What I learned from Nanowrimo2014.

- There is magic in doing.

The way I was able to finish was to start and keep going. I had days and times where I didn't feel like writing, but just made myself keep typing and I think this taught me a lot about the process of writing and being a writer.

- If you just keep writing, eventually you'll get to the stuff you like.

- very little is as bad as you remember it.

- It all works itself out in the revisions.

It's a process as well as a mindset.

Setting time limits leads to better productivity than 'just writing'.

Nano 14, Day 5 thoughts

Consistancy breeds mastery...or whatever.

So, last we spoke I was semi-dreading the start of Nano14.
Wondering how I was going to manage to write 1,667 words a day.
Worrying
Worrying
Worrying.

Well, it seems I over-estimated the time it would take to write and now, after 4 days of writing, I'm sitting at the quarter way point, twelve thousand five hundred words in. Twelve THOUSAND words in 4 days!!!!

Leap

I am afraid but I have purpose.
 Like hundreds of thousands around the world, on November 1, I am going to start the attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel.
It's a big deal for me, especially since I tend not to write a lot every day.
However, and this is what drives me; the winners get two copies of their book printed in paperback for free.
So, the deal is basically, if I complete the 50k mark for my book, then revise it, in a year I will be holding a copy of my book.

The only thing holding me back is the actual writing.
Fifty thousand words in and of itself is a daunting task. Any writer will tell you that it's a big chunk of writing. To try to do it within a month is even more daunting.

Yet, it gets done all the time.
thousands complete the challenge every year.
Many working writers regularly set 2,000 words a day as a reasonable daily goal.
Some even complete the NanO Century, which is 100,000 words in a month or 3,334 words a day.
Looking at that number makes 1,700 a day seem easy.

Like most things, it's attacking it day by day that will make it happen.
The thing is that we need to get up, get at it and see how it takes to get 1700 words out.
Given what I've read, at a steady pace, 1700 words takes about 2 and a halfr hours to write.
THe way I want to split it is one and a half hours in the morning and an hour at night.
Anything else is, as they say, gravy.
However, the hour and a half in the morning doesn't come cheap. Prime writing time is from five-thirty to seven, when the rest of the house wakes.
All we need to do is make it work.
And to make it work, we need to sacrifice everything past 9 that is unessential.
Cut away the fluff and reap the rewards of getting up early and getting writing.

Bump goes the life.

Today I am a failure.

Well, maybe not.

However, the Internal Editor's working overtime today and boy is he pissed.

Maybe a lot of that is because of the fact that I missed a couple days of posting, violating my ROW80 goal. However, that was because I was visiting my in laws and my Mom for Canadian Thanksgiving... I was trying to keep up with the writing but there were more interesting things to do on the weekend.

On the up side, great drive in and back, great chance to talk with my son, who is a brand new teenager. So, that's always great to be able to do.

I think this is important to writing, to get away from it and actually have days off from the routine and have things to say when you return.

All work has breaks and as I've been trying to emphasize, we need to look at writing like a job, with quitting times as well as responsibilities . Just as you work 9 to 5 or whatever, your writing needs boundaries as well.

Making it part of your every day life means knowing when to walk away from it. Hemingway talked about leaving when you knew the next sentence you would write, so that you had an entry point into the next day's writing.

 Lawrence Block went a bit farther and often rewrote the last half-page of whatever he was working on as warm-up every morning, before moving onto the day's writing.

Regardless of how you are going to start each day, it's important to know when to leave. Whether or not you can see a sentence into the future of your story or the entire next chapter, you need to plan your exit.

Mistaking motion for Movement.

One of the things we need to train ourselves to do is write freely while at the same time know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

We need to remember that there needs to be a certain direction to the flow of a story.

Remember to think before you write.

The Time you Make is the Time You Take.

One of the biggest things I've heard from writers just starting out is "Where do I find the time to write?"

You don't.

You MAKE it, just like you make time to poop, shower, eat, dress and watch Reality TV.

