Table of Contents

#Forward

This is How I Get it Done

Day 1: Go!

Day 2: The Thing You Did Wrong Yesterday

Day 3: So… how’s it going?

Day 4: Biting and Sucking are fun, Oooh yeah.

Day 5: Babble On

Day 6: The First time You Get Behind

Day 7: Dirty Trick #1: Killing Adverbs

Day 8: In Which You Pass the dreaded Day Seven

Day 9: A Really Mean Trick

Day 10: “You Ready to Listen?” – Lessons from my granddad

Day 11: Keep Calm and Carry On

Day 12: It’s not, in fact, better to Burn Out

Day 13: Ignoring your Inner Hermit

Day 14: Trusting your Demon

Day 15: Rules of Three (Dirty Trick #2)

Day 16: It’s all about Falling Down - Lessons from my dad

Day 17: Looking ahead. Looking behind. - Lessons from my mom

Day 18: Bang! (with Ninjas)

Day 19: Dirty Trick #3 – There’s always a conflict.

Day 20: Okay, how far behind are you?

Day 21: Giving back

Day 22: NaNoWriMo: Contents Under Pressure, Possibly Habit-forming

Day 23: I feel like you need a pep talk - Lessons from my grandmother

Day 24: Using Time

Day 25: In Which You Are Amazing

Day 26: In Which You are a Turkey-day Ninja

Day 27: Cracking the WIP

Day 28: “Finish for me.” – Lessons from my sister

Day 29: In which I am the Mean Parent

Day 30: Fleeing the Sinking Ship

#NaNoWriMo: My personal retrospective and thanks.

#Forward

In 2009, I undertook the challenge of NaNoWriMo for what would turn out to be my eighth time. I love doing NaNoWriMo; every time is different, every time is challenge in its own way (usually because I make it so), but I was particularly excited about 2009, because (thanks to Twitter) I was in contact with a lot more writers than I had been in the past (I'm rubbish with the actual NaNoWriMo forums). I was jazzed, and I let my enthusiasm flow out into a pre-NaNoWriMo post intended to (a) remind me of the things that had worked for me in the past and (b) to maybe provide a little bit of help to all the would-be writers trying the thing out for the first time.

The post was received pretty well. Very well. “The Twitters Asploded,” as the kids say.

On November 1st, I set to work along with everyone else, and dropped a (very) short post on my blog wishing everyone luck.

And, like everyone else, I struggled with a few obvious things on that first day. So I shook my head, remembered the lessons I'd learned about writing, and got back to work.

Then: “Hmm, I bet some other folks are having the same problem – that'd make a good blog post.”

So I wrote the post (”The Thing You Did Wrong Yesterday”). Again, there was a lot of positive response; a lot of fellow nanowrimos saying things like “Thank god I'm not the only one having this problem.”

And I thought: “Of course you aren't. Everyone deals with this, and it's the same thing every year, in the same pattern. I bet I could write a post every day about how to deal with whatever problem I'm having that day, and it would be the same problem almost everyone was having.”

Then I thought: “Yeah, but that's a lot of writing to do on top of writing the story.”

THEN I thought: “Eh. So what?”

And that's where all these posts came from: just me, writing advice to myself, sharing it with you, and hoping it helped.

Apparently, it did.

Hopefully, this year, it will help again. Encouraged by some requests from 2010 nanowrimos, I've compiled all those posts into a little ebook that you can haul around with you and read at your leisure. Also, because I'm not really that smart and because other people have really good ideas and advice as well, I've kept most of the comments that people left on the original posts. Some of them are nothing more insightful than “I love Baby Penis Tank,” but many are gems of pure crystalline wisdom.

I hope you enjoy this thing. If you do, let me know.

That's it. Off you go.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

- Doyce

This is How I Get it Done

Oct 30th

“You fail only if you stop writing.” – Ray Bradbury

All right. Let me get this key bit out of the way:

Do not take my writing advice.

Have I published some stuff? Yeah. Have I written stuff and gotten paid for it? Yeah. Have I ‘found’ an agent who was willing to represent my longer work? Again, yeah.

But I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a total effing noob.

But NaNoWriMo? My people, I can do NaNoWriMo. To quote Samuel L. “Bad Motherfucker” Jackson, I’m the NaNoWriMo Foot fuckin’ Master.

One year, I got food poisoning and spent three days in intensive care. And finished. Another year, I did it with fifty people reading and commenting and bitching about each day’s output. And finished. Once, I started eight days late, landscaped my front yard, tiled my kitchen and master bath, and found out I was gonna be a daddy. And finished. I’ve done it as a big group project. Twice. I did one with a 3 year old underfoot. And finished.

Point is, I can’t give you much advice on writing (and what I can give you, you should fucking well ignore), but I know how to do this NaNoWriMo thing (and maybe have something decent afterwards), and I’d like to share a few tips on the how.

Just a few. Like… five, maybe. Let’s go for five.

1. When you’re writing, write

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching…talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.” – E.L. Doctorow

Here’s the thing. You aren’t going to have much time every day to write, unless you quit your job or something. (Pro tip: don’t quit your job.) What that means is when you get 20 minutes to write, you need to write. Don’t Google facts to fill in your story with. Don’t look up a n y t h i n g on Wikipedia. Stay the fuck away from tvtropes.org.

(Jesus, I just lost like half of you to tvtropes.org, didn’t I? Dammit. There’s half your day gone, and you people are going to blame me.)

If you think you need a fact in the story, make something up. If you don’t want to do that, then put some kind of flag in the text that tells you to come back LATER and fill in the fact. I use [these things].

“Are you fucking kidding me, Tom? It’s going to take us [fact here] days just to get to the base camp — no way will the time-lemurs survive.”

Like that. Except not crappy. Then you can just come back later and do a search for ‘[' or ']‘, and find all the places where you need to fill stuff in.

The point is, if you have like a half-hour to get some words down right now, you’d better get some words down.

2. Four bites, every day

Roger Zelazny said:

I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day, minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several times a day you’re going to do more than three sentences, one of them is going to catch on. You’re going to say “Oh boy!” and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say “Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That’s 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn’t goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I’ve moved as far as I have.

My friend Dave quotes this quite a bit – he’s got a system based around this. Me, I just quote it to remember a few things:

- Zelazny was cool.

- Writing is work.

- You have to do the work.

- You can do the work a little at a time.

- Zelazny was cool.

Listen. I am possibly the worst worker ever in the history of working. I screw around all. the. damn. time. Poke at a presentation for 20 minutes. Check GMail. Poke another ten minutes. Browse my news reader. Answer two emails. Check on the Twitters. Repeat. My boss once told me he’d never met anyone in his life that screwed around so much and still got more shit done than everyone else.

That last bit is key. Somehow, I still get the work done. I do that by taking small bites all day long. There’s an old saying about learning things that goes something like “you can’t eat an elephant all at once, but you can eat him one bite at a time.” That’s fine for learning, but it’s slightly different for writing.

I’m not trying to eat an elephant; I’m trying to kill that dirty bastard, and all I have are my bare hands and my teeth, so I bite the son of a bitch to death.

Takes me about a month.

Right? So make sure you find enough time to take, as per Zelazny, four bites a day. Four spots in each day when you can write for at about 30 minutes. Then, as I already said, make sure you WRITE.

Write rhymes with bite, according to my daughter. This is no coincidence.

3. Moods are for sex. Writing ain’t sex.

I don’t know how to say this any better. You need to be at your special table at your special coffee shop with your lucky cup and your specially-made NaNoWriMo iPod mix playing, so you can write?

That’s… special.

Screw that. Screw it right in the ear. Write EVERYWHERE. Write when you’ve got five minutes, waiting at Great Clips. I don’t care if it’s three goddamn words. I don’t care if it wouldn’t fill up a post on Twitter. Get em down.

I know this doesn’t entirely jive with the four bites a day advice. That’s because I’m inconsistent and what works one day doesn’t always work the next day, so you basically have to be ready to jump at the chance to write something down at any time.

Four bites is a minimum, but it isn’t like any of us need to be told how to snack between meals, is it?

Never stop at the end of the chapter

You want to stop each writing bite in the middle of the action or in the middle of whatever is going on. Stop at a cliffhanger if you have to, but better yet take a break in the middle of a conversation or just as someone pulls a trigger. Cory Doctorow suggests stopping right in mid sentence, but that’s him — he does a lot of shit that maybe only works for him. (Until four years later, when everyone starts doing it and realizes it’s no big deal and who the hell does this Doctorow guy think he is, anyway?)

The reason to leave your story hanging is so you can noodle over what’s going to happen next while you’re away. You want to leave stuff up in the air so your brain can juggle with it while you’re getting your oil changed or back waxed or whatever. Stopping at some comfortable end of chapter means you can take a mental break too.

Which means that when you come back to the story, you’re like “So, what’s next?” and your brain is like “I unno.”, cuz your brain is stupid. Stupid brain.

Related to this: take breaks. Go for walks in strange directions. Read a comic book. Take showers — let the water drum some ideas through your skull — I do that one ALL THE TIME; I’m the cleanest writer on the planet.

Word processors can suck it

Don’t use Word. Don’t use Open Office. Hell, don’t even use Google Docs. You want the simplest damn tool you can use and still make sense.

I’m talking about things like WriteMonkey. Write Or Die Desktop edition. Effing NOTEPAD. (Or Metapad, which doesn’t suck.) The world is full of distractions, so about how about you don’t use a tool that has a bunch of distractions built in?

Set your Status to Busy. Better yet: Offline.

Speaking of distractions, get the hell out of Google Talk. And YIM. And AIM. And Twitter. And Facebook. And mute your cell.

If you MUST stay connected, set your status to busy and make sure you enforce it. I’m connected to Google Talk all the time, but my status is set to busy cuz… guess what?

BUSY.

The people who ignore that and IM me anyway are the people who know it’s okay that they do that for the topic at hand, and then they go away.

The people who ignore it and … don’t? They get blocked. That’s whole different post.

Interrupt me for no reason, and Baby Penis Tank
will DESTROY YOU.

So… where was I? Jesus, I stopped numbering my points didn’t I? Is that more than five? It looks like more than five.

More importantly, what’s my word count?

Eh. Doesn’t matter. Lemme sum up.

Conclusion

You can do this.

It’s not hard. It’s just work. You do work every damn day and it probably isn’t something you love. This is work you love.

I do this, and I am a dopey, lazy, easily distracted, tangential sumbitch.

If I can, you can. I know it.

Comments

Jamie Harrington :

I can’t even comment on this blog post… I am way too focused on baby penis tank.

Cat Hellisen :

Cool post.

I also do the “bites a day” although I call them sprints. four 15 minute sprints in a day can give me 2000 words on a good day. And setting aside 15 minutes to just concentrate on writing is pretty easy, there’s always a 15 minute chunk somewhere.

RKCharron:

Hi :)
What a great post!
It was fun & insightful & drilled the advice into my brain so I cannot forget it – even if I wanted to.
:)
Thanks for sharing,
All the best,
RKCharron
:)

Chuck:

This is some priceless advice about writing in general, not just about NaNoWriMo.

Well-done.

Also: time-lemurs.

Time-lemurs.

And, once more, for the emphasis:

*TIME-LEMURS*.

Today, my friend, you win the Internet.

It’s kind of dirty, and it’ll need to be cleaned.

– c.

Mur:

Baby penis tank makes me cry.

Other than that, love the post. Love #3.

Ok. I love baby penis tank, too.

Alan:

Great great great hilarious post.

First time I’ve read your blog and your style makes me think of another point.

There are a lot of funny people out there who, when they start writing, think they have to Write Seriously.

Max you’re strengths when you write. Be yourself on the page. It will make the whole thing a helluva lot easier than trying to be some writer you aren’t.

And if you don’t, Baby Penis Tank will find you.

