I decided to jump on the NaNo train. Maybe I'll do better this time around than I have the past several years... I think I need to try it for my mental health, anyway.

Sitting at 1,119/50,000 right now. A drop in the bucket.

So, I spent most of October writing, and I liked what I was coming out with. I hit a good pattern of write, revise, write, edit, and I was happy. And when November hit, I waffled. I thought, yay, I am all warmed up and ready to launch into a new giant project!

And then I thought, oh no, what is going to happen to what I'm working on, and what is going to happen to my quality level if I drop the revise and edit part out of my work? Will I still be content with what I'm producing? Will I go off on tangents that I should have seen were wrong, if I'd let the work breathe a bit between stints?

Then I got the first encouragement letter from Chris Baty, and I decided that maybe, this year, my goals don't intersect with NaNoWriMo. That whole speech about the geodes that you cut open to see if you have something pretty or if you have crap, and you only know if you go for it? Uh, yeah... being able to say that I persevered to write 50k of crap is not going to make me proud right now. So I decided, no. It wasn't going to make me happy, it wasn't going to produce anything I would be proud of, and it was going to cause me a lot of undue stress.

So far I've kept November rolling like October, and I've been writing either every day or every other day. And yeah, it has (so far) all been stuff for Novitas, which doesn't belong to me and I can't publish anywhere but the internet. But I am happy with it, and I can feel the difference in my lifestyle now that I'm writing regularly again. I wake up with words on the brain. I write during breaks at work. I think about it on my commute. I steal emotions from music and bend them into points of view on the page. It's good, and satisfying, and the thing about the internet is that I get occasional feedback instead of writing in a void.

I have a few things left to wrap up for Novitas, and then I suspect it will shift into the background until we resume regular play in April or May. So I will try to start picking at a new project soon, something just for me, and we'll see how that goes.

Dear Writer,

Howdy! NaNo Program Director Chris Baty here. Welcome to the 10th NaNoWriMo! It's great to have you on board.

I'll be sending you one of these emails each week from here until the end of the event. Between my emails, you'll also get two encouraging missives from our panel of celebrity author pep talkers. This week, you'll be hearing from Jonathan Stroud and Philip Pullman.

Okay. Enough chit-chat. It's time to talk geodes.

Geodes, for the geologically disinclined, look like normal rocks on the outside. But when you cut them open, they're filled with all sorts of wonders—bubbly layers of agate, sparkly crystals, elves.

As a kid, I was obsessed with geodes. The highlight of my year was a visit to Dick's Rock Shop in Fountain, Colorado. The owner of the store, Richard Stearns, had a crate of dirty, unremarkable, tennis-ball-sized rocks in his Geode Bin. You'd spend an hour hunting through them until you'd picked out the perfect dirty, unremarkable rock.

Richard would then fire up his slab saw and cut the thing in half for you. The machine screamed and spit water to cool the blade, and it was messy and slow. Most of the time, Richard would lose a finger in the process.

That's how I remember it anyway. The details are a little fuzzy after so many years.

When he was done, Richard would present you with both halves of your geode. They'd be wet, and sometimes you'd gaze down into a glittering concavity of purple or green. Other times, you'd cry because you'd stupidly picked one of the geodes where the all the crystals were caked with a calcified layer of elf spit.

As we head into NaNoWriMo, I'm reminded of the feeling I got standing in Dick's Rock Shop, watching as that year's mystery stone revealed whatever magic it possessed. After nine NaNoWriMo novels—most of which have trended more towards elf spit than gemstones—I still get an excited stomach-flutter at the start of November. I can't help but feel giddy as I ponder questions like: Will this be the best novel I've ever written? And, secretly: Will this be the best novel ever written in the history of humankind?

Because it really could be.

Then the writing starts, and by the second sentence, two new questions have occurred to me. Namely: What am I doing? And: Could this be the worst novel ever written in the history of humankind?

And you know what? It really could be. But that's fine. Trust me on this. Don't waste your time measuring the success of your NaNo novel by the sparkle of your prose or the rock-solid genius of your plot. The books we write in November won't start out like the novels we buy in bookstores. Because the novels we buy in bookstores didn't start out like bookstore-novels either.

Nope. They started out as way-less beautiful, way-more exciting things called first drafts. These are the dinged-up cousins to final drafts, and they're packed with crazy energy and laughable tangents and embarrassing instances where a main character's name shifts six times over the course of a single chapter.

Creating this reckless, romantic, and potential-filled beast is the first step in writing a great book. It's also a fantastic workout for your imagination, and monkey-barrels of fun. There's a catch, though. Getting through a first draft will require you leave perfectionism and self-criticism at the door. Fear not: We'll keep them both safe and return them to you in December.