Speaking of which, if you watch reality TV,  but want o be a Writer....then two things...
1)Shame on you.
2)Kiss it good bye....
No more Honey Boo Boo, but hello 55 minutes of writing time.


The thing I had to do...and trust me, this was hard, because Mike loves him some sleep....I get up an hour early......Which also means I go to bed earlier as well.....
This wasn't so hard to do as I'd just been staying either watching YouTube videos of dreck or trying to write, forgetting that writing while tired never got me anywhere.

So, what I've tried to do is get into good habits at night time and accept that I won't be creating quality work after a certain time, so there's no point in trying.

Has it worked?
Yes and no, but I accept that it's a work in progress and I'm not going to give up on at least trying to make it part of my writing practice.

Decisions Decisions

How to decide where to go in the story.

Right now, I'm deciding whether or not to kill off a  main character at the end of Act 1.
Unlike a lot of MC killings, this one won't change the bulk of the book, I think.
He was going to be out of the picture for 75% of the book anyway.
It just changes the potential ending.
The last scene being Trevor and Wade doing a joint signing, rather bthan Trevor doing it by himself
What's the upside to this? Anyway just write the thing and see where it goes.
There is no need to get all bent into whatever shape by having to decide right at this moment and deciding something that doesn't actually happen until 10 chapters or so into the book.

I think that this not an uncommon problem, though.
Authors must have to make the decision to kill off beloved characters all the time.
Often, the decision comes about in second draft or so where you see that the action just benefits from the death of a character or that there really isn't any room for them past a certain point.
However, when you've spend an awful long time crafting their personality, it can be a bit of a tug on your heartstrings to type out the words that spell their demise.
However, you have to do it. If you are going to be honest to life, you will have to face and write about death.

In my book, the person dying is at the end of a pretty full, long life.
How writers summon the courage to write about the death of a child is beyond me.
Yet they do.
And one day, I'm sure, in my writing I will have to tackle that most taboo of acts.
 I think the most honest thing you can do as a writer is to create characters that are multi-faceted and realistic and people that are recognizable as people.
Then don't be afraid to kill them, because fear of killing off characters that you like is a sign that you don't trust your instincts or skill as a writer.
It's as if you are saying "I don't know if I'll ever be able to create a character like this again."
And you will. In fact, by killing off characters you give yourself permission to experiment with characterization, by saying "If this doesn't work out, I'm not stuck with this person or situation"
In fact, and I just thought of this.....
Take a character you like...and kill them.
Take a section of whatever you are working on, a book, short story, whatever.
Kill one of the characters.
See how it affects the world around them.
You don't have to include this in your story, unless you want to or think that it's a direction you wish to continue in.
It's just a writing exercise in having characters react to a death.
Be brave.
Good writing is courageous and takes chances, in the belief that the writer will learn from the experience and strengthen as a writer.


The point is to get something down and not worry about things.

Sixty Six to Success:

Sixty Six to Success:

One of the things that I was taught was that it takes time to create a habit.
The research varies and some say it takes 21 daysm 28 days, even up to 100 days to form
a habit.
However, one of the most common theories puts the timeline at about 66 days.
Two months and a week.
Which suits me and my current writing regime, as right now I'm participating in ROW80, an eighty day stint of writing practices and a chunk of time in which Writers vow to complete a series of tasks.

My thing was to write a blog entry every day for 80 days. So far, so good.

One of the biggest issues has been finding the right time of day to do my writing.
I've tried to follow the idea of getting up earlier. Some people suggest at least an hour earlier.
Robin Sharma even suggests getting up at 5am, although that's a bit extreme for me right at the moment.

If I was  a night-owl, I could write when the rest of the house is in bed.

Whenever you feel the most comfortable writing is up to you.
The important thing is to find a time that works and try to work within that time consistantly.
If you have to let the rest of the household know to give you your space, then so be it.