LrShadow:

This is absolutely priceless. Thanks to Mur for sharing, but more importantly, THANK YOU Doyce for posting it.

trev:

Baby penis tanks wins photo of the day. I want to go out and but a screen printing business just so I can have that on a t-shirt by this time tomorrow.

evf:

Effing brilliant. Thanks for that.

Eve:

You’re my new hero. Partially because of your advice, but also because of your baby penis tank. Baby. Penis. Tank. What????

Good advice.

Velvet Verbosity:

Are you sure about the whole “stay away from Twitter” thing?

*scratches arms nervously*

I don’t have a problem.

*swats at something not there*

Really. I can Twitter and write at the same time.

Doyce:

What I’m saying is take your totally-not-an-addiction one writing bite at a time. I’m not saying “don’t do Twitter”, I’m just saying to shut off your notifications and Tweetdeck or whatever *while* you’re writing.

Otherwise, it’s gonna look like this:

“Are you fucking kidding me

[You've got Mail!]

[Check mail. Respond.]

[Go back, reread last line, remember where you were.]

[Start writing.]

, Tom? It’s going to

[UPDATE: 25 new Updates in your "Friends doing NaNoWriMo" Twitter List, two using your @name.]

[Go to Twitter.]

[Read the list you mentioned.]

[Go to home page and read all the tweets by all the people you're following to get 'caught up.']

[Tweet something.]

[Stop just before you hit "Update" because you realize you forgot to hashtag it with #amwriting and #nanowrimo.]

[15 minutes later, you manage to squeeze your message AND the hashtags in.]

[Check your twitter updates one more time.]

[Return to writing. Reread 'sentence' one more time.]

take us …

[Crap, how long will it take them to get to to base camp? To the Bat-Google!]

[Insert about... 40 minutes of Google-surfing here, only five of which had anything to do with your question.]

… at which point in time, you’ve run out of writing time.

11 words down. In 90 minutes. Woo hoo!

((Note: I am totally not writing this from personal experience. At all.))

ganymeder:

Actually, I found I use twitter more during Nanowrimo. I don’t follow notifications, like you said above, but I do check on breaks to post my wordcount as an accountability thing. I’m a big believer in shame as a motivator. If I brag about doing Nanowrimo, then after I’ve made such a big deal about it, I’d better make my word goals and win, dammit! :D

It’s amazing how much you can get done in little chunks, like you said. Most of my writing has been done this way, and so far I’m ahead.

Great post! Good luck on your Nanowrimo, and Happy Novelling!

Robert McKay:

Wow. I dunno about all the advice, but you seriously crack me the fuck up.

Alright, the advice is solid too, but I don’t want to give it too much credit because I’m procrastinating right now and if I say your advice is good that means I should get back to work.

So, um, yeah. Back to work I go. Thanks for the post.

#NaNoWriMo: Go

Nov 1st

Boo.

Time to start biting the elephant to death.

The thing you did wrong yesterday.

Nov 2nd

Yes, yes: we’re all very impressed.

Well, no. I’m only kind of impressed.

Mostly, I’m suspicious. Your first day of NaNoWriMo… umm… wrimo-ing?

It’s very tidy, isn’t it? Nice and grammatical and spellchecked and all the verbs are tensing in the right directions and all of that stuff and that’s good, right?

No.

Ahem. That is to say, “no.”

You went back, didn’t you? You went back to something you’d already written and fixed it, didn’t you?

That’s bad.

I don’t care if the sentence you fixed was terrible. It’s supposed to be terrible. It’s a first draft, and you used up so much time fixing it.

How much time? Double the time? If only. If only.

Let me explain about a little thing called Opportunity Cost. I will use an example.

We have a writer in our example. Let’s call him… Doyce. Doyce is writing a story. It is the first draft, and it’s the first day, and Doyce has been doing revisions for so bloody long he’s sort of forgotten how to START a story and get all the stuff in his head onto the paper, so he flails around a bit. That’s normal, but Doyce doesn’t want normal. He doesn’t even want a first draft. Doyce wants the Great American Novel.

(Pro tip: if Doyce keeps fucking around trying to get the Great American Novel, he will not get his first draft, either. Promise.)

Anyway, Doyce writes a bad sentence. Very bad. Ugly. Embarrassing. It says what he wants it to say, but it says it… the way a stupid… bad… writing person would say… something of that type of… nature. (See? Like that. Bad.)

So he re-writes the sentence.

How much time did he waste? How much more than “the time it takes to write a sentence” did he spend?

Two times? He should be so lucky.

1. The time it took to write the sentence to begin with.

2. The time it took to re-read it, doubt it, and decide to change it

3. The loss of the sentence he could have been writing when he was re-reading and making that decision.

4. The time it takes to write a better sentence.

5. The loss of the sentence he could have been writing while he was rewriting the first sentence.

So, he’s out 3 times the amount of time a sentence takes to write, and he’s two sentences ‘behind’ where he would have been if he hadn’t done the rewrite.

He’s a paragraph behind.

Imagine if he’d rewritten a paragraph.

Christ, imagine if he’d rewritten a page. You know what would happen?

What would happen is that the first 500 words that should have taken him about a half hour instead take him two and a half hours.

That’s horrible, isn’t it? That’s a big fucking waste of precious, precious time; time he could have spent recharging his creative batteries, instead of writing several more hours than expected and crawling into bed at 1 am.

That’s bad, people.

Don’t do that.

Learn from my this entirely hypothetical mistake.

Bonus tip! Check out Maureen Johnson’s newest NaNoWriMo advice-post on embracing your inner suck-monster.

So… how’s it going?

Nov 3rd

"I admit that I did not expect the space-penguin porn, but it kinda works."

Day Three.

The day-you-hit-5000.

The-day-before-the-day-where-you-finally-figure-out-where-it’s-going-and-the-story-behaves-for-awhile.

Anything good so far? A good line, a good description, a particularly nice turn of phrase?

Please, please, share it in the comments.

(Tomorrow, we’ll share the really bad lines, don’t worry.)

I’ll start things off. Right now, my favorite line is the first one in the story. I consider this a good sign. It’s pretty simple, and goes like this.

I used to tell stories.

How about you?

Comments

Tina Hunter:

Not sure if it’s a good line (2 really) or just one I like but:

“You’re going to tell me how to turn it off.” Harper walked forward until the end of the riffle was pressed against the forehead of the Myrith. “Now!”

“Oh my. Did your balls just drop, boy? How interesting.”

Linley:

OK, I’ll play:

“Right. Because all I am is a violin-wielding test-acing machine. And just minutes ago I had been reveling in the feelings of being an actual teenager. But what was the point in arguing? I didn’t have anything to wear at this point anyway. The only dress in my closet was from when I graduated from eighth grade two years ago, and if that still fit, I really had nothing to live for.”

Hyetal:

Five thousand? Shoot. All I’ve managed was stomaching my existing long enough to claw my way out of zero. But it’s a place to start.

“He was Three Pygmies, so named because he was as tall as three normal pygmies combined, son of Four Pygmies, son of Two-and-a-Half Pygmies, son of Twelve Pygmies, son of a pygmy.”

***Dave:

Caitlyn didn’t crawl into my bed that night. I was greatly relieved, and vaguely disappointed.

How about you? (Write your favorite line in, below.)

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Biting and Sucking are fun, Oooh yeah.

Nov 4th

Just a quick post today. By tomorrow, you’re going to actually know where the story is going for, like, the first time, and we’re going to talk about that, but for today? Quick post.

You’re writing crap.

Yes, you’re biting that elephant to death, but in another very real way you are, as the kids say, simply biting it.

And that’s okay. There’s a freedom and joy in the first draft, because the stuff you’re writing, you’re writing for YOU, and if it sounds horrible the second time you read it, that’s fine, because at least during the process of getting it down on paper, it was awesome.

It brought you joy.

It was play, and sometimes the result of play is dirt and stained clothes and sand in your bathing suit area that will take a week to get out.

We have a lot of sand in our bathing suit area right now, don’t we?

So… let’s see it! (Not the bathing suit area. Eww.) Hop into the comments and trot out the most overwritten chunk of text you’ve dumped on the screen so far. I wanna see!

And, just to prime the well, here’s one of MANY POSSIBLE EXAMPLES from Adrift.

The Drift — what little of it I could see of from our vantage point — was the same as I remember: a vast patchwork quilt of mismatched metal; multi-millennia-deep piles of ships welded into a moon-sized satellite that predates any written history to which anyone from Caliban has access. It’s unsteady orbit – the source of its name – circled an otherwise unremarkable star on the border between what the Concordant Navy called ‘controlled space’ and the Remnants; a location that attracted any number of unsavory Remnant species, vagabonds, vagrants, traders, beggers, mercenaries, killers, crime lords, and those too unlucky to get away from them. It was a huge, dead, beast’s carcass infested throughout by millions of parasites and scavengers.

I picked this paragraph at random.

Just… for fun… try to count the times I switch between present and past tense. And forget about all the needless exposition. Sweet jumpin’ Jesus.

In edits, that paragraph is going to be like… one sentence.

But right now, it’s WORD COUNT, baby, and more importantly, I had fun writing it.

I had fun.

Writing for a living is a fine and good thing (in one way or another, that’s what I do, even at the day job), but the key thing to remember is we love this.

And it’s fun.

And we get to do it all month long.

Seriously: I am so fucking happy right now.

Even when I read that terrible paragraph.

Comments

***Dave:

Wow. I get to be the first, after all the NaNoWriMoRTLuv?

Um …

My body was hurled along the direction of the bullet. Though the round was quite large — .50 BMG being favored for snipers in the modern era — the damage done by the hole it made was itself minimal compared to that of the shockwave of its passage through the internal tissues. The adult human brain weighs about three pounds. I liked to think mine weighed a bit more, of course, but only a small fraction was blown out the hole on the right side of my skull, to land in the lap of an assistant to the Deputy Mayor for Community Development. The rest, instead, was frapeed into something the consistency of cottage cheese, as anyone who did an autopsy after the incident would discover.

Of a mercy, it’s the 8th paragraph in the story. So hopefully it’s uphill from there.

Chuck:

My mileage varies quite a bit out from this, but that’s okay. The spirit of it is doubleplusgood. :)

– c.

Doyce:

Understand where you’re coming from on it, Chuck.

At least I think I do.

From where I’m sitting, it looks to me like you’re taking it like serious work, but still having fun. That’s entirely good.

And also, you try to minimize the horrible blocks of TLDR exposition. Also good. You’ve clearly (and very enjoyably from my point of view) accumulated those skills.

I see so many people trying their hand at it, though, who worry that if everything they write isn’t a perfect gem, that they themselves are terrible.

So they fuss and fret and eventually none of it’s fun anymore.

And I guess I think it should almost always be fun, else why do it?

I take this same stance on my day job, to be clear, so this isn’t me being disingenuous or over-precious or having another standard for “the art of writing” vs “the job of writing. I just think it’s important to remember that it’s supposed to be fun.

(but yeah, I kinda figured you’d see it another way ;)

Doyce:

Rereading what I just said, I realized that the stupid “it” in the last sentence makes it look like I’m saying “I figured you wouldn’t think writing should be fun.”

That is not at all what I meant. I’d be talking complete bullshit if I even implied that.

So, clarification: that’s not what I was saying.

Chuck:

That’s exactly it. Writers should enjoy the writing. Work is best when you enjoy it, whether you’re a janitor or a rocket scientist. Or a rocket janitor.

I usually aim for the middle ground on first drafts — I know it’s not going to be perfect, but I aim for a solid B to B+ range. Hell, I’m going to go through five drafts anyway (if the latest novel and screenplay are any indicators) — but if my first draft is littered with lots of little problems, I’m looking at six or seven drafts. Further, the little issues take a lot lot lot of time to go back and fix.

