One of the hardest things about the end of Nano is finding personal motivation to keep going in December. Never mind January. Here it is December 15th, and I’ve barely touched my novel since November 30th, only adding a couple thousand words to what I already had. This is a ridiculous state of affairs, and I have no decent excuse.
December is busy, for sure. But it’s no different, really, than any other month of the year (except for maybe January, which is dead dead dead). December brings cookie baking and holiday-card writing, and tree-decorating and shopping. And parties. But that’s really no excuse. How can I not manage to find a few minutes in every day to write? Even if it’s a few hundred words, it’s something.
It isn’t about the time, that’s why. It’s about the motivation. Somehow, not having a deadline hanging over me makes it easier to procrastinate. And that’s just ridiculous. Do I never want this story to hit print? Isn’t that why I’m writing, to begin with, so others can read it? How can they read it if it hasn’t been written? I always say, “if I had an office” or “if I wasn’t so busy doing _________” but those are just convenient excuses for not getting the job done. It is my problem, and I need to fix it.
How to fix it is the big question. I know of no magic potion or device to employ. I’m going to have to do this for myself, by myself, somehow.
There are less than two days of NaNoWriMo left for 2009. I will finish above 50K this year, as I always have. The story will not be finished at a measly 50,000 words, which is also per usual. Most of my stories worth reading are around 90K.
This one should be close to that when it is finished. The hard part is actually finishing once I don’t have the hammer of Nano hanging over me. There are still huge gaps in the story, since I was having trouble filling in some of them, and I jumped ahead to the ending. The cool thing about writing the ending first is that now I know what I need to do in the middle to make all the ends match. The uncool thing about writing the ending is that that is the most exciting part of the story, and to write it means that that exciting part of my writing is done, and I don’t get to draw on that excitement to write the middle.
My goal is to keep working, spending two or three nights a week writing until my rough draft is done, hopefully by the end of December. Then I will figuratively “put it away” and let it steep for a month, and begin editing in February. With any luck at all, Without a Net will publish around September, 2010.
I hope all of my friends and buddies have done their very best this month to reach the goal, which was 50,000 in 30 days. No one said it had to be good, no one said it had to be finished, no one said it had to be publish-worthy. The goal is to get that story out and onto paper/computer screen. I applaud all successes, and all attempted failures. For those that gave up? Well, I have harsher words, but I won’t share them here. I believe everyone has a story in them, they just need permission to get them out. And that’s what NaNoWriMo does for me.
I like hanging out on the forums over at the NaNoWriMo website, but I sure don’t like all the whining. The whines I’ve heard/read just today:
1. I lost my file when my computer crashed, lost 5K words.
2. I’m never going to make my word count!
3. I’m so busy, I can’t ever do this.
4. Now that I’m doing Nano, I have no social life, I miss my friends.
5. My plot sucks and I can’t fix it.
6. I can’t move forward, because I have to go back and fix what I messed up.
I realize, complainers are louder than others, and that may account for all the whiny posts I keep seeing. But get a grip, people. It’s supposed to be FUN, first of all, and there is a method to doing Nano, if you’d only bother to read about it before you start the month. If you “can’t do it” then why did you sign up? If you are too busy with your social life or whatever, then why did you sign up? And for goodness sakes, it’s not called “write the perfect novel month,” the goal is a rough draft. As in, the first run at it. No one ever writes a best-seller on the first draft.
As for that not having time to do it? I never accept that as an excuse. Ever. I work full time, I homeschool my kids, help my husband run his business, write professionally in several blogs, and also have a social life that doesn’t involve writing. Yet, I still manage to write a 50K or better MS every November for NaNoWriMo. No one starves to death, everyone has clean clothes, I still go to coffee with my non-writing friends every other week, work 50+ hours a week, etc. And, I write. I’m no better or worse a writer than any other Nanoer, I just don’t ever tell myself I can’t do it, and I never lament what I’m missing out on by doing this every year. If I start to do that, then it’s time for me to stop taking the challenge.