What helps is letting them know that you are taking your writing seriously.
You  become partners in creating the writing habit.
However, having a definite time makes me at least commit to writing during that time.
Loose or vague goals or guidelines don't lend themselves to productivity, in my experience.
However, what does work is what Merlin Mann calls "Courageous blocking" setting aside a distince set of time and sticking to it.
He suggests that anything less than 15 minutes is a waste, as it takes you that long to get into your writing.
I think we talked about this before but chunking your tasks together tends to create those blocks of time where you can just concentrate on the writing and not the laundry (Although a laundry cycle is a good block of time to write for without a break (our washer runs about 25 minutes per load).

However long you write for or however long you write for, try to make it a constant...
That is the first step towards seeing yourself as a Writer.

Round Four Goals!!!!!!

This week's the start of  a new round (Numbah foah!!!!) of  ROW80, or Round of Writing (Needs that announcer echo thing happening as you say it....ROOOOUNNNND offfffffffffff WRITINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG..ng ng ngngng..."

80 days to get your write on, in whatever way you want.

NaNoWriMo's also looming, so there's that as well...

My goal and I say this basically to publi-shame myself into doing it is this:

One blog entry about writing every day for 80 days.... So, basically from now until just after Christmas, if my calculationes are correct-amundo...

Ok, and to not weasel-ass my way out of this by typing "There, I wrote, Done" and thinking that's a blog entry...cause it AIN'T......I'll add this...Minimum 100 words.. Mighht be more might not some days, but 100 words every day.

Caveat lector, though...Odds are that a fair chunk of the November ones will be kvetching about NaNo...

Just so you know....

OK, well, let me go write-ify up something and I'll post it

The Joy of Plotting or "There's Gotta Be a Pony in There Somewhere."

I think the greatest benefit of plotting out a story before you write is the idea that you'll know where you're going when you get to the end.

As you all know, I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo 2014 and the novel I'm going to attempt to get 50,000 words into is based on a few ideas I've had and a couple themes I want to explore.
As well, it's a case of living vicariously through the main character a bit, as well as through a couple of the other characters.

The chief reason I'm plotting this novel out ahead of time is the fact that I have a schedule of roughly 1700 words a day to pump out and there's no way, I think, that I'd be able to just "go" at that pace without knowing beforehand where I am headed every day, in terms of developing the story.

So, I've gone onto Scrivener and used the 'corkboard' to plot out 55 chapters.

The outline's pretty sketchy so far, only a sentence or two describing the overall action in those chapters.

However, it's a road-map.

I know how the story starts, how it proceeds, the plot-points and complications that confront the 'hero' and how he resolves them.

If I shoot for a thousand words a chapter, I'll be able to easily top the 50k word goal by November 30.

And, if I somehow manage to complete 2 chapters worth of rough draft a day, I'll actually either hit my goal early or hit 60k words in November (Granted this is a long shot...10,000 extra words is a bit much to ask for, especially while trying to have a life as well.)

At the beginning of drafting my outline, I was lost and a bit overwhelmed because of inexperience.

Traditionally, I'd be a 'pantser' in writing my shorter fiction and tended to let the 'story lead it to it."
However, in a time constraint like NaNo, I can't afford to dead-end a storyline 20k words into it; even wasting a day's writing time can be fatal to my attempt.

So, I made myself learn to plot.
I kind of think of it like learning to code, if you're a programmer, because they are both basic skills that help you understand the underlying structure.

I've had discussions where I was told that over-plotting killed the spontaneity of the novel and made it formulaic... I respond that Frank Lloyd Wright probably knew where his toilets were supposed to go before he started building his houses.
'Framing' a story properly frees you to be innovative....if you know how scenes connect, you can play around with how those scenes play out...

It also saves you heart-ache if you know that Character A will do X in chapter 40, so you can't have him do X in chapter 20 or that he suddenly can't do X because you made him do Y 50 pages earlier, which made doing X impossible, which is sucky if X was going to be the plot twist you needed to resolve Act 2 and set up for the ending.

Ultimately, I think the best argument for plotting is that it gets you to the point that you need to get to in order to finish your novel, what I call Draft 1.0, a complete workable draft from which you can do revisions and change the plot-points that seem clunky and the scenes that seem superfluous suddenly.
Plotting doesn't mean that you etch your ideas in stone, it merely means that you pencil them in, make a draft and then move onto revisions, which is where the work really starts.

