (which, I don’t, alas) than you’re going to have to motivate yourself. I’ve figured out that if I can just get started, the rest usually takes care of itself. Then I have a hard time stopping. But that’s an issue for another day.

So what have I learned over the years about getting started? Here’s my list in no particular order:

Leave the house. When my family first moved to Columbus I had no idea that it has cloudy gray weather to rival Seattle’s. A kindly neighbor with Seasonal Affective Disorder pointed this out the first week we were here. “November. Yep. It’s Cloud Season,” he said. “Won’t be sunny again til March. If we’re lucky.” I thought he was joking. He was. Turned out it was April. Our house was dark. Cold. Dreary. I could barely crawl out of bed, much less write. I had to get the heck out of there before I went crazy.

Most days in winter, I pack up my computer and haul my lazy butt out the door to the library. In our town it’s warm and well lit. It has nice comfy chairs. They’ve reserved one for me. (Not really, but it seems like it. I sit in the same one, back in the quiet reference section, near the big windows.) The library is a great place to write because it smells like books. Which is what I’m trying to write. Some days when I need an extra dose of inspiration, I meander over to the YA section and make a large space on the shelf where they’ll some day shelve my books. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.

If I have $3.75 I head over to the Caribou Coffee shop. Our town has two, both within walking distance. (Not that I ever walk, haha.) A coffee shop is a good place to write because you can get a nice shot of caffeine to spur you on. They have electrical outlets where you can plug in your computer. And there are usually other people around working, writing, studying, so you’ll get a good motivational kick to go with your caffeine surge. (For the record, I also frequent Panera Bread and Starbucks.)

Make a date with a writer friend. It helps if you pencil this in on your calendar: Thursday—12 to 3 meet Jill to write. I used to think this method wouldn’t work. The person and I would get to talking and nothing would get done. But you’d be surprised. Throw two writers together and usually one of you will be in a productive mood. The other one will have no choice but to get cracking too.

Have a place in your house set up for writing. You know how articles about sleep issues always suggest that you make your bed a place for sleeping and nothing else? Well, I’ve learned this applies to writing too. Not the bed part. But having a place where all you do is write. An office. Or at least a desk. Last year my supportive handyman husband converted part of the guest bedroom into an office for me. It has a comfy chair. Shelves of children’s books for inspiration. A table for spreading out all my notes and research. And a wall-to-wall corkboard where I can pin up my ideas (typically scribbled on folded grocery receipts). When I walk into that room, I feel like writing is my job. Which I guess it is. Except for the getting paid part.

And my final suggestion: team up with an accountability partner—another writer like you who needs a nudge to get started every day. My writing partner lives in another state. We have only met in person a few times. Every morning we email each other our writing goals. At the end of the day we email what we’ve accomplished. Some days when we’re both lagging, we text each other, setting up mini races, such as write 100 words in the next ten minutes.

Let’s try that now and see if it works. Okay? 100 words. Ten minutes. Go.

To Outline or Not to Outline

The real question should be: when do you outline? Ask the average person, anyone who’s sat through a 7th grade Language Arts class, and the answer will likely be before writing. We’re taught to choose the main idea. Break it down into sub topics. Add details. The point is to organize your thoughts. Plan. See where your writing is going before you start. It makes sense. And if you’re writing an essay, it’s definitely a good idea.

If you’re writing a book, you’ll want to organize your ideas by chapters and/or scenes. A few weeks ago I heard a writer speaking at a conference about how he creates a detailed outline. He charts out his scenes in advance, logically arranging the sequence of events—introductions of characters, plot twists, action, etc. It takes him two or three months to do, but when he starts writing the book, it comes fairly easy. Each day he refers to his outline and sees what scene he needs to write. He stressed that his outlines are not written in stone. He even showed us a sample that included cross-outs and rearranged elements. But overall, he sticks to it. He’s written all of his books this way, and he’s been very successful using this method.

I’m sorry I can’t go into more detail about how to outline a book, because it’s not the way I write. I must confess that I was one of those students who wrote the outline after writing the paper. (Let me say here that I don’t believe that any particular method for writing is better than any other. Interview ten writers about their process and you’ll get ten different answers.) My suggestion is to experiment with a variety of ways, cobble together bits of what works for others until you find what works for you.

So how do I write a book if I don’t outline first? I begin with a vague idea of where the story is going. I know the end, or at least what seems like the logical end. And I simply write toward it. Maybe “simply” isn’t the right word. There are painful days when I feel like I’m slogging through each sentence. But there are also days when everything flows out. (Here’s something interesting: when I read back over what I’ve written, I can never tell which parts were hard to write and which parts were easy. It all blends together. Which is just weird, but I digress.)

