‘Fess Up Friday: Week Four

Well, it’s over for me. I finished National Novel Writing Month this morning with 50,362 words. Whew. And YAY!

Week four was quite the rollercoaster. As I mentioned, I started the week ahead by two days’ worth of word count. I did a little bit of writing on both Tuesday and Wednesday, but because of the holiday and company arriving, I didn’t get in more than 300 words at either session. Which meant I needed to write about 1,000 words on Thursday, or Thanksgiving Day to us in the States.

Do I even need to tell you how much that didn’t happen? I’m not sure any power under the sun could have actually gotten me out of the craziness that was hosting 12 people for Thanksgiving dinner and made me sit at the computer and write. My day in the kitchen started at seven in the morning and wrapped up around five. In between the cooking, there was visiting and eating and watching the most adorable 20 month old dance around our living room. In short, it was an excellent holiday and so I didn’t feel too bad about falling behind on my word count.

But fall behind I did and I spent Friday and Saturday playing catch up with word count. By Friday night I was just ready to be done with the draft and so I buckled down on Saturday morning and again in the evening, determined to finish by the end of the weekend. In all my writing time this month, I think that’s when my internal editor turned off completely. And I mean completely. Not only would I type a sentence that would ordinarily make me cringe and completely ignore it, I pretty much stopped using the delete key all together, which led to some very questionable spelling and punctuation. Ah well, I’m not sure my last scene will survive the revision process, so I’m okay with leaving it as the mess it is.

It’s too soon for me to really reflect on this NaNoWriMo as a whole, so instead I’m going to do a celebratory chair dance  (whoop whoop! raise the roof!) and wish all my fellow NaNoWriMo participants the best of luck in the next three days. I hope you meet the goals you set out to accomplish and I hope you learned something about your writing process along the way.

Cheers!

Thanksgiving Memeage: The “BBC” Book List

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:

Hurdle #1: Writing on Vacation

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?

Fess Up Friday: Week Three

I was torn about which cliche to use to open today’s ‘fess up: “there’s a light at the end of the tunnel” or “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” Either could apply.

Word count as of this morning: 32,717.

So this was week three of NaNoWriMo. In week two, I was drinking from a giant bowl of suck.  In week three, I’m so busy just trying to keep my head above water that I don’t even care that I’m drinking from a giant bowl of suck. I just want to reach the bottom of the bowl. My mantra this week has been (and pardon the language) “Fuck it, I’ll deal with it in revision.” It’s a good mantra. I highly recommend it. It will serve me well going into week four.

Chris Baty refers to week four as the zero hour, the sink or swim, the do or die. And what a week. Thanksgiving happens smack dab in the middle of. Not to mention all the preparation for Thanksgiving and for having company and for getting a bed delivered…

But this is good. Because if there’s one thing all of us aspiring-to-be-published writers should take away from National Novel Writing Month is the discipline to keep writing. Even when things get busy. Even when it seems like the only way you’ll add any words to your manuscript will be to type them with one hand on your smart phone while waiting in the grocery check out line. The 50,000 word count is great. The first draft is nice to have (especially for freaks like me that prefer revision to drafting). But I think the real winners of NaNoWriMo are the ones that get up on December 1 and do it all over again.

Happy writing!

Above the Frey

So, in case you missed the news this weekend, James Frey has himself a fiction factory. A young adult fiction factory at that. The original article that exposed Full Fathom Five, the powerhouse behind I Am Number Four, is here. Read the article and the crimes of James Frey speak for themselves. There is a lot to say about all this, about Frey’s questionable ethics, about the exploitation of writers, and about how MFA programs turn their students out into the real world with very few skills for surviving the business side of it.

A number of writers have written thoughtful and interesting responses to this, so I’m going to direct you to their words rather than add my own.  Maureen Johnson, Nova Ren Suma, and John Scalzi are just a few of the published writers tackling the problematic aspects of Full Fathom Five’s contracts.

READ THESE POSTS.

I repeat, read these posts. This is especially important if you are a fledgling writer, if you are unagented, or if your first response to reading about about a guy that will give you $250 for a completed novel is “where do I sign up?”

I also want to add my voice to the chorus of other former MFAians that left their programs completely unprepared for the business of writing. The information I managed to gleam about submitting to lit mags and selling novels came mostly from other students as we all tried to figure it out on our own. My adviser was good about sharing her experiences and frustrations with publishing her novel, but otherwise, myself and my peers received no formal preparation. I had no idea what a query letter even was until three years ago. Shameful, isn’t it?

Anyhow, there’s one more lesson to be learned from all this and that is: There is a certain age beyond which flipping off the camera no longer makes you look funny, or wryly ironic, or anything other than like an asshat. I believe that age is 22, though I’ve known teenagers that wouldn’t be caught dead doing this. I cannot imagine what goes through any author’s mind (never mind an author accused by Oprah of conning his audience) that he would think it’s a good idea to flip the bird as a professional photographer snaps his picture.

So. Don’t write for James Frey. Read the fine print in collaboration contracts. And when someone raises a camera to their face and tells you to smile, before you flip them the bird ask yourself, is this really what I want showing up in New York Magazine?

Fess Up Friday: Week Two

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.

False Message of Lethargy

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?

 

‘Fess Up Friday: Surprises

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!

The Anti Anti-NaNoWriMo Rant

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.

Well, eff you, Ms. Miller.

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 asshats 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.