So, for me, it’s a matter of economizing the process. Fixing small errors now — largely by making sure they don’t happen in the first place — actually saves me a shit-ton of time on the back end.

Also, from a professional standpoint, while the big picture is to enjoy the writing and to love the work, it’s also good not to get overfocused on one’s pleasure factor. Sometimes, writers have bad days. I don’t love those days. I don’t love writing on those days.

Often, though, I love the writing I *do* on those days. Maybe not that day. Maybe a week later, or a month. If I concentrated too much on how much I enjoyed it, I might not have gotten it done in the first place.

So, for me, writing is about satisfaction and long-term enjoyment rather than the pleasure factor of ass-in-chair. It’s marathon-esque that way. During the long run, you might be ready to quit, ready to run headlong into a tree to make it end. But you push, and you feel awesome for finishing when the day is done.

– c.

Doyce:

I am totally going to write a post about the little things you can do to have the end product suck less. Thank you for giving me that idea.

And definitely also about the marathon factor and the days you don’t want to write. That’s a bit later.

I have read the (good!) points you’ve made against the stated goals of NaNoWriMo, but I’m glad you’re chiming in on these posts, because I think that there’s a lot folks can learn about the work during the nano-ing stuff, and you’re insight is, if you’ll pardon me, fucking gold.

Chuck:

My insight is nothing more than me either making things up as I go, or me reiterating things that I’ve banged my head into too many times for it to not have left a big ol’ bruise.

:)

But thanks, either way.

– c.

Bonus Tip: Check out Chuck Wendig’s Your First Draft: Close Enough For Horseshoes And Hand Grenades

Babble On

Nov 5th

“Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.” — Raymond Chandler

I don’t give much in the way of actual writing advice, for two reasons.

1. You kind of have to figure that stuff out for yourself, or it won’t stick.

2. I don’t actually pay that much attention to writing advice. The only ‘writing book’ I’ve ever finished is On Writing, and I have to reread it periodically, because what I don’t already know didn’t stick.

Also: I give bad advice, and you shouldn’t listen to me. (So that’s three reasons.)

Also also: I’m not sure it makes things that much better. Okay, yes: I avoid adverbs and prepositional phrases absolutely as much as I can, within reason. (You see what I did there?) I try to use punctuation correctly and I check my Strunk and White when I’m not sure. That’s just mechanics, though; proper tool use.

But any discussion on style and theme and premise and that sorta stuff? Masturbatory, is what that is. (IMO, YMMV, Offer Void, et cetera.)

‘Style’ is ‘how you write’, which (a) you already have and (b) is changing throughout your life anyway so don’t worry about it. It’s like thinking really hard about your socks every time you take a step.

Theme and premise? Hell if I know.

Theme and premise are the kinds of things that make people ask “What were you trying to say when you first introduced the duplicitous character, standing in front of a building with a facade?” (At which point I’m thinking: “I dunno… it’s a shitty little street. Shitty buildings on shitty streets have facades.”)

Thinking about theme and premise while you’re in the middle of your first draft (to bleed out my analogy even further) is like looking through a telescope to see where you’re going on your walk: you fall down a lot and you don’t see a goddamn thing where you actually are.

Anyway: that kind of stuff will come out unconsciously in little hints and ghosts as you go through the first draft. Revisions and 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th) drafts find those little ghosts and hints and strengthen them into recurring themes and (if you’re inclined toward it) A Message. They are not things you should dwell on during initial writing.

Now, all that stuff up above could possibly be mistaken for Writing Advice, but it isn’t. I’m not telling you about something you should do, I’m telling about shit you shouldn’t do. Should not, in fact, even think about.

Why do I even mention it, then?

Because today is Day Five, and sometime either today or tomorrow you’re going kind of get your bearings on the story — to get a sense of what’s actually happening. Your characters will stop flailing around quite so much and actually Set Out To Do Something.

And you might catch the barest hint of something that looks like a Theme. (Or a Premise, maybe; fuck if I can tell em apart.)

And in seeing that strange beast for the first time this month, you might feel compelled to pursue it.

Do not. Just keep piling on the words. Keep telling the story.

Don’t get fancy. Don’t have a style. Just write things the way you write things.

Let’s go back to the righteous Reverend Chandler.

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning.” – Raymond Chandler

Babble on, guys. Build the teetering, leaning, unstable tower. When you hit that point (and you will) where you realize that – maybe – you know what shape the thing should be when it’s done, don’t freak out. Don’t let on; don’t give it away.

Just build.

We can stabilize the damn thing later.

Comments

Robert McKay:

I guess you really do have a firm grasp of the way people’s minds work when doing NaNo. I was at exactly this point this morning. I can start to see where I ultimately want to go with this story and it paralyzed me. I couldn’t get started this morning.

Once I decided not to think about that shit any more the words started to flow again.

#1 Rule of NaNoWriMo. The words must flow!

Linda:

Thanks for that non-advice. I needed that. Now back to flailing (’cause I’m doing a lot of that).

Doyce:

The secret to my genius insight into the minds of nano-ers: I basically just write advice on how to deal with whatever it is that I’m fucking up that day.

#themoreyouknow

De:

If it works, don’t think about it.

If it doesn’t work, think about it.

But later.

Doyce:

Yes, yes yes yes. That’s it exactly.

Definitely not saying “don’t worry, all your shit will be fine”, but for right now, Day Five? Yeah.

Love that summary of yours – what a surprise, you summed a three page post of mine in three lines.

De:

Hey, like I said :P

The first time you get behind.

Nov 6th

Maybe it was your first day.

That happens. The first time I decided to do NaNoWriMo, I had already scheduled a convention for November 1st through the 3rd, so I hit the 4th with about 1300 words.

Maybe it was Day 3. You had two big, exciting, productive bursts, and then you hit Tuesday and work kicked your ass all day and you just knew there was no way you were getting to 5000 words.

Maybe it was Day 4 and you just … totally … forgot. Believe me, that happens.

Maybe you’re a secret detective, and you made this fundamental error in judgement:

I'm running late, but I'm sure nothing else will come up...

Maybe you’re learning how to do podcasts, and your first one takes five and a half hours to finish up, instead of one. *looks guilty*

The details may vary, but the end result is pretty much the same: you, innocently standing there, and the daily wordcount for NaNoWriMo walks up and…

You needed how many words?

Knocks the air right out of you, doesn’t it? It’s okay, Tiger; shake it off. Sit on a chair and bounce up and down a couple times with your legs together. It helps.

I talked a couple days ago about how we have to remember that all this writing stuff is supposed to be fun, or else why do it?

And that’s true. That’s absolutely true. But I need to share the other half of formula, and it’s pretty technical, so bear with me:

It’s also work. Work we love, yes, but work.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. – Thomas Mann

I don’t know if you can imagine doing something you really love as your actual for-pay job, but I want you to try. If you really can’t do it, try to find someone who has a job like that, and ask them if they ever get tired of it; if they ever feel like calling in sick so they can play Torchlight all day.

Feeling like that is easy to imagine, really, because we all feel like that sometimes. And we still go in. We still do the work. Maybe not always, but usually.

Thing is, this month, you need to have that “get it done anyway” attitude about writing. Even though you love it, because the day will come where you just don’t feel like it or you get discouragingly behind on your word count and you want to give up. You especially need to have that attitude on the day after you blew your writing goal and you have catching up to do. You’re going to have to take more than four of those elephant bites today; sit at the keyboard longer; stay up later than you’d like, and wake up tired.

It’s called “overtime”; butt in the chair, hands on the ‘board. Tappity tap.

Some people think that treating it like work will take away the magic of creation and imagination and the glittery pixies will abandon them and… I dunno. Whatever people like that say.

I have names for people who think like that. I call them “That guy that didn’t finish this year.”

So you’re behind.

Big deal. So am I. I’m gonna fix it.

Tonight, I’ll write until I get caught up. Tomorrow, I’ll write some more.

“Weekend” is just another word for “no one’s fucking interrupting me.”

Overtime. Work. Fun work, most of the time, but work.

Get to it. Let the pixies take care of themselves.

Dirty Trick #1: Killing Adverbs

Nov 7th

A few days ago, in the comments, Chuck said:

I usually aim for the middle ground on first drafts — I know it’s not going to be perfect, but I aim for a solid B to B+ range. Hell, I’m going to go through five drafts anyway — but if my first draft is littered with lots of little problems, I’m looking at six or seven drafts. Further, the little issues take a lot lot lot of time to go back and fix. So, for me, it’s a matter of economizing the process. Fixing small errors now — largely by making sure they don’t happen in the first place — actually saves me a shit-ton of time on the back end.

So here’s the thing. Chuck is totally right.

I’m walking a dangerous line here, because when you’re working a NaNoWriMo project, going back and editing is a phenomenally bad idea that will put you in the hole on wordcount faster than anything, so I don’t want to tell you to do any editing at this point. Perish the thought.

But there are a few things you can do using your brain-thinking-thing so the words you put down aren’t as bad as they might otherwise be. A few very very very simple rules you can follow.

However, I still wouldn’t mention them, except for one thing.

*looks around*

*leans in*

*whispers*

A couple of these rules, like the one I’m going to talk about today, will actually give you more words than if you don’t follow it.

Dirty Trick: No Adverbs

Sorry, did you just say "She held the gun tremblingly?"

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. – Stephen King

That’s a pretty strong vote against the adverb. It’s a pretty widely accepted rule among writers, though perhaps King is the most passionate about it.

Well, and me. I’m kind of rabid about adverbs, but not for the same reason. I don’t like them because they kill my word count.

Examples:

“What’s up?” he said smilingly.

*wince* Right. That sucks. Let’s try it without the adverb.

“What’s up?” he said with a smile.

Ehh. Better. Marginally less wince-worthy, and more words. Okay. Some people will grouse about how words can’t come with a smile, but whatever.

Now, once you’ve broken your two-pack-a-day adverb habit, you can take it a step further by killing those “with a…” phrases. I don’t know what they’re called in grammar books; prepositions? Maybe. Not all prepositional phrases are bad — most aren’t — but those ‘with a …’ phrases are really just a way of writing adverbs without writing adverbs. You’re cheating yourself.

“What’s up?” he said, smiling as he spoke.

Better! Considerably less suckitude. More words. Win/win.

Maybe you could even try…

“What’s up?” he said. He was smiling as he spoke; the particular smile I liked to imagine he saved just for me.

Bam. Maybe not the great american novel, but exponentially better than “smilingly”.

There’s your first dirty writing trick: No adverbs.

Now get back to work.

Have fun.

Comments

De:

Hey, that Chuck guy, he’s pretty smart.

…And you’re a big no-adverb cheater.

Doyce:

He is pretty smart.

… but I can’t tell if you’re saying that I’m cheating by observing this rule… or cheating ON the rule.

… and it’s sad that I don’t know which is more true about myself.

In which you pass the dreaded Day Seven

Nov 8th

A shout out to those who are waaaay behind on word count. I am with you here. We will triumph. Seriously. Those people who already have 20,000 words are using robots and house pets to write their novels for them while they sleep. We don’t need that kind of help. We are tough. We are slow.

We will make it up this weekend.

- Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo 2002

It’s Day Eight. You made it.

“Made what? she asked, carefully avoiding any adverbs. Wait… dammit.

Lemme explain.

There’s this interesting pattern that people fall into in doing anything difficult or new (like trying to adopt a habit of writing 1700 words every day) — many falter or fall off the wagon at the same, seemingly arbitrary points.

The magic numbers are 3, 7, and 21.

See, if people are going to quit something like a new exercise plan, or meditating in the morning, or whatever, they usually do it on the 3rd, 7th, or 21st day. I don’t think anyone really knows why this is, but it’s an actual thing that happens.

Pat yourself on the back: if you’re still seriously working on your project, you have passed two of the three giving-up hurdles.