Whining is not attractive, nor is it productive. If you have enough energy to whine, then you have enough energy to write, so get to it!
1. Believing you will fail from the get-go.
2. Procrastination that lasts more than a week, putting you too far behind to catch up.
3. Being a perfectionist; remember, this is supposed to be a rough draft.
4. Re-reading more than a few paragraphs (see number 3).
5. Editing instead of writing new material.
NaNoWriMo starts in less than a month. Less than three weeks! On October 1st, the folks at the site took everything down, archived all old forums, and then started out clean and fresh. Always a good thing. Now that the site is all clean and shiny and new, I’ve been over there dipping my toes into several forums, just to see what is going on.
And I find…lots and lots of very young people. Maybe it’s because I’m pushing 50 now that I look at all those repeated posts about “how am I going to write and still get my homework done” and “my parents won’t leave me alone to write” and “I get no privacy to write” and just think they are all whining little babies.
But they are, almost literally, babies. This is new to them. When I was their age, I was writing in spiral notebooks with pencils or sometimes pens. My parents didn’t care one way or the other, we were a family that had plenty of activities, had dinner together every night, but after that, after dishes were done, our time was our own. I could be found sprawled on my bed with a notebook, scribbling away. In the summer, I might be doing it outside, laying on a blanket under the shade of our big maple tree. I still had chores to do, and homework, of course, and I had a part-time job. So I suppose I wasn’t writing all that much, and Nano is a whole universe different than the scribbles in a notebook I did.
That isn’t to say that I think they can’t do Nano. On the contrary. This is one of the only times in their life they will not be burdened with full-time work, or responsibility for anyone but themselves. They haven’t yet had to juggle work with child rearing and home maintenance and laundry and meal preparation and bill paying and grass cutting and all those other things that adults have to do. Now is the time when they should be getting those creative juices trained to flow; later when other things must encroach on their lives, they will need that experience, that desire, to keep them going.
I know, even for me, it was very hard to write in those years when I had small children and a stressful marriage and plenty of real-life things that kept my creativity locked away. Now that I’m older, and my kids are older (although I still have a grade schooler and a teen at home), I do have more freedom to write. They can care for themselves enough that I don’t have to be watching their every move, and they can help with household chores. This makes a huge difference in my free time, and is equally good for them, I know. They are learning independence and self-reliance, and mommy is getting some good writing in.
But still, if I knew then what I know now, I would tell all these young’uns who are worrying about how they are going to do it to stop whining and just do it. There will never be another time in their lives when they will have this freedom, as limited as it seems. And they will be building good work habits and learning how to fit everything into busy lives so that they don’t lose their ability and desire to write.
Methinks, really, he can do better. Better lighting. More shelves. More books.
And a big comfy chair.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/03/neil-gaimans-library.html
One of the reasons I’ve not spent a lot of time outlining in the past is that it just doesn’t seem to work for me. Too much outlining does one of two things: it either makes me feel like I’m totally boxed in with what I outlined, or the outline is so detailed that it sucks the life out of my interest in writing the story in the end.
And I think that’s what’s happened as I’ve spent nine weeks outlining my story in my Two Year Novel class. I have no desire whatsoever to write the story now. The outline sucked all the fun out of it.
I have always felt I wrote better as a “seat of the pants” writer. I start with a character(s) and a vague idea of an ending or how I want it to go, and start writing. I let the characters develop themselves as they go along, let them tell the story through my fingers. This has worked very well for my last three published novels, and also for the one I am currently editing. And I know it will work for the Nano novel I’m writing this year.
What’s frustrating is that I know this is a good story, and it deserves to be written. I could have skipped this part of the class and just picked up later when the outlining was over, but I wanted to give it a fair chance, try it and then make a decision about outlining.
At least now I know the answer; outlining killed the novelist, and I will stay away from outlining in the future.
As for A Cabin in the Woods, I will continue to work on it, struggling the story out for the class as I’ve pledged to do. I just wish it was a lot more exciting in my mind.