Why 'False Attachment' will kill your writing.

I'm finishing a novel. Actually, I'm working on two right now... One is my NaNoWriMo novel that I'm plotting and doing all that crazy fun prep stuff for. A lot of the ideas for that are coming fast, furious and often, being dumped just as fast.

The other novel is the one I started in Sarah Sheard's class in the fall of 1996, so a lot of that has been kicking around for 2 decades now.

Actually, only about 6,000 words of it are from then. The other 8,000 or so I've put on it since re-starting my writing has been written in the last couple months.

Most of that, while I think is interesting and potentially useful, I have no issue with altering and cutting from the manuscript.

I'm a lot less willing to dump the early stuff simply because it's been around so long. It's become calcified and part of my past.

 "But, but...I wrote that in that cafe just off Baldwin, where that cute girl was and it was that summer and OH THE MEMORIES!!!"

Still doesn't make the draft any less shitty. And the fact of the matter is, it doesn't represent where I am right now in the novel and where I want to go. So, bit by bit, section by section, it's being eroded and replaced by a retcon of the first section.

The lesson here is never be afraid to put on your big boy or girl pants and kill your darlings, no matter how old they've gotten.

The Joy of Shitty Notebooks

       Years ago, back in the early 80s, I was seriously into Kerouac and Jim Morrison and Patti Smith and Lou Reed and a bunch of other "rebels' that appeal to the faux-anarchic tendencies of suburban white kids who really have no reason to rebel.

And the thing that I really loved finding out about was the publication some of their notebooks.

If you ask any writer who started writing before the advent of storeable data, you'll pretty much find that they wrote their ideas in notebooks, to work through an idea before committing to the work of typing it out.

With the 'greats'(famous writers) these notebooks were a look into the 'rough' work, the stuff that sometimes never made it into their polished drafts

Now, of course, everyone and their brother has a laptop or tablet and the drafts get put into memory somewhere somehow.

And it's shifted the way we write, I think. Instead of distinct drafts of work, we tend to 'over-write' our mistakes, highlighting the passages that don't quite work and then backspacing them into oblivion.

And I think we're losing something by doing that.

Which is why I love paper notebooks.

The cheaper the better.

Crane and moleskin and a host of other makers have lines of notebooks that are works of art and craft. leather binding surrounding rich cream-covered heavy paper...paper that cries out to be written on with a fine three-hundred dollar fountain pen...

But you can't bear to violate that kind of book with mere scribbling...mere "hunches"....

With dollar store notebooks, who cares?
They are designed to be disposable.
Hilroy makes an 80 page spiral notebook that is perfect for writing in and near back to school time, the local chain stores have them on for next to nothing, sometimes literally so... I picked up 50 this year for 5c each.

At that price, who cares if I write stuff that never goes anywhere or takes a while to get there?

But having the freedom to fail lets me try ideas and brainstorm and just follow something I think might work out.... And often it does, if sometimes not in the way I thought.

Heck, I've written stuff for one story, only to have an epiphany that it's perfect for another story.

The more we allow ourselves freedom to not have to write 'good' writing, the more chances we are willing to take.
The more chances we take, the more possibilities there are to create something that surprises us and surprises the reader.


   

I've been writing since I was a bout 14 or so, although I've been making stories up since I was a kid.

I guess I got 'permission' to be a Writer when my friend's dad said one day, after watching me spin a pretty convoluted tale out of a GI Joe, a picket fence and a rose bush, "Boy, you need to do something with that imagination of yours."

I've run hot and cold with my writing for years and and that's been a big regret because I've always thought I had something as a writer, if only I could muster the discipline and organization to work on it.

I know that sounds a tad egotistical, but isn't ego what you need to get ahead in most things?

This year has been the longest stretch that I've continued with writing. So far, it's been almost every day since the summer that some form of writing gets done.

NaNoWriMo's coming up and I'll write more about that as it happens.

Flying Pants

One of the discussion that I've been having over the last few days with one of my oldest friends has been about the nature of creativity.