You can do this.

Oh, and look: a cool essay from Neil Gaiman that you can read, instead of writing.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

A Really Mean Trick

Nov 9th

Okay folks, short and sweet: here’s a hardcore, kick-you-in-the-junk trick for keeping yourself motivated during Week Two.

1. Buy a NaNoWriMo t-shirt.

Is it not attractive? Order a size big: they shrink.

2. Consider the guilt you’ll feel for owning the t-shirt without earning it.

3. Write.

Comments

Chuck:

Heh. Clever. Very nice, sir.

You are a master manipulator. A puppetmaster, callous and cruel.

You’re no angel, after all.

– c.

evf:

Um, yeah. Kinda what I did.

Doyce:

For the record, I wrote this post TWO DAYS ago, before the Wendigian Sainthood had been bestowed.

I save my mean tricks for when shit gets hard.

Danielle:

You’ve now given me a rock-solid reason to buy that fab nano travel cup.

Bless you!

“You Ready to Listen?”

Nov 10th

So this was me, last night:

Me: Guys, can we move things along?
Characters: We are.
Me: But, the outline…
Characters: Shush. Grown-ups are talking.

I had forgotten about this part of the project.

See, I’ve been doing revisions for quite awhile. Revisions are nightmarish and purgatory-like, but in some important ways they’re very comforting, because you’re working on a project where you and the characters are old friends. They probably aren’t going to do anything TOO crazy and unexpected. Also? They probably don’t hate you.

The first draft characters? It’s not like that. They wander off. They don’t go where you want. They won’t SHUT. UP. And they think your outline is an adorable list of suggestions. They definitely don’t trust you yet. You’re a week into the project, and you know in your head where you want to go, but the story just doesn’t seem to be going that way. If you’re working from an outline, you haven’t seen anything that resembles a point on the outline for the last four days.

So how do you deal with these characters?

I’m going to suggest you give them their heads for awhile.

Let me tell you a quick story.

My granddad got a hunting dog pup. Good dog, but damn he was hyper. If you took him out for a hunt around the end of the day, he was all right, but in the morning? Forget about it. My granddad hunted for most of his life, and he understood animals and people (and stories, but that’s a post for another day), so this is what he did.

Every day – usually before I was even awake – he drove out to this stretch of gravel road between his house and ours. He’d let the dog out and lead him down into the ditch. He got him to sit still, walked back up to the truck, got in, rolled down the window, put the truck in gear, hollered “Come on!”, and hit the gas.

About a mile later – sometimes more, depending on how hyper the puppy had been acting that morning – he’d slow down, stop, get out, and walk around to the back of the truck.

The dog would be standing right there, panting, with his big, dumb, dog smile plastered over his face.

My granddad bent down (which took awhile, on some mornings), looked the dog in the face, and said “You ready to listen?”

What was that you said about a plotline? That sounded good.

That. Right there. You do that.

Your characters are hyper. They’re just fucking thrilled to be in a story and living and breathing and just doing stuff.

Let ‘em run it out.

Once they’ve got it out of their system (it’s coming up soon — probably today or tomorrow), get back in there and take the reins back.

Just so we’re clear about what I’m saying, let me put it in clear points.

1. Your characters aren’t listening to your grand plans. Don’t panic.

2. Let them run. Stay with them, so they don’t run off somewhere completely horrible, or get badly hurt, but let them run.

3. When they bleed off that wild edge, step back in and assert control.

Now, caveats.

- With #1, it’s not okay if they’re not listening and not doing anything interesting. Screw that. Kick em in the ass and get em in line.

- Note on #3: This part is important. You are the author. You really are in charge, so get the fuck back in there and take charge. It’s just a quick run – not anarchy. We aren’t poets.

-=-

On Writing

That’s the end of this post, but I wanted to add a little postscript here that harkens back to one of the main tips of NaNoWriMo: “It’s okay if you write crap.” I’ve said similar things before, but I want to fine tune that statement a bit; include something I unconsciously add for myself, but don’t say aloud often enough.

“Write bad stuff, but as much as possible, don’t write it badly.”

I’ve seen some folks do these NaNoWriMo projects and… it’s like they saw “it’s okay to write crap” and thought it meant “it’s okay to forget everything you know about writing.”

Yes, it’s okay to have big, fat scenes with too much dialog and some unnecessarily long descriptions — you’re feeling your way in a new space; some of that exposition and over-description is for YOU, to find out what’s going on and to get to know the characters — you can write it now and chop it later.

But it’s not okay to ignore your tools. Solid sentence structure. Decent grammar. Spelling as good as you can do without actually running a spell checker. (That’s a treat to save for this coming Saturday.)

You have these tools. Treat them with respect. Use them well. That’s all.

Get to work.

Have fun.

Comments

Chuck:

Solid advice, all around.

Love the hunting dog story. Hunting dogs are like that; wild energy. Needs to be pointed.

Would love to see, when the time is right, examples of this from your own project — how did you let them run, how did you draw them back in, and punt them in the nuts and make them listen. And so forth.

– c.

Doyce:

What I’m planning on doing with regard to that is to kind of document it with the podcasts of Adrift.

Episode 3, which goes up on Thursday, is the last one for awhile where the-thing-that-happens is the-thing-that-I-outlined.

That’s about 6k words in. It’s about five days before I get back to the outline. I’ll be talking about it in the blog post in which I deliver the podcasts.

Doyce:

I finally got around to writing about the point in my story where the characters went wandering off-script for about fifty pages.

It’s over here: http://doycetesterman.com/index.php/2009/11/adrift-episode-5-podcast/

Rebecca:

You know, I just found this post, but around the same day that you posted this I was having the same problem. My characters hijacked my plot, and ended up making it better. I’ll have to send this link to my Wrimos.

Also, I love the story about the dog. My husband does that with our dog right now, only he does it on his bike so that he gets a workout too. They both come back much better behaved then when they left. :)

Keep Calm and Carry On

Nov 11th

So, once again, I’m starting off with a Twitter quote:

@barelyknit: Do I make myself finish just so I can say I did? Is that what #NaNoWriMo is about? ‘Cause I am NOT LOVING this novel.

@doycet: Pushing past the not-loving is one thing NaNoWriMo makes happen. The not loving thing happens every single time at some point.

@barelyknit: Good to know. This is my first larger project, so I’m not used to going on despite the apathy.

Now, I’m not posting this to pick on Jennifer. At all. She is not the only one thinking this.

People keep leaving comments (yay!) and twitter DMs (woot) about how I must be wired right into the NaNoWriMo GroupBrain, because I just seem to know exactly what’s about to happen to their nano project, day by day. Fact is, I’m just writing advice for whatever thing I happen to be having a problem with that day, because… surprise surprise… I am not a unique snowflake. None of us are. These problems are everyone’s problems, and if I have some insight into them, or Jennifer happens to mention out loud what lots of people are thinking, that is why.

I write about it cuz I’ve worked through these projects mumblety-times before. That’s it. I don’t always see it coming, but I always recognize it when it gets here, and I kinda-sorta remember how to deal with it.

Now then, bit of background: in my dayjob, I teach things to people – mostly, to adult people. That’s the simplified summary of it, anyway – it involves project management, and regular management, and online course development, and classroom course development, and a metric buttload of writing, as well as doing that actual thing that people think of when they think of ‘teaching’.

There’s a key thing to understand about learning: at some point, with anything that you’re learning how to do, you have to… you know… do it.

The first ugly fact about writing a full-length… well, anything… is that it’s a fuckton of work. The first draft isn’t even most of it; that’s like a decifuckton. A portion, is what I’m saying, but still a lot.

The second ugly fact about writing a full-length anything is that you don’t know if you can do it til you do it. That’s part of what NaNoWriMo is about — giving you a relatively fun way to determine if you can do it (and lots of company if you find out you can’t, yet).

The third ugly fact is that there is stuff you will NEVER learn about writing until you actually sit down and try to write the thing that you want to learn to write. That’s really the other thing that I think NaNoWriMo is good for… it let’s you take that final step in learning how to write a novel by writing a novel. In the end it’s the only damn thing you can do to really learn how, and one of problems that the process teaches you about is how to deal with not always liking your story.

So let’s talk about not liking your story.

This will actually happen a couple times per project, probably. If you’re lucky, you’ll just have one instance of it, but if so, it might go on a few days. There are (at least) Two Things you can do to deal with this. Note: these are not different options you select from — do both of these things.

Thing 1

Close your eyes and think of NaNoWriMo.

So you’re not happy with the stuff going on right now? Sorry, but that’s tough. You’ve got a story to deliver, and sometimes you just have to soldier through.

Simple truth: some days, the words just come hard.[1][2] Sometimes they’re hard because you’re not really loving the scene, or it’s just very tricky, or you suck at action sequences, or whatever.

This is one of those moments that defines. This is the thing that culls people from the herd before they get to the finish line, and there isn’t a better way to put it; if you want to finish your novel(la) length story, you learn to power through the days where you aren’t loving your work. Not the work – YOUR work, specifically.

If this seems like a NaNoWriMo thing, I have to tell you, it isn’t; this is a writing thing. NaNoWriMo may seem silly to some, but it does teach us – via the experience – to write long stuff, and this is one of the lessons: Sometimes, you gotta write anyway.

Thing 2

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. - Elmore Leonard

Stop and ask yourself: “Why don’t I like what I’m writing? Why is this not working for me?” That’s an important question, because if the author doesn’t like it, who the hell else is going to?[3]

- Are you over-describing stuff? Stop. Switch to nothing but dialog for awhile. If you’re protag doesn’t have anyone to talk to, FIX THAT RIGHT NOW.

- Is the scene boring you? Drop it and skip to the next. Flag it with a [finish this later] and move on.

- Do you not care about the character? Get them in some conversations with other characters, so you can find something to like (or find out that you’re writing about the wrong person as the protagonist).

- Are you hung up on how to get through the current scene, but you’re writing a solution anyway? STOP. Go write some other scene — that reluctance is your brain telling you that you’re writing something stupid and that it will give you something not-stupid LATER.

- If all else fails, attack the scene with genre-appropriate ninjas. I am totally not kidding.

Bottom line: your lack of enthusiasm might be your brain telling you “Dude, I would skip this bit if it were in a book I was reading.” So skip it. If you need it, skip it and come back.

Let me give you an example.

Earlier this week, I was working on Adrift, and I got stuck. I’d written my characters into a bit of a corner, and I just… I didn’t know how to get them out of it. I wrote about 400 words that day, most of which involved the characters looking at each other, scratching their heads and saying “Well, fucked if *I* know.”

So I went and wrote something else. My main character (Finnras) is a dad, trying to find his daughter, so I went and wrote out one of the bedtime stories that he used to tell his daughter when she was a little girl and Everything Was Good. That was my writing for the next day, and it was good: one of those rare 3000+ days on word count.

And when I was done?

When I was done, the characters I’d left back in that nasty corner had figured a way out.

Thing #2 is a really good trick, by the way. I highly recommend keeping that particular tool handy.

So, to sum up:

You don’t like the story right now.

1. Above all, keep writing.

2. Find out what’s making you not like it, and either stop it, fix it, or leave it be and write a different bit.

That’s it. Get back to work.

Have fun.

These Things are good Things.

[1] – Actually, for me, the words rarely just fly onto the screen in mighty 5000 word clumps — it just doesn’t happen that often; maybe a half-dozen times in as many years. Maybe. I almost never get ‘ahead’ on my daily wordcount, because the daily deliverable is what gets my ass in the chair, and that habit is far more valuable than a 6000 word day. But I digress.)

[2] – You totally thought I was going to make a ‘come hard’ joke, didn’t you? Perv.

[3] – The answer to that is somewhat dependent on how many revisions the author has done. Finishing revisions sometimes leaves me with a very strong desire to never ever ever ever see that particular work again. Ever.