A week ago I had a couple friends over for some geeky stuff. One of those friends is pretty handy with Wordpress (that’s the engine that runs my blog), and php in general, and he was going to help me re-route my blog to a new location.
That was the idea, anyway.
What happened was I mostly lost my blog. The good part of this is that I got to install all the latest updates and get a new shiny template. Then I had to cut and paste almost two years worth of entries from a data file I managed to extract from the lost blog.
So, if you read through back posts and find something out of whack, that’s why. I lost all formatting, and most of them, I just didn’t put the formatting back in. It took me about 10 hours to get the whole thing reconstituted, without returning all the formatting. I did put the formatting back in for posts that are less than four months old, because I figure some people will try to read back that far.
Now, back to business. I’m still plugging away on my two year novel class. I really struggled with the outlining portion of the class, which, thankfully, is over. Now we get to start writing, which makes me happy.
And Nano starts in just over two months. I’m looking forward to that, I seem to be way more motivated in November than I do most of the rest of the year. I usually write more (and better) than I am producing right now, but I think much of my energy is getting sucked up by problems at work. We should be settled in a few weeks, and that may help me get back to a more normal writing routine. Right now, I come home and just want to be left alone, and I shower, eat, and turn into a vegetable for a couple of hours, then go to bed. I’ll be glad when things settle down.
So, that’s it. Hopefully, you like the new look of the blog.
As I continue to navigate the waters of NaNoWriMo, and the Two Year Novel class, and my own Nano-based online writing group, I keep wishing for the death of the vampire genre.
Everyone does it. Primarily, younger writers seem to be enamored of the vampire thing (or vampyre, if you’re being artsy about it), but there are older writers doing it too. I understand the appeal, honestly, but really. How many books about vampires can there be before the whole vampire thing finally goes up in a puff of smoke resulting from its own spontaneous combustion?
Even Neil Gaiman, whose dark writing includes some vampiric characters on occasion, has come out in an interview or two stating his preference for fewer vampire stories:
(And note that I’m not saying there’s anything bad about vampires, quite the opposite. Just that in a world in which a dozen people immediately write to me on Twitter to point out that I’ve got it wrong, as they are all writing Vampire stories, in which Vampires are now everywhere, is a world in which High Vampire Season is coming to an end). You shouldn’t be glutted with vampires: they should be a spice, not a food group.
And I have to agree. I realize that as a non-fan of the fantasy genre, I am probably not qualified to say one thing or another about vampires. But in my mind, there are too many of them, too many stories with them, just too too too much. Anyone have an original idea or two?
Of course, what feeds the market are the readers who buy the stories. I have never bought one or read one, and probably never will. My daughter has read the first three books in the Twilight series, but cannot force herself through the fourth one. She is already over it, after only three books. I have to think she’s not necessarily alone, and at some point, all of these vampire stories will have no one to read them.
At least, that’s my thought. It’s time for this genre to see its sunset, in my opinion. Strong words, I know, to the lover of a vampire story.
A writer friend of mine has had some good luck with getting her stuff published on Associated Content. They pay per click on your stories/articles, if they are accepted. I wrote one based on a subject they wanted (the best wedding advice you ever received) and it was published within a couple of days.
So, emboldened by this, I will be trying to produce a few more things to go up there. I don’t expect to make a lot of money doing it, but it should help get my name out there. While I primarily think of myself as a novel writer, there is great value in short article writing at this point, especially online. I already do it on my blog, with opinion-based articles I write about my life and my kids. I also write for a pretty well-known tech blog, at a rate of three or four articles a week. Some of them are newsy, but many of them are opinion. I earn a small amount every month for those, not enough to really make a difference, but enough for some luxuries every now and then.
Turns out, I produce a lot more small pieces (non-fiction articles) than I produce with novels. Yes, I have three novels in print and one seriously waiting for me to fix it, but those are long-term projects and bring in no money at all, to speak of. So maybe a few more articles would be the best thing to do at this point. At least I’m earning something on those pieces!