If you've read my other posts, you know that I set a word count goal each day, usually 1500 words. I think in terms of scenes and I concentrate only on the scene I’m working on that day. Occasionally I worry about where it’s all going. Especially when something pops up unexpectedly. Why did my main character do that? for example. Or where the heck did that person come from? But I just keep going, having faith that when I’m ready to start the next scene I’ll know what to do. E.L Doctorow said once that writing a novel is "like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

Writing like this is a little scary. But I just keep plugging away at my 1500 words. Usually around day twenty (I have no idea why this is) something happens. I know what’s going on and it all starts to come together. Suddenly the words are spilling out. The tension is building and I can see the final scenes rising up out of the foggy ether. Now I’m eager to start each day because I want to see how it’s all going to play out and the only way to know for sure is to write it.

So where does the outline come in? Here’s the strange part: it comes when I’m “finished.” I write the last word. Print out the big mess of the first draft. Then I put it away in a drawer to marinate. (That’s how Stephen King describes it in his book On Writing.) I don’t look at it for at least six weeks. Later, when I pick it up, I read it like a reader. No red pencil in hand. I just want to see what I have. Yes, it’s a mess. But there is a real book buried in there and now that I see it, I can begin my outlining process.

I write out my big questions—what are the main ideas driving my story? Who are the main characters? What are the internal and external conflicts? I have a general sense of this while I’m writing, but you’d be surprised how things change over the course of writing a book. Sometimes what you’re really writing about doesn’t hit you until page 100. I list out the scenes I have on index cards and I literally spread them out on the floor. Every scene must contribute to the overall story; otherwise it needs to go. Or maybe I need to add a scene (or fifteen) where essential elements are missing. Once I’ve done that, I make my outline.

Now I can start my revision.

Seems like a lot of work, I know. When I spoke to the writer at the conference who outlines first, he looked at me like I was crazy. But after talking we realized that he does his logical work on the front end and I do that work on the back end. We both have to revise. Both methods take roughly the same amount of time.

Whichever method you choose, here’s a final word from the inspirational folks on the NaNoWriMo site:

“All the books we've loved started out in a similarly imperfect form. They're called rough drafts for a reason. No one gets a novel totally right on the first pass. This is true whether you give yourself a month or a lifetime to write the first draft. There's an adage in noveling that you can revise a bad first draft into a great book. But you can't revise a blank page into anything but a blank page.”

Gearing up for NaNoWriMo

Three years ago at the end of October my family moved to a new state. It was a big change for our all of us. New schools for the kids and new careers for my husband and me. It was the year I quit teaching and decided once and for all to focus on my writing. Only a few days after moving into our new home, before the pictures were even up on the walls, I signed up for NaNoWriMo. It changed my writing life.

For the uninitiated NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Participants pledge to write a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month of November. Sign up and you get helpful writing advice from published authors, a cool-looking page where you can chart your progress, daily inspirational emails, and the instant support and encouragement of a community of writers on the same journey.

That’s what I knew going into it. But here’s why it changed my writing life. My previous method for writing a book was this: I would come up with what I thought was an interesting idea or two, create a few characters, and begin writing. And revising. And reworking. And editing. And revising some more. I literally could not move onto the next sentence until I felt that the one before it was perfect. It took me two years to write a book this way and by the time I was finished, I hated the thing’s guts and couldn’t bear to look at it again. I also patted myself on the back for having what I believed was not a first draft. After all I had revised it to “perfection” as I wrote it. I submitted it to publishers. It got rejected.

But the moment I began a book NaNoWriMo-style, I realized my revise as I go method was not going to work. Take 50,000 words and divide by 30 days and you get 1666 words per day. Subtract out weekends (not going to happen. I had a family. We were adjusting to a new town) and Thanksgiving (jeez, why’d the Nano people pick November? Don’t they have to cook 20-pound turkeys for visiting relatives?) and I was left with more than 2500 words per day. Let me tell you something. You try writing 2500 words in a day and see how quickly you move past the revise as you go method. Perfect sentences—ha ha. Forget it.

So this is what happened. I did it. I wrote a big 50,000-word mess of a book. And I couldn’t kid myself—it was truly a first draft. It had digressions and a string of loosely strewn-together scenes. Strands that went nowhere. Characters that disappeared and characters that popped up in the final chapters. But it was a thing of beauty anyway. It was funny. It was heartbreaking. Yes, there were long passages of bad writing, but there were also nuggets of the best writing I’d ever produced. It was not perfect. But it was finished. And here’s a saying from one of those inspirational Nano emails and something I’ve clung to ever since: a first draft IS perfect simply because it is finished.

Now I don’t recommend this type of writing for everyone. There are many successful writers who swear by the revise as you go method. But I found that Nano-writing forced me to let go of my crippling perfectionism and silenced the negative editor in my head. Nano helped me embrace the free-spirited creative voice and follow it wherever it wanted to go. Usually to a place I hadn't planned. Writing a book this way is exhilarating.

When I read that first Nano draft in January, I found the bones of a pretty decent book. This time when I revised, I had the whole thing in front of me to work with. I could do real revision and not what I had been doing before, which I realized was actually line editing.

This November if you want to kick-start your writing career, join me on NaNoWriMo.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
If you stick with it, in 30 days you’ll be toasting your own beautiful mess of a first draft.
(Tips for revising Coming Soon)