Comments

Jennifer (yes, *that* Jennifer):

Thank you! Not only did you address the issue at hand, which is not liking what’s happening at the moment in this work, but you tackled another issue I have, which is – can I jump around?

I have many different files with different scenes, little blurby bits, and shit that I don’t even know what to call. I’m worried that in the end, I won’t even be able to assemble this thing without an engineer and a rodeo clown, but at least now I know I’m not the only one who has to move on to something else sometimes.

It’s not, in fact, better to Burn Out

Nov 12th

I’m a little worried about some of you guys.

Not you, the one who’s a little behind you wordcount. You’re fine. Get back to work.

Not you, the one who writes exactly 1,667 words every day, and then stops. You’re… well, you’re not fine, but you’re beyond my help.

And not you two over in the corner, who write a little extra most days, and then maybe a little less other days cuz you can afford to, and then make it up.

I’m worried about you, over there: the one who’s at 31,000 words already, breathless and bloodshot. We need to talk.

(Take all the following with a grain of salt, guys: everyone writes differently, and everyone’s daily productivity is different, blah blah blah, we’re all unique snowflakes, et cetera. Also, this post is probably coming a little earlier than it needs to, and that’s fine — I’d rather talk about this now and have it be early than next week and have it be late.)

I’m worried you’re going to burn out or, worse, physically damage yourself (Repetitive Stress, et cetera) by just doing the same thing too much every day. I’ve been there, quite by accident, and it ain’t a fun place.

You need to pace yourselves.

A lot of folks who are doing NaNoWriMo don’t do a ton of writing the rest of the year. Cool. Fine. Nothing wrong with that. November becomes a special time — an event — you get to ignore other stuff in favor of writing, instead of the other way around (which is how it normally goes), and that’s some heady stuff.

As a result of this decadent blank check of writing prioritization, some folks go a little crazy. They churn 6000 words out day after day, cackling gleefully. After the first week, the cackles get a little less gleeful and a little more maniacal. In week three, the cackles get a little raspy – a little plague-stricken; also, those folks start rubbing their wrists a lot and taking handfuls of aspirin. Week 4? Week 4 ain’t pretty.

Don’t let this happen to you.

Listen, some of you out there can do that level of production every day with no ill-effects. You’ll have you’re fifty thousand words sometime Monday, and you’ll probably hit 113k by the end of the month. I’m not talking you.

(Seriously: I’m not talking to you, like, ever, because I both hate and fear you. We will not let the machines win.)

Most people can’t do that. Even if they can, they shouldn’t. Let’s take a look at Stephen King for a few seconds. Love him or hate him, no one can argue that the guy isn’t a productive and prolific writer[1]; he’s basically turned out at least one book every single year since he was about 20 or so, and he’s somewhere in his mid-60s now. The big secret to his productivity is pretty simple: write 2000 words, every single day. On Christmas. On Sundays. Whatever.

The astute reader will notice that’s pretty much what you’ve got to do to finish NaNoWriMo. The very astute reader will note that King’s been doing that pretty much non-stop[2] for 40 years without burning out.[3] A bit of word-math let’s us deduce that if he can maintain that pace for 40 years, we should be able to sustain that pace for a month, assuming we have something to say. (And the going wisdom says that everyone has at least one book’s worth of something to say inside of them, so you’ve got that advantage.)

What you don’t hear about are guys who write 3 times as much as King every single day for 40 years. Those that tried to maintain something like that either came to their senses or don’t write anymore, for any number of progressively depressing reasons.

So cool your jets. You want to enjoy yourself throughout the project, and that means not blasting away so hard that you burn out too early.

Ultimately, some of you may want to turn this into a Real Thing. A thing you do all the time. A lifetime pursuit and perhaps even profession. For that, you need to establish realistic, sustainable writing habits, and I’m sorry: your wrists might be young and supple now, but they won’t stay that way – six thousand words a day ain’t sustainable.

The guy on the right has written 1500 words while you read this post.

Here’s a few telltales to see if the stress of NaNoWriMo (which is normal) is turning into Burnout (which isn’t).

Stress:

- Over Engaged

- Emotions are overreactive

- Urgency and hyperactivity

- Loss of Energy

- May kill you prematurely[4]

Burnout:

- Disengaged

- Emotions are blunted

- Helplessness and hopelessness

- Loss of motivation and hope

- May make life seem not worth living

Sorry for the downer points, but it’s kind of important, you know? NaNoWriMo’s supposed to be fun, and sometimes it ends up being the very opposite of that.

Solution: Burnout Prevention

- Start the day with something relaxing. Spend a couple minutes doing some easy yoga or stretches (BACK Rx is on it’s way to me as I write this), writing something not-the-story longhand in a journal, or just reading a book you really like.

- Stick to healthy eating, exercising, and sleeping habits. As much you might want to, this is NOT the month to let yourself stay up til 2 am every night or to switch to your all-chicken-skin diet. You WILL be pulling some late nights, and you will be munching on some crap like halloween candy and ohmygodyumturkey, but don’t make it a daily habit, and try to get plenty of rest and some regular physical activity to make up for it. Take short naps.

- Set boundaries. Don’t overextend. Don’t agree to do more stuff than you can legitimately do. (But also: DON’T just leave your family and friends hanging in the wind all month – that’s a dick move about which I will write more another day.) Seriously, though: no new commitments on top of this one: learn to say no.

- Set a time each day when you completely disconnect. Put away your laptop, turn off your phone, and stop checking email. Doesn’t have to be a long time, but you should do it.

- Try to do something every week as a fun thing that has nothing to do with the project.

That’s about it. I’m not a genius about this stuff (said the guy trying to learn how to podcast at the same time as write this month), so if you have any good tips for avoiding stress and burnout, let’s hear it in the comments.

[1] – I, like Neil Gaiman, think he’s one of the finest living American writers; possibly one of the finest living or dead. Only time will tell.
[2] – Except when he got hit by the truck. That put a dent in his writing for awhile.
[3] – No, the alcoholism and mid-80s coke habit don’t count as burnout – just stupid.
[4] – But not in just one month. Chill out.

Comments

Michelle:

Non-nano months I write 2000 a day in fiction, 2000 nonfiction, and about 50-200 lines of code (more if it’s new design day).

One day when my noveling career takes off and coding, short stories and freelancing become just side projects then maybe I’ll slow down.

I’ll admit though I committed to a lot this month. Start a rough draft via nano, finish another draft so I can have it all for my critique group after nano. And I’ve got a long term freelancing gig going.

That start a rough draft and finish another one thing has been a little crazy.

Still I turn off the interwebs at night, and relax.

Doyce:

Yep. Like I’ve said on my other NaNo posts, I’m writing advice for myself.

Two classes to write, daily nano posts, the NaNo project, and hey… how about I learn how to do twice-a-week podcasts at the same time? Yeah, I’m pretty much writing this to me.

elysabeth:

Awesome blog, and thank you. I think we can all pull something away from this as writers, not just NaNoWriMos.

Ignoring your Inner Hermit

Nov 13th

The 2009 NaNoWriMo is practically cheating.

See, we actually get five weekends this November, and that’s like a whole extra week! Kinda. Sorta.

Okay, I don’t math.

But the point is still valid! Weekends are incredibly useful for NaNoWriMo — most of us didn’t get to take the month off just to write, so for a lot of folks this is our opportunity to catch-up, relax, or even get ahead in anticipation of the crappy schedule NEXT week. It’s when we can really buckle down, close all the doors, shut the world out, and write.

In this, our third weekend of NaNoWriMo, I want to make a suggestion:

Do not just close all the doors, shut the world out, and write.

Most of us have People of Significance in our lives (I’m not only talking about Significant Others, although they’re a subset of this group.); spouses, children, close family, close friends, bowling buddies, whatever. They’re out there. Most of them know you’re doing this NaNoWriMo thing. Some of them are actively helping you find the time to get your writing done (deflecting noisy children, doing the dishes alone, taking everyone out of the house on three-hour excursions), but even if they aren’t THAT active as a NaNo-supporter, they’re probably cutting you a lot of slack this month: not bugging you about unreturned phone calls and emails, letting you off the hook for poker night, not punching you in the junk when EVERY SINGLE CONVERSATION ends up being about the story you’re writing.

And here's what I think of your struggle with First Person, Present Tense...

One year, I decided to do NaNoWriMo without any support at all. I told NO ONE I was doing it. That was my third run through on a NaNoWriMo project so I had some data for comparison, and let me tell you — the stuff our friends and family do for us is huge. HUGE.

Don’t make them fucking regret it, people.

This weekend, you’ve got a new task: get your writing done, yes, but also open up the door to your writing space, step out, and do some stuff with or for the people who are cheering you on through this thing. Here’s a few nice things that don’t eat up an entire day and which can actually be a good thing for YOU, too.

- Do the dishes. Unasked. Do it during one of those stretches when everyone got out of the house to give you some writing time, and THEN go write. It won’t take that long.

- Go for a bike ride, or just a good walk. They don’t take that long and the views will give you ideas.

- Drive out to the airport and watch the planes take off and land, or go to a lake and watch the boats. Bring some snacks.

- Cloud watch.

- Go to a park (combines well with cloud watching). Maybe take a frisbee. (Can you tell it’s warm out here in Denver?)

- If it’s not warm where you are, go sledding. They’ll get cold soon enough, this won’t take that long.

- Miniature Golf. Mini-golf is awesome.

- Play some Happy Birthday, Robot! (If you aren’t sufficiently nerdcore to own fudge dice, just use regular dice and consider 1 and 2 to be -, 3 and 4 to be ‘blank’, and 5 and 6 to be +.)

- Buy them a little present. Little. Not big. Grab a cute bookmark at one of the Tattered Cover write-ins. Something to show you appreciate them. Doesn’t have to be much of anything.

I’m sure you have some other ideas. Post em in the comments.

Finally, make sure this time is not just “Time”; make it Quality Time.

By that, I mean: Don’t Multitask. If you’re writing, Write. If you’re Doing Something with Them, then DO ONLY THAT. Don’t mix the two.

Don’t.

Fucking Don’t; I’m serious.

(More on that some other post.)

For now, that’s it.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

… and go do something with the people cheering you on. They deserve it.

Totally. Worth it.

(This post is dedicated to Kate, Kaylee, Dave, Margie, Tim, Randy, Chris, and everyone else who puts up with this crap all the time. You guys are my heroes.)

Comments

Megansays:November 15, 2009 at 4:14 am (Edit)

Question for Kate: Did you actually do the dishes without being asked?!

Hahahaha :P

Doyce:

Pff. I’m on my second load, in between making pancakes and eggs for breakfast.

Yah gotta remember: I write this advice for me — it just happens to apply to other people.

kate:

Megan — He totally did! And he sent the little one to wake me up this morning, bringing tales of homemade pancakes.

Megan:

So good to hear!

And they think that chivalry is dead!

Trusting your Demon

Nov 14th

Okay not so much lazy as really busy recording the next two podcasts.

“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant – you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.

”Trust your demon.”
— Roger Zelazny

No insightful (or inciteful) post today, guys, just the advice above and a request for some comments from you: what’s the craziest thing you’ve done so far to solve a problem that’s cropped up in your story? Please share – I love hearing stuff like that.

Comments

De:

Went from not liking beer at all to liking craft-type beers a LOT?

Dude, I edited my taste buds. I think that counts.

Doyce:

+100 internets to De.

Rules of Three (Dirty Trick #2)

Nov 15th

File this one in there with the no-adverbs post — stuff you can do that will make your draft a little bit stronger and reduce the amount of pain you have to go through on revisions: Rules of Three.