I've known him since we in a High School play way back in 1982. Before going off onto different careers in the late 80s, we were in a band and an improv troupe together, wrote songs and skits and critiqued each of these with each other and various other people.

Danny is a novelist, as am I..... However, we've found that we have very different approaches to writing.

Danny's a classic "Pantser"; He loves getting an idea and figuring out where it goes by sitting down and writing, using his 'muse' as his GPS on the trip through the novel, listening to where it says to turn.

Frankly, I blame it on his parents: Classic ex-Hippies who were constantly inventing dinner on the fly at the last moment and who vacationed by opening a map, figuring out how far and back they could get on a couple hundred bucks of gas and randomly picking a destination within that area (I might be exaggerating a tad).

I grew up with Old School shirt and tie/Dress with pearls Conservatives who planned their vacations  and made reservations months ahead.

My Dad was also a Journalist and Ghost Writer/ "Rewrite Man" who wrote untold hundreds of articles and columns in his career, both under his byline and without one.

From him I learned the need to know where you are going in a piece of writing. You need to know what the elements of the writing are going to convey. And you need to deliver on your promise to the reader.

But I  also rebelled in my youth; I wrote poetry in one take, for Open Mic Nights,often finishing the poem on the fly with the spotlight heating up my face. I got up on an improv stage with the barest of suggestions and went down the rabbit hole of a skit with my team mates just to see where it went. 

I spit rhymes and dropped dimes and had the sickest rhythms every damn time...Ok, maybe not THAT...

Somewhere along the line though, Dad won out.

When I write now,I have no need to know what every single character is going  to say on every page for the next hundred pages, but I do know I really feel better if I know where the next few chapters are going, if only in a general way.

Why my Eng. Lit. degree hasn't made me a better writer.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was about 12 or so. I remember standing in my Grade 8 Drama, sorry Miss Jenkins..."Thee-ah-tah Ahts" class and being asked to create a character sketch and having the epiphany that "Hey, with acting or writing, I can pretend to be anything I want."

Fast forward twenty something years to me sitting outside the Continuing Education office at the University of Toronto and looking at the  brochure for a  program called "Pre-University", designed for people like me who were older (I was 34 at the time) who wanted to go to university but lacked the regular prerequisites.
Out of the four streams from which you could choose, I went with Pre-Literature, which, 13 years of part-time studies later, led to a degree in English Literature and Modern History.

Neither of which has made me a better writer. Ok, of fiction...I've certainly become pretty good at writing the shallow, sycophantic essays that pass for undergraduate scholarship these days.

I just never learned how to be a better fiction writer by reading Shakespeare, Austen or Dickens.

Most of the big I "Instruction" I had on writing was a delightful 10 week class taught in the 90s by Sarah Sheard.

The rest I learned by writing...and writing...and writing...

And reading WHILE I was writing something, which helped me because when I'm writing, I run into specific issues and reading the work of authors I admire gives me an insight into how THEY deal with the problems I have, like pacing and character revelation and building up suspense in a story.

If I were ever to, in another life, become an English Lit. Prof., I would teach the classics like a Writer, rather than a scholar. I would point out HOW Austen paces her novel and how we get to know the characters.

I think it would make for a better class and something the students would retain longer.

When I heard about ROW80 as an alternative to NaNo, I was liking it more and more. No hard deadline (50,000 words in 30 days) 267% more time to do the challenge (80 days instead of 30).


However, and this was the best part for me, I get to choose my own goal.

 Of course, the point of making this useful is to make the goal something that actually achieves something. Years ago, I had a goal of writing everyday, something my writing coach at the time told me to do. I did, but often the entry would be " There. I wrote today. Goodbye"

Something like " Write 1,000 words  every day." or "Write for 30 minutes every day for a month." will do more to get and keep me on track than a vague goal.

So far, I've been pretty good. I've written, if not every day, most days, to the point where I definitely feel my habit muscles building.

And, if I'm not writing text, I'm spending time working on the outline or fleshing out characters or concepts of the novel(s)

This is a good thing, I know.