Go With The Flow

Writing isn't easy. It takes discipline to find the time to write, assuming you're not a full-time writer, and then to actually sit your backside in a chair and do it. You can always find excuses to avoid writing and usually they're things most people would find reasonable—you need to clean the house, go grocery shopping, make dinner. And at the end of the year, it takes a near herculean effort not to succumb to the Big Excuses—holiday planning/decorating/meal cooking/gift shopping. I mean, the holidays are already stressful enough and you don't want to let your friends and family down, right?

Wrong. You've forgotten one very important person: You. When you, as a writer, don't prioritize your writing and always (or mostly) let other distractions take precedence, you're letting yourself down. I don't mean your writing absolutely has to come always first, but it should be important enough to come first a fair amount of the time. It's called balance, something we could all do with more of in our lives.

That's one of the reasons why I think NaNoWriMo is great for a lot of people. I'll freely admit it isn't for everyone. But for some people, NaNo has turned out to be the one month of the year they're able to truly prioritize their writing as task numero uno. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because they can point to the website and say, "See? I'm participating in a national event. I just can't do x-y-z until I've reached my word count for the day." Or, maybe it's the feeling of we're-all-in-this-together comradery at the write-ins that spurs people on to continue writing.

It's as if once you start writing, the words suddenly just keep flowing. My advice: Go with the Flow. Make it a habit and keep going. (Surprise! For those who only write during NaNoWriMo, if you keep writing after November the words still flow.)

One note. Don't forget to back up your work! My rule is: Save Early and Often. Turn on automatic saving, manually save frequently, and create an archive back up after each writing session. Since I use Scrivener, I back up my Scrivener project to a zip file.

Another back up suggestion—save your back up file to multiple physical locations, in case of a disk crash. My two favorite "off computer" back up locations are an USB flash drive and Dropbox. If you've never heard of Dropbox, it's a cloud service and it's free for up to 2GB of storage (you can pay for more storage, but honestly I've been using it for months and haven't begun to make a dent in my storage space). You can access it from multiple devices (PCs, Macs, iphones, ipads, other smart phones, etc.) and you can share files with other people, if you choose, using different levels of permission. It's an amazing service.

So, find time to write and write as much as you can (turn off your internal editor!). Save your work frequently and copy your back up files to multiple storage devices. And above all, have fun!

I'm a bit behind on my NaNo goals, but I'm plugging away and writing every day. How's your NaNo journey going?

Ready, Set, Write!

Welcome to the first day of NaNoWriMo!

Have you written your first words yet? Yes? Way to go! Keep up the good work! No? Why not? Time's a-wastin' if you want to write 50,000 words this month, so get cracking!

I'm only half-joking about that.

I've participated in NaNoWriMo every year since 2003. My first NaNo I wrote over 125,000 words. I've never duplicated that feat and my other NaNo attempts have been a bit of a mixed bag in regards to the number of words written, but I count each a success. That's because I've learned something important about my writing during each one.

My first NaNo taught me that I can write novel-length fiction. Diving into a couple of NaNos with only an idea and a couple of unformed characters taught me that I'm not a pantser. NaNo has taught me that I have to turn off the internal editor in order to get the words on paper. It's also taught me I can write fast, so long as I have a pretty good idea where I'm going, and that I can carve writing time out of just about any hour of the day when I need to.

I know the fact that NaNoWriMo is held in November drives a lot of people a little crazy. And so it should. Who wants to try to write 50,000 words in a month with one of the biggest holidays of the year? The thing is, though, if you can muster the discipline to write 50,000 words in November, of all months, then imagine what you could do in, say, March?

The real key to NaNoWriMo, at least for me, is to set a daily word goal and make sure you reach it. Then, if you can, write past it. If you break it down, 50,000 words in 30 days comes out to 1,667 words per day. That's the goal I set for myself in my first NaNo, but each day I tried to write more than that, usually doubling my goal. I told myself I was creating a cushion for the holidays, but I found when Thanksgiving came that I still managed to find time to write. Of course, by that time I didn't have to write—I'd already written something like 75,000 words—but I was having so much fun writing I didn't want to stop.

So, what's my goal this year? I need to come close to duplicating my first NaNo. I know it can be done; I've done it before. If you're looking for me this month, I'll be the one over there in the corner madly typing away at the keyboard.

If you've decided to participate in NaNoWriMo and would like to share your experience, I'm "dbw" on the NaNo site. I don't participate in the forums and I don't generally go to local write-ins, but I do try to post my word count. Just don't expect the site to be useable for the first day or so. It's kind of like most fitness centers the first couple of weeks of January—packed with people with good intentions who stop going after they realize how much hard work it is. After the first couple of days, the NaNo site generally settles down.

Good luck, all you NaNo-ers out there! Keep us updated on your progress.

My External Editor is a Real Drag

Current Project:Status: Inching forward

I’ve decided my main problem in writing is not my Internal Editor; it’s my External Editor. One of my critique partners pointed out last night that I was a technical editor for over four years. ‘Editor’ was my role and my mindset. No wonder I have trouble turning that off and finishing the damned book! (And no wonder I was driving my poor critique partners crazy with line edits!)

That’s why it took me three years to write my first First Draft. I’d learn a new piece of the craft puzzle, then go back and fix what I’d already written—in other words, EDIT. That’s also why trying to write a Textnovel and doing Nano were so good for me. Writing a First Draft at breakneck speed emphasizes to my subconscious that I am a WRITER, not an editor.

Speed sets my creative, big-picture right brain free. Revisions are the place for my dominant, analytical left-brain (affectionately known as the Big E.) to come out of the closet and do its editing thing.