Rules of three are pretty good — a hard limit that you’re not supposed to exceed when you’re writing. Let’s lay some out:

- Only three facts in any description. This is another Zelazny tip that I find wonderfully straightforward to implement. When you’re describing something (a person, a thing, a place, whatever), you only get to mention three facts. The reasoning is that the reader is only going to remember three facts anyway, so you’re better off dictating what those three things are rather than letting them cherry-pick from a two-page description of your protag’s love interest (pro-tip: I don’t give a fuck about the brand of their clothes). You can cheat and add extra bits as the story progresses.

- Only three uses of the same joke. Seriously, it’s not funny after that.

- Only three uses of the same anything. Be it a particular application of a superpower, vampire hypnosis, a dance move… whatever. Three.

- Only three adverbs per story. Might as well put a hard limit on the little fuckers.

- Only three exclamations points per story. Actually, “one per 50,000 words” is better, but you can have more in your first draft. EVERY SINGLE ONE must be in dialog, though. Don’t make me get the hose.

- Only three ellipses per story. That might be harsh. Maybe Three-per-25k words, but you can’t end ANY PARAGRAPH with them.

- Only three ‘nods’ per… chapter? You (and by that, I mean ‘I’) should do even better than that, but it’s a first draft.

- Only three ’shrugs’ per… aww, hell. Just try to control it.

Anyone else have some particular story element or vocabulary element that you find you have to control? Please, do share.

If not, get back to work.

Have fun.

Comments

Doyce:

Credit for this post idea goes to De and Chuck, who were talking about stuff on Twitter that led me to thinking about this.

De:

Cuss words.

De:

Or should I say, @#$%^& cuss words.

Hyetal:

Only three shrugs per story? Shoot, Zeke is averaging three shrugs per *sentence*.

Doyce:

Three shrugs a story? Oh hell no.

Last revision I did of the book I just sent off, I think I was averaging something like a shrug every five pages for the length of the book, before edits.

Maybe “three shrugs a chapter.”

Linda:

Sighs rate right up there with shrugs. My character sighs all the time. Oh, and blinks.

Frankie:

My characters sigh, look, and shrug a lot. One book’s draft one had so many sighs, one critique partner said she felt like she was hyperventilating. That…uh, was bad.

Oh, and in the book I’m writing now, in the dialogue, no one finishes a complete sentence. I have a LOT of dashes in this version. They might not stay… don’t know.

Bonus Reading:

- TERRIBLEMINDS: Repeat After Me, Writers: “No Unitaskers”

- On Descriptions and Breathing

- More on the Descriptions: the When and Why

It’s all about Falling Down

Nov 16th

Lemme try something - I saw it in a cartoon one time.

I’ve told this story before.

I grew up in a midwestern town. Maybe a little more ‘western’ than ‘mid’, but we still fell into the correct geographic zone, and like most towns in the midwest, we had a small school in which all the students pretty much signed up for all the extra-curriculars they could reasonably schedule; if we didn’t, then that year the school didn’t have a football team or something, and it was a point of pride that that sort of thing Did Not Happen in my home town.

Result: when I was a kid (and into high school) I pretty much did everything. Rehearsed dramatic readings. One-act plays. Oratory. Band (marching, concert, pep, and jazz). I wrote for the school paper and the yearbook. I did wrestling (once), and basketball, and track (for awhile), and (of course) Football.

I don’t know if I was any good at football, but I liked it. I was a starting lineman, and… well, our team did okay; in my senior year, we were ranked third in the state for our division, so we weren’t awful, by any means.

But in no way was I a natural.

So – this was back in junior high, probably, around the time when the coach was getting in trouble with the school board for telling us that we were the next Great White Hope for the school’s football program – and it’s late summer, probably a month or so before school actually starts, and practices have started up.

My mom worked (and works) in town, so she was usually the one to pick me up after practice, but on this particular day my dad was in town to drop off a load of grain or something, I don’t know, and he had dropped by the field, leaning on the fence with some of the other dads who stood along the fence and muttered observations about their kids. I didn’t notice him until about halfway through the practice, and when I did I suppose I must have amped up my performance a bit — I remember knocking a buddy of mine down a couple times during the blocking drill (man was he pissed) — but that was about it.

After practice, I was amped to talk about The Football on the drive back home.

Now a bit of context: Dad is not one of those guys you see on Friday Night Lights, trying to relive their glory days through their kids. I believe very firmly that he wanted nothing more than to see his kids succeed at whatever it was that they were into, even and especially if it had nothing at all to do with what he had been into in school. He took that suicide scene in Dead Poets Society to heart, is what I’m saying.

That said, I knew that Dad had played football. I know their team had been successful, back when everything was black and white. I was a lineman. Dad was a lineman. Moreover, I think Dad weighed an even 150# as a senior – at 185, I would have been some kind of mutant monster thing on his old team.

I was keen to hear a little praise.

The ride was pretty damned quiet.

“Did you see the blocking drill?” I asked him, and laughed.

“Yup,” he said. And that was it.

“Coach said I was probably going to start left tackle,” I said.

“Yep,” he said. “You’ll have to watch the ball out there, for the hike – it’s hard to hear the count when you’re that far out.”

More silence. More driving. Our farm was thirty miles from town, and Dad wasn’t in much of a hurry.

About five miles from the driveway, he said, “You’ll have better games if you have better practices.”

I didn’t know what to say. In my mind, I’d rocked that practice (at least the second half). I told him as much.

“The drills were fine,” he said, “but — ” He waved it away, which over time I’ve come to realize is what he does when he thinks there are so many suggestions to make that he’d run out of time.

“It was a good practice!” I protested. I went for the exclamation points pretty fast back then.

“I think the coach would just like to see you try harder,” he said.

“I’m trying hard!”

“If you were really trying,” he said, “you’d be falling down more.”

And that was that, as far as conversations go. Those of you who’ve known me a long time know that I try to keep that particular observation close at hand. It was the tagline on my first blog for a really long time. It’s the border on my twitter page now. It’s a marqee banner in my head, and in all my thinking about it, it boils out something like this: you have to try, and you have to fail, in order to get better. If you’re afraid of the part where you fall down (which you inevitably will), you’ll never get better.

I’m trying to teach that to my daughter now. She doesn’t like riding her bike, because she’s afraid of falling over (which she never has). I’m afraid of her falling over too, but I kind of wish she’d actually wipe out for once, so she could see that it’s not nearly as bad as the good parts.

Earlier this year, I ran across a good post at a site I never read. An excerpt:

Your $x (whatever your $x happens to be) is not some fragile vase that is going to shatter the second you $y. It is as strong as you decide it is, and the boundaries are where you set them.

I’m sure that this is obvious to other people, but it is not obvious to me: it’s okay if I’m not perfect. Really, it is. My writing is not some fragile vase that is going to shatter the second I split an infinitive.
— Alison at bluishorange

There are lots of things we stop doing, and while there are lots of reasons we stop doing them, one of the most prevalent and recurring is the fear that we won’t be… good. That we won’t do those things perfectly.

“I can’t do a great blog post today, so I’m just going to leave it to [tomorrow/next week/next month/later].”

“I don’t have time to do justice to a story right now.”

“I don’t have time to get good at playing sax again.”

Or this one.

“This project isn’t going very well at all – I’m going to leave it for now.”

I can’t do anything perfectly. Half the time, I can’t even do them well, but if I only did the things I knew I was going to do well, every time I did them, I wouldn’t do anything. Ever.

I would suck.

I would suck far, far worse than anything I might try and fail at.

The more we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become.

We’re in the wastelands now, with this NaNoWriMo thing. It’s a barren, quiet, scary place, and it’s where we start to get scared that we’re going to get to the end of the story, and it won’t be as good as we’d always thought Our Story would be.

Keep going.

Fall down.

Get muddy.

Get bloody, and get back up smiling.

The falling down is never as bad as the good parts.

Comments

Linda:

And when you fall, get scratched and bloody and sometimes scarred, think of the stories you will have to tell for each wound.

Chuck:

Dude, you rule.

De:

Yep.

Maggie M:

You have struck the nail square on the head for me. There are so many things I put off trying because I may fall down. Well I need to fall down. Thanks for the encouragement during this NaNoWriMo thing. Accomplishing this will resonate through the rest of my life and remind me that falling down doesn’t hurt so bad.

Jennifer:

Damn. You just took all the thoughts I’d been having and slaughtered them. Thank you. And also, I kinda hate you. Because I’m about 10,000 words behind and now I have to win.
Dammit.

Ann Marie:

Bingo. I had reached point where my pulse went up just looking at poison ivy. Finally got it (again), did not die, continued to hit the woods. Worst-case scenario on this NaNo thing is that I’ve missed a month of TV. Better get cracking.

Cynthia Schuerr:

This was the “kick in the pants” I needed today, Doyce.

Oh my gosh, thank you so much.

mom:

Good Drill, Doyce. I think it was a good practice too.

Looking ahead. Looking behind.

Nov 17th

Story time. You’ve earned it.

(Yeah I know I busted you in the chops yesterday and you’re all grim determination and I-don’t-care-if-it-sucks-I’m-DOING-IT today, and that’s fine. That’s good, in fact. But first, story time.)

When I was a kid, we had a huge lawn. Huge. The trauma has blocked clear memory of the thing from my mind: I don’t know precisely how big, but I remember that it was easier to express as acres than square feet. It took about five hours to mow the thing on a riding mower, if you had to bag the clippings.

I want to be clear here, because sometimes I joke or exaggerate for effect: in this case, I am not joking or exaggerating for effect; it took five damn hours.

Guess who got to mow that fucking thing every Saturday?[1]

To put it mildly, I hated it. It was a huge, daunting thing that never ever looked like it was going to be done.

When I complained about it, my mom had this suggestion:

In the first half, look at how much you’ve got done. In the last half, look at how little you’ve got left.

You get that little bit of midwest zen, guys? Take it to heart.

Look back for a second at what you’ve written. Thousands and thousands of words. Maybe you’re not quite halfway. Pff. Maybe you’re not loving the story. Fine. But it’s still a story. It generally hangs together in that way a story does, and you made it. You made up this thing out of your head and wrote it down — this amazing, gargantuan thing — maybe something bigger than anything you’ve ever done.

Be proud of that.

Now, look ahead. Compare what you have left to do to what you’ve already done.

Piece. of. monkey. cake.

How do I know this?

Because you have already done an Impossible Thing, and that makes you mighty.

You live here.

Be mighty.

Write a book.

Have fun.

[1] – And people wonder how I got so much reading done as a kid.

Comments

mom:

I kinda of forgot that little bit of advice–maybe I should try it with housework and window washing.

Bang! (with Ninjas)

Nov 18th

So here we are. Week Three, innit it? Bit of pain in the ass, this one. Some folks call it the wasteland. Some call it the weeds.

I call it dirty things you wouldn’t call your wife, unless it was the Special “Diceless Roleplay” Weekend.

Too much info? Right, moving on.

It’d be easy for me to say you’re stuck, but it’s also not quite right. You’re flailing around, sure, and mud’s flying up in every damn direction, and you really can’t see where you’re going cuz it’s all up on the windshield and christ your dad’s gonna be pissed unless you can get it to a carwash before he sees it, but you’re not stuck-stuck; you’re moving, but it’s sluggish, and you’re starting to worry that if you keep going the way you’re going, you really WILL be stuck.

You need a big goddamn boost to get out.

Let’s talk about Bangs.

Bang.

Some of you have heard me talk about Bangs before in the context of gaming.

Put simply (and in writing rather than gaming terms), a “Bang” is when a scene introduces some sort of event or piece of information that requires a choice from one of your characters, and you don’t already know what they’re gonna choose.

Let me break that criteria down one more time:

- Something happens that cannot be ignored and which requires some sort of response.

- You’re not entirely sure what your protag is going to decide to do.

And example from my NaNoWriMo project:

I’m at about 30k words. There’s been a lot of talking going on, and it’s time to shake stuff up a bit. Per my own advice, I attack the scene with genre-appropriate ninjas. This situations creates a Bang (fine: “decision point” if you must) for Finnras:

- Return to the ship, where Deirdre is in danger from the G.A.N.s.

- Continue onward in pursuit of his daughter, abandoning Deirdre and other members of his crew to their own fate.

A couple key things to pick up from this kind of event:

- It puts things into motion.

- You learn something you didn’t know (or weren’t entirely sure of) about the character.

These are both pretty good boosts for getting out of the muck, and they also have a fairly good chance of propelling the story in unexpected and interesting directions that will give you a boost of enthusiasm and energy — enough to power through to the end of the story.

For reference, here are a couple types of Bangs I’ve used in the past, broken out with labels decreed by a Mike Holmes, from whom I learned a lot of this stuff.

Dilemma: This is like the example I mentioned from my current story. You just grab two Important Things and make up a situation that forces a decision between those two things. Finding the Important Things is pretty easy – take what you know or think you know about the character, pick two things that seem to be roughly equal in importance, and set up a situation where they have to pick between the two. Note: this sort of event can result in the character losing the thing they didn’t choose, but this isn’t necessary, and it might be better (read: more incredibly awkward and painful for the character at a later point in time) if that doesn’t happen.

Be aware that you character may decide to pull a Batman and change the situation: they don’t accept that they can’t get one thing without losing the other, so they put a third thing at risk, trying to save both of the original things. This is awesome. Go with it.

Escalation: this is essentially hitting the same choice as a previous Dilemma, but upping the stakes. Basically, you take the unselected option from a previous dilemma and make it more important or more endangered. Let’s say Finn goes with “I have to follow my daughter,” because the threat to his crew isn’t that concrete and they’re actually pretty competent people. In an escalation, I can come back to that later and set up a scene like “okay, the crew is now captured, and they’re totally gonna die/go to jail for a million years/vote republican… or you can go after your daughter.

Identity Crisis: Do I need an example of this? Really? Okay…

“Luke, I am your father.”

There. Someone thinks they’re one thing, and they find out they’re something or someone else. Hit em with the Sith Lord Daddy and stand back to see what happens.

Something Totally Weird: Exactly what it sounds like. Something really weird happens which can’t be ignored because it’s so… weird. With no particular clue about a solution, what we learn about the character (hopefully) is how they try to address the event.

Ninjas! So you’re kind of out of moral dilemmas, but you still need to get the action going. For this, I give the floor to Reverend Raymond Chandler:

Have somebody come in guns blazing, and figure out who they are later.

Does your guy fight or run? Do they freeze? Are there innocents to protect? Valuable stuff that needs to be kept from harm? Watch, learn, and write it down.

Don’t have ninjas in your story? Dude, everyone has ninjas.

Mutant beaver ninjas.

Pervert Alien Ninjas.

Doctor Ninjas. (Or possibly disease outbreak ninjas.)

Not ninjas, but still awesome.

… and that’s it.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

Dirty Trick #3 – There’s always a conflict.

Nov 19th

Over at House of the D, De muses about the nature of conflicts and scenes in a story.

Any scene with NO CONFLICT = DOOOOOOM.

Two characters fall happily in love? One of them has a fatal disease. A mother and daughter quit arguing? The mother has called the men in white coats to come pick up the daughter and wants to keep her peaceful until the girl’s sedated. The villain invites the hero in for tea? Strichnine, my friend. Strichnine.

Remember: any degree of “happily ever after” that occurs before the end of the story is doomed!

First of all, that’s some pretty damn good thinkin’ going on right there.

Second AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, this is a great engine for getting us more WORDS, people!

But we have to be careful. In order to take advantage of this Dirty Trick, we have to do something we should never do during NaNoWriMo: go back and look at the stuff we’ve already written.[1]

What we’re looking for in this case is any scene where there’s no real conflict: everyone just gets along pretty well, or no one’s trying to convince anyone of anything, or it’s just an info dump. Something. Doesn’t matter. We are NOT going to read the whole story to find those scenes. We’re going skim.

Skim v. skimmed, skim·ming, skims
4. To read or glance through (a book, for example) quickly or superficially.

Now, I can sort of cheat on this, because while I don’t use chapter breaks in Adrift, I do separate each scene with this:

-=-

… so I can just search for that, glance at the first line of the scene that follows the -=-, and ask myself:

What’s the conflict in that scene?

If there is any kind of answer to that question, I move on.

If there is no answer to that question, I then say:

Ah ha, then what was secretly going on in that scene?

And maybe I’ll add one line at the end of the scene where one of the protags calls someone up after the other guy leaves and says, “It’s me. He believed it.” or whatever.

And THEN, I have a whole other scene I can write in which we find out more about what was really going down in that previous scene, and really screw the characters some more.

Your characters will want you to be kind. Ignore their pleas.

And that’s it. More words to write. More story stuff happening. Not just plot, but plotting. Aren’t you just nefarious?

That’s it; short and sweet.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

[1] – Yes, I have to reread everything in my first draft, while I’m writing it, to do the podcasts. Yes, I’m taking a stupid risk. Do what I say, not what I do. #goodparenting

Comments

Rebecca:

I needed this post today. My characters just got to a happy scene where all is going right, and don’t want to continue on because of that big nasty car accident that’s about to come their way. And I felt kind of bad putting them into that car when they just finally found their collective happiness. I was trying to find some way around that ugly mess.

Now I feel better about killing some of them.

Doyce:

Rebecca,

“I needed this post today” is – no bs – the best thing I can read in these comments. Thanks. :)

Jennifer:

I just can’t come away from your blog without something useful.

Today it’s that tiny, animated graphic that was likely just a funny afterthought to you, but to me it explains everything. I set out with this really messed up protagonist but I can’t make her look as bad as she is. She wants me to paint her in this good light and that’s boring.

Crap. Every time I want to quit you give us something else useful. Damn you. ;-)

Doyce:

Jennifer,

The images are never an afterthought. Take from that what you will.

Also: I’m rooting for yah.

Okay, how far behind are you?

Nov 20th

Okay, sometimes I talk about things that help with NaNoWriMo, and quite by accident they happen to also be useful things for just… you know: writing. I don’t know if this is one of those times. It may not be. We’ll see.

We’re hitting a point in NaNoWriMo when the disparity in wordcounts is starting to show. Some folks are done already (don’t worry about it – we don’t like those people very much), some folks are a little ahead – around 40k, say, some are just chugging along doing a few hundred more than they need every day (that’d be me), some are five thousand or ten thousand words behind.

And some of us are… really behind.

Let’s talk about being behind.

The first year I did NaNoWriMo, I started out behind. There was this thing I had to go do, and on November 4th I had like… I dunno. 350 words. So I was about 5k in the hole right off. Plus I had never really written anything of any significant length at that point. I so chugged and churned and built a multi-user blog for other crazy people who were doing this new NaNoWriMo thing so we could cheer each other on, and right around the 14th, I finally caught up.

And then I went to this gaming convention (when I should have been home writing anyway), ate a bad chicken sandwich (Carls Jr. can die in a fire), and was hospitalized in ICU with the most mind-blowing case of food poisoning imaginable. Safe to say I fell behind again.

That year, I sent my family off to Thanksgiving dinner at our friends’ place and stayed home, pounding away at the keys to finish up. Only me and ***Dave finished of our local band, that year.

I thought that was the most I’d ever be behind. The following year went fine, though *Dave’s wife did mention how disruptive NaNoWriMo was for everyone around the writers.

A few years later, I decidedt again. However, I also wanted to finish up revisions on a previous story (Hidden Things, which has seen at least four ‘final revisions’ since then), and I wouldn’t let myself start til I was done with those revisions.

I didn’t finish revisions until November 8th. As I wrote the first word of a story called Spindle, I was sixteen thousand words in the hole and needed to average about 2300 words a day to finish in time.

Also, I didn’t tell anyone I was doing NaNoWriMo. Nobody. I wanted to prove that I could write a book without disrupting everyone around me. As a result, I didn’t have a good (or even bad) excuse for turning down some honey-do projects during the month, and ended up:

- Landscaping the front yard.

- Learning how to tile and then tiling the master bath and the kitchen.

I never got caught up at any point that month. I had a few 5000 word days, a 6800 day, and one 8700 word day, but I had a couple 0 days in there too, so don’t get too impressed. I submitted the final text four minutes to midnight on November 30th. The count was 50012 words.

I’m not mentioning any of this stuff to brag; I’m trying to tell you that I know from being behind.

So, you’re behind, what do you do?

Buck up, lil buckaroo.

1. Forget about the word count.

I know: It’s NaNoWriMo! Word count is king!

Well, the king ain’t on your side anymore.

You remember the story I told about mowing the lawn? Well, if you need to write 33000 words in the next 11 days, that’s too much lawn to look at. You can’t worry about that. (Note: I’m saying 33000 simply because it’s a big number, and 11 divides into it nicely.)

You need to work with numbers your brain and your ego can handle. 3000 words a day? Ouch. Let’s try…

Pages. Pages might work for you. Each page in double-spaced Times New Roman 12 is about 250 words, give or take. I’m saying 250 for the sake of easy math. 3000 words is about 12 pages. Call it 13 for a nice symbolic number. Baker’s Dozen. Totally…

Okay, no. That still feels like a lot to me. Let’s try…

Scenes. Okay, this is a lot better. A decent scene with some action or a good argument or whatever will give you 1000 words. (A really good scene will give you 1200, 2000, or more, but let’s not get greedy.) A thousand words! That’s awesome! You only have to write three solid scenes a day! Totally doable!

Dirty Trick: Don’t just write three scenes. Start the fourth one and stop for the day mid-sentence. You are too far behind now to fuck around at the beginning of each writing session with window- and/or navel-gazing. Sit down, look at the screen, see the half-done thought, finish it, and KEEP WRITING from there. Hit the ground running, cuz you have miles to go.

2. Scout ahead.

Before this year, I’d never written with an outline, but during the year-of-16k-behind, I did scout things out from day to day so that when I hit the ground running, I knew which way to go. Here’s what it looked like:

“But where will I find — [START HERE]

-=-

[Bobby and Kiffer, outside Bobby's house]

-=-

[Keven meets the King]

-=-

[Keven meets the Master of the Hunt]

-=-

[Bobby and Kiffer and the Entourage go marching]

So I’ve got my half-finished scene, three full scenes to write the next day, and a scene to start and not-finish. All I have to do is word-search for [START HERE] the next day and start typing.

Did I word count at the end of the day? Sure I did, but mostly I didn’t bother.

3. Skip to the good (read: easy) parts

About 15k into Spindle, I decided to do a flashback to where the girl (Keven) first met the King and the man she’d later fall in love with (the huntsman) — both of whom are chasing her with a pack of hunting dogs at the start of the story. I wanted to see how we’d got to that point.

So I got into this flashback, and I just… didn’t want to come out. I’ve always liked writing in a fairy tale style, and this was that, but with a sort of gritty YA twist, and I just loved the hell out of it (still do, come to that). I knew I’d eventually have to write the rest of the story, but I figured I’d ride that pony as long as it’d carry me, because the words were coming out easy and I needed all the help I could get.

So that’s what I did: scene after scene, all part of that flashback… which ended up taking the next thirty-five thousand words.

When you do your scouting ahead, you’ll be writing down a few scene ideas out ahead. If you get to one of those starter-notes where the words are coming hard… yes, normally, you’d slog through anyway (and honestly the hard-to-write stuff comes out very well most of the time, even if it felt like sanding your brain to write it), but right now? No. If you see that the next scene after this hard one would practically write itself, get the fuck over there and LET IT DO THAT.

However, be aware that the scene that looked super painful and hard and slow to write yesterday might be your ‘practically writes itself’ scene tomorrow. That stuff happens all the time.

4. … I dunno.

That’s all the tips I have about this right now, except for this:

You gotta have fun. (It may be “17th mile of the marathon” fun, but that’s a kind of fun, too.) Do not fucking burn out on this. It’s not worth it. Write what you write, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t hit 50k, and try it again next year. Or don’t. Or just keep going come December 1st. (That’s what I’m doing, because no way will Adrift be done on the 30th, and I’m kind of thrilled about the prospect of seriously working on something solid for probably three months.)

Remember that you’ve already learned stuff. Maybe you’ve learned that you can’t just stop when you get hung up on a protagonist’s issue, cuz it kills your momentum. Maybe you’ve learned you can sit your ass down and write every day, even when you don’t feel like it. Maybe you’ve confirmed that you really do love this stuff. Maybe you’ve found out you don’t. That’s okay too. Every book needs a hell of a lot more readers than writers.

Still here?

Okay. You’ve got a lot to do right now.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

Comments

Ptocheia:

I definitely do #2 and #3! I’ve got a little list of “things to write, eventually” at the end, so when I run out of ideas I can hit that list. Which, incidentally makes #3 very useful. I’ve got scenes I want my characters to be in, but since the hard part is getting them to that scene, I’ll just stick in a [stuff happens] bracket and worry about said stuff when I have the luxury of time (i.e. sometime after Dec 1st!).

yi shun:

every year is different…and wonderfully insane-making.

Linley Dolby:

“Remember that you’ve already learned stuff.”

Yes! That’s one of those things you tend to lose sight of when you’re deep into it.

I may have dropped out and failed to get my groove back, but the whole thing really is an exercise in craft, so word count isn’t necessarily king if there are other lessons learned.

For example, I have discovered that I REQUIRE an outline!

Thanks again for your words of wisdom. I will be referring back to many of these posts in the future.

Stephanie:

Excellent post. Great timing and just the right doses of reality, humor, and motivation. Thank you (as I struggle to, yes, catch up).

Paige:

Can I just say that you’re totally awesome? THANK YOU for this post. I think needed to read it pretty badly.

Giving back

Nov 21st

This post is really not about writing at all. This is about National Novel Writing Month and the Office of Letters and Light non-profit organization that make the thing happen.

Every time I go to nanowrimo.org, I notice that little donation graph over on the side of the front page, and the info underneath that tells me that a little more than 4% of the people signed up for NaNoWriMo have donated.

That would kind of blow my mind, because it’s such an awesome thing and does a lot of good for kids as well as all of the adults, but the really kind of crazy thing is that despite the piddling number of people who have donated, they’ve collected so much money.

Not quite enough to run the office all year ’round, not yet, but close. If they could double what they have right now, they could do some truly neat thing and worthwhile things (if you mouse over each book in the graph, it tells you what they can do if they hit that amount).

SO, here’s the one time I’ll rattle a tin cup for this little party we’re all dancing at.

I think it’s a good organization, I think they do good things, and I think I can afford to donate the amount of money I’ll spend taking my wife to the movies tonight — I get at least that much value out of it every year. At least.

Hell, this year’s efforts have made me a couple friends that aren’t even doing NaNoWriMo, let alone those that are — that’s worth it to me right there.

I dunno. Search the couch cushions, or your wallet, or just your paypal account and toss a couple bucks in the tin, if you think you learned something this year. Small price to pay.

And just think of all the good karma...

That’s it. No more prodding.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

NaNoWriMo: Contents Under Pressure, Possibly Habit-forming

Nov 22nd

Back on day eight, I mentioned that by getting that far through NaNoWriMo, you’d already gotten past two of the primary “I quit” days in the month: Days 3 and 7.

Now we’re past day 21. If you’ve gotten this far, and you’re still here, I think you’re going to do okay. In fact, I think you’ve probably picked up an unexpected benefit from this month; a habit.

(And no, I don’t mean the caffeine or chocolate addition. Can’t help you with those: sorry.)

A number of the classes I teach at my day job have to do with modifying your own behavior (time management, verbal communication, how to not be a pain in the ass for everyone who reads your email or anything else you write, et cetera), so when I talk about what needs to change, I also talk about how to change that habit or, more to the point, how to make the change stick.

Failure to form this habit will result in the tape-and-body-hair punishment.

Changing a habit is always the hard part, after all, and it’s why people fail at things like ‘keeping the house clean’ or ’saving money’ or ‘maintaining a healthy weight.’

Usually, this failure stems from one simple thing: none of those goals involve changing just one habit; they require changing a lot of habits and frankly people aren’t very good at changing a lot of habits at the same time. In order to make progress, you need to pick one habit out of the whole mess, and focus on that.

There are, in fact, steps.

- 1. Commitment. Commit yourself to a habit change, big time. Make your commitment as public as possible.

- 2. Practice. Changing habits is a skill, and like any skill it takes practice. Most people suggest challenging yourself to a 30-day Challenge and try to do your new habit every single day for 30 days.

- 3. Tracking. It’s best if you log your progress every day. This will make a successful habit change much more likely.

- 4. Rewards. Reward yourself. Do so often, early on — every day for a week or so, then every three days, then the end of every week, and then at the end.

- 5. Focus. It’s hard to do more than one or two habits at a time — you can’t maintain focus — so just pick one.

Does… any of this sound familiar?

I want to congratulate you. Not on winning NaNoWriMo – that’ll come – but on something much more valuable: on building a writing habit.

It’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?

Comments

Chuck:

No! It’s a total misery and now I am a creature mired in self-loathing! I hate you, Doyce Testerman! I hate you so bad!

…

Okay, not really.

Great post, as usual.

– c.

I feel like you need a pep talk.

Nov 23rd

So we’re about a week out. Next Monday night, they take down the tents and roll the circus off to the next town.

Now, if you’re very very lucky, and your word count is roughly on track, you’re maybe starting to see where the end is. There’s about ten big scenes between here and there, and you’re home free, running under the sun.

Maybe not, though.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it’s so hurtful to think about writing. – Heather Armstrong

Could be you just finished up a nice, big, fat weekend where you expected to get about five thousand words both days and really get ahead. Or get caught up. Or something. That was what you expected.

You didn’t expect it to hurt, that’s for goddamn sure. You didn’t expect it to feel like pulling your eyeteeth with a pair of needlenose vise grips just to get 400 words out. You didn’t expect to barely get through your daily word count, and nevermind that crazy talk about getting ahead a little bit — let’s just forget that idea was ever out on the table. It’s disheartening, is what it is; umpteen thousand more words? After we’ve done so many? That’s just –

It’s okay.

Listen.

Shh. Shut up.

It’s okay.

I’m putting these posts out here for everyone, and I feel – genuinely feel – as though they’re doing some good. I really hope that they are – it’s why I keep doing them when (and here’s a big reveal) I had absolutely no intention of doing them in the first place. Shit just happens sometimes, you know? Sometimes it’s good that it does.

But I also feel as though some folks think that, since I’ve done this a bunch in the past, this shit is easy for me, so let me be clear:

This is not easy for me. I am right there with you, just barely ahead of my word count, unable to really get ahead a little bit and coast.

Sure, every so often, I get an absolutely burning desire to write. To write right now. I am filled with author-energy and goddamn but I just have to get my fingers on a keyboard immediately.

Those magical moments almost exclusively happen about four minutes into a two-hour meeting that I have exactly zero chance of skipping.

Most of the time? 99% of the time, when it’s time to write, I’m reluctant to sit down. I’m sluggish about actually starting.

I have a theory that the closer you get to the Thing You Should Really Be Doing With Yourself, the more you procrastinate and drag your feet, because your mind (filthy, lazy traitor) knows how busy it’s going to be when that Thing begins, and it’s trying to prevent it from happening.

So instead of those fiery bolts of inspiration sweeping us away, there’s a routine. There’s the obligation and the commitment and the habit and the necessity of avoiding the shame of failure. That gets me sat down and writing.

It is not easy. We do it anyway.

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail. – Ernest Hemingway

So we had a non-stellar weekend, productivity-speaking. That was yesterday. Fuck yesterday.

Today, write.

Or maybe you made the mistake of re-reading stuff from earlier this month, and now you can’t bear the thought of doing anything but going back and fixing the broken bits you saw. It’ll only take a few minutes. An hour, tops.

No.

It will take the rest of the month, if you let it; the rest of your life. This is not statue-polishing time; it isn’t even statue-carving time. It’s cut-the-stone-from-the-mountain time, and that sucker is almost out. Don’t start –

You know what? This reminds me of a story.

Story Time

I love my grandmother. I love her to tiny little grandmother pieces, and not because she’s the only grandma I’ve got left — it’s because she’s always been the ‘cool’ grandma. (I’m her oldest grandkid, and that actually holds some traction with her as well, which I don’t mind.) She is unfailing in her love and support and her rickety laugh and her quirky smile.

She just… does this one little thing I hate.

See, Grandma Floy has been around a couple of times when I’ve moved. Two, if I remember correctly, and she has always been a tremendous help, even if it’s just with a few suggestions here and there and making sure we all have some lemonade and sandwiches when it’s time for a break.

But there’s this other thing she does during the move.

She dusts the furniture.

Not… you know… not when it arrives in the new place.

Not when it gets unpacked.

Not before we pack it.

She dusts that shit while we’re moving it.

No, not while it’s on the truck.

While we are carrying it. While we are carrying it to the truck. Through doors and other door-like apertures. She is dusting.

So forget that rock-carving analogy. That’s trite and overdone. Try this:

This is not Dusting time. This is not even Unpacking time. This is Lugging and Moving time. Put the fucking dust cloth down, Floy-Jean. I love you, but damn.

Or this:

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped. — Lillian Hellman

… to which I will add “so stop trying, cuz you’ve got work to do.”

You do, right?

You do. Write.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

The only reason for being a writer is that you can’t help it. — Leo Rosten

Using Time

Nov 24th

I’m writing from the Home Office today, rather than a booth at Panera or the front seat of my parked car over lunch hour. I have this lovely wingback chair (secretly also a recliner) in the corner of my office, and it’s in that chair that I’ve tapped out about two-thirds of this month’s project (with my trusty EeePC resting on the Logitech Portable Lapdesk that makes in-chair typing not just possible by actually enjoyable).[1]

This unfamiliar comfort comes to me as the primary benefit of burning some of my precious vacation time to extend the Thanksgiving holiday a little bit. Tomorrow, Kate and I will be spending ten hours of quality time together – with our dogs – driving to (and through) the barren wastelands that birthed me, but I took the extra day to both prep for the trip and write.

That’s right: a whole glorious day of writing – an actual day away from work, and not some crappy Saturday or Sunday, where your writing time is polluted by pointless interruptions like “family activities” and “feeding children” and “things I absolutely promised I’d do, even though it’s NaNoWriMo”. There are no family activities or children to do them with — the kids are at school, and my wife is working. Likewise, I have no weekend home improvement/maintenance obligations, because it is not the weekend.

Do you see the loophole I have discovered? Can you conceive the power that rests within my hands?

Who wants to touch me?

I said WHO WANTS TO TOUCH ME?

I’m sure you’re asking yourself how I’ll be spending the day — with Thanksgiving coming, there’s even a small chance you’ll be able to enjoy a luxury similar (albeit inferior) to mine, so let me lay out the means with which I maximize my writing productivity on a day like today.

[But first, a brief pause in the writing while I drive my darling child off to participate in the physical and mental enrichment so necessary to ensuring that she can take care of me financially in my old age. ]

*Returns, windblown, toting a mocha with double espresso shot.*

Ahh, evil corporate caffeine goodness. *sips* Ahh.

Okay, now then, where was I. Oh yes.

The Day.

Now is the time that we make the boogie.

A writer is working when he’s staring out of the window. – Burton Rascoe

6