But in November, you are beyond criticism. Because you are doing something that few people in the world have the guts to try—you're packing a huge creative challenge into an already-hectic life. You're juggling work and home; family and friends. With all of that going on, you've signed up for NaNoWriMo. Where you've spent the last few weeks hunting through the bin of possible novel ideas, trying to pick out the perfect one. Maybe you've got yours already. Or maybe you feel like you're not quite ready.

You're ready.

It's November 1, writer.

What say we fire up the ol' slab saw and find out what's in there?

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Watching TV and movies with Justin, he often stops and says "I want this scene." He's picking out emotional and plot high points for Marius most often. I thought, well, what sort of scenes do I want for my story? That's what I tried to think about today.

I wrote some notes to myself about theme and scenes at lunch today. Nothing awesome like a real outline, but I almost never have a real outline, and hey, it's progress. It's still a pretty nebulous idea, but the mood of it stretches out before me now.

I am seriously considering this again, and the only thing that makes me more hopeful than the last two years is that I've been having a lot of fun writing little bits and pieces of fiction over on the Novitas forums as an extension of LARP. It feels nice to be writing again, but weird, like rediscovering that younger version of myself who had more free time and possibly less friends, but certainly more opportunity and brain space to sit and write.

The problem with me is that I like to spread the writing out over hours. I'll write a scene, I'll check my e-mail, livejournal, and the forums, write another paragraph or two, play a game of solitaire, pick at the page some more, get a snack, make some tea, write again, and so on. It's a mode of being. It's the business that regularly kept me up until 3 or 4am during college when I was writing a paper. It's a part of the process for me.

However, it's not only inefficient, it's impractical while working full-time and having "shit to do." Who has time to putz to let creativity simmer when there are dishes and laundry and dinner to be made and Netflix and electrical problems and, and, and...

It also makes me a lousy human being to live with or interact with, and can be impossible while not living alone. It's an active choice to temporarily ignore the real humans in my life for the paper ones. The last few years I started NaNo, part of my commitment problem was that I decided that I didn't want to ignore the real people.

I need to find a happy medium between the two if I'm going to make it work this year. For that lesson, I'm willing to not finish, so long as I learn how to start the balancing act.

I don't have work today and Justin is at class, so my goal is to make some plot notes and get some characters designed so I have a place to jump off from.

Dear National Novel Writing Month Author,

Hi there! NaNoWriMo Program Director Chris Baty here. Before we get rolling, I wanted to give you a quick guide to our upcoming five weeks of literary domination.

Here's the plan:
( Read more... )

We begin very soon, brave writer! I can't wait to get started!

Other than both being writers, my friend John and I are very different. While I waffle back and forth and treat my writing like a hobby which I fit in around other commitments, John is a full-time writer, working on book one of a five-book epic, and currently living off the wages his girlfriend makes. He also has a lot of different ideas about process, ideas to be pursued, structure, editing, craft, plot, etc. So when we get onto writing talk there is invariably some very opinionated discussion.

I was talking with him last night about our respective books-in-progress and we got to the subject of endings, specifically morals/messages in the conclusion. John once told me he always wrote with a moral in mind. "Otherwise, what's the point?" he said. We were both taking a children's writing class, and I was writing a very fun piece about pirates with no discernable moral whatsoever, and possibly no point other than an adventure. But for whatever reason, I've sort of switched my tactics and I approached both my NaNo novels with a premise in mind that was, at least in the beginning, stronger and more solid than the plot. And while I can't say they strictly give morals, they do point to a way of thinking. Switch's main theme is seizing control of your own life and making it into what you want it to be. This year's one is about family: the physical and habitual traits that make a unit and what makes it work. In both of them, there's other stuff going on, but there was a main idea pushing me in the right direction. Sort of like an essay point made through plot.

In keeping with this new[er] way I'm working, and his prior statement about morals being the entire point, I asked him what his premise or moral was for the epic. It was a weird conversation because I think we were talking at cross purposes. He said there were too many to count, and lots of his opinions and different world views, and things he claimed could not be resolved. "People believe what they want to believe. It's all philosophical debate." I argue that it's the writer's job, as they plot out the story, to make a case for the one point of view they believe. "Your characters may never agree on it or have an aha moment, and some of your readers might not agree, but event A, B, and C are going to show cause and effect, and your effects and outcomes show your opinions."

Here's where things got convoluted. "Julie, honestly, you can't think of everything as a structure. You always have, ever since I've known you. All I care about is the story and character building. When things fit into a structure, it's pure accident. I mean, A might effect B, or it might not, either way, the reader is left to think." I ignored the structure jibe and after we discussed it further for a while, I rephrased my question. "When your reader gets to the end of the last book and puts it down, what is the most important thing they are going to be left thinking about?" He said he's writing high fantasy, so it's not supposed to have a "Fight Club" ending.

Now, I know the type of stories I'm working on now aren't the be all and end all of styles. And there is a place for the Fight Club stories and the adventure stories and everything in between. But even if the conclusion is only "good triumphs over evil," surely there has to be SOME endpoint?