Now that I know this about myself, I’m learning to keep my editor in check and stay focused on my goal of writing first drafts all the way through to the Happily Ever After. I make notes of the things I notice in passing, which helps to quiet the Big E.

If you have a Big E. attached to your identity like I do, remember that any way you can trick her into going against her nature and embracing the Stillness like this swallow (Have you noticed swallows seem to fly constantly?) is a good thing.

All's fair in love and writing!

NaNo Day Twenty-Something, "Motivate Me!"

Current Project: NaNoWriMo 2009
Status: 13,258 words

Don't panic! That isn't me asking for your help (although, now that you mention it...wait, what?). Ahem, as I was saying, that's not me asking for your help. Oh, no. That's the sound of the characters in my head yelling at me.

In the past few days my characters have turned into whiny method actors, nitpicking every scene. Now it's, "What's my motivation here?", and "My character wouldn't do that!" I mean, really, you get boxed in a corner and throw in one lousy exploding llama* and it's all, "Now you're just making stuff up!".

You think they'd be grateful for their shot at starring in a novel. But are they? Nope, not them. I can hear them whispering in the back of my head. Occasionally a word or phrase will be clear: "...want script approval...too much coincidence...go on strike..." It's a nasty business.

*sigh*

I'll admit I've struggled with a couple of problem areas. The first is having too many things happen by coincidence. I don't want to write one of those books. You know the kind of book I'm talking about, where things happen just when they need to. Not as a natural consequence of a character's actions, but just because, well, the author needed something to happen and, hey, coincidences occur all the time, don't they? Not in my book, they won't! Unfortunately, that's easier said than done. It's so alluring, you know? When you've written yourself into a corner and there's an easy way out--why not take it? I now understand that temptation.

The second area I've struggled with is, yes, character motivation--the smaller, scene by scene motivations, not the big, this is my character's inner conflict motivation stuff. I mean, I tried to get my heroine to voluntarily walk through the interdimensional portal to an unknown fate, I really did. I told her her father was probably trapped on the other side somewhere. She didn't buy it. Said she was too smart to just assume stuff like that without a lot more proof and some hint of what she'd face--oh, and a means of, you know, returning! Fine, I said, I'll just have the damn device overload while you're fiddling with it and toss you across the portal (if you won't go voluntarily...). We bickered back and forth about the difference between an inciting incident and one huge coincidence (and somewhere in there is where the llama exploded). It wasn't pretty.

Come to think of it, maybe it's just one problem--too much coincidence!

We've come to a tentative agreement, my characters and I. I've promised to examine the motivation I give them in every scene and they've promised to stop yelling at me, at least until we get to revision. However, they've made it clear that if I throw in one more exploding llama* they won't be responsible for their actions.

How about you? Do you ever find yourself tempted to let something happen by coincidence in your plot? How do you resist?






*No llamas were exploded in the process of writing this post.

NaNo Day 9, Goals and Motivation Revisited

Current Project: NaNoWriMo 2009
Status: 7816 / 50,000 words

I've been blogging daily about my NaNoWriMo experience in my personal blog. Yesterday's post (NaNo Day 8, On Which I Hatch A Cunning Plan) was about trying to figure out why, at 7427 words, I suddenly experienced the dreaded "now what?" syndrome. While the post was meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, the topic was serious. (And I wasn't lying about the directed dreaming--I really did that.)

You see, I'd been chugging along writing scenes, getting to know my characters beyond descriptions on a worksheet, thinking we were all having fun, when wham! I came to a wall. A blank wall, at that. What the heck was wrong? I'd worked on plot (boy, had I worked on plot!). So why couldn't I figure out what came next?

Over the course of the day--spent mostly away from the computer--I came to realize that while my characters had strong personalities, their goals were weak and their motivations, tepid. I'd made the fatal mistake of confusing the huge world building of the story (i.e. the setting/framework for the story) with the, actual, you know, story of the story. Confused? Yeah, me too.

The "world" of my story is huge. It's set in the "multiverse" (an infinite number of alternate universes) -- and you can't get much bigger than that. But the story itself, I think, needs to be more intimate, at least, the story that I want to tell does. The problem is, I made it too small. Small enough to be resolved in a chapter, maybe two chapters if I dragged things out. Thus, the wall I hit.

Part of the problem is my inexperience. I know that I'm still learning and until I actually complete a book, I'll continue to grope my way along. I understand that, tough as it is for me to admit ("I've been voraciously reading books all my life. You'd think I'd just know how to put one together!"). But another part of the problem is my personality. I dislike conflict in real life and I go out of my way to avoid it when possible. I like the characters I've created and I've discovered a blind spot I didn't know I had. I have a tough time making their lives difficult. Who knew?

My advice to myself? Get over it!

What I did on NaNo Day 9 was go back to the character drawing board and really examine character goals and motivation. I'm not quite done with that. I'd say I've raised the motivation temperature from tepid to warm and put a little pudding into the jello of their goals (ew! I really need to come up with a better visual for that!). Still, it was a realization worth having and changes worth making.

What about you? Do you (or did you) ever find yourself making things too easy on your characters? How did you get over it/solve that problem? A newbie (really!) wants to know.

Saturday Check in

Hey all! How did your week go? Did you accomplish what you wanted? More? Less?

I didn't write near as much as I wanted, about 4000 words. I was hoping for five times that. Hopefully this next week will work out better. But Wavy will be proud of me. I read three books this week! I had two to read for final edits and one was an EPPIE entry. That's why I didn't get as much writing done this week. Plus buzzing over the mountain for the meeting. It always takes away from my writing time, but it refuels and re-ignites my writing flame when I get back.

Only one more week until NaNo. How many of you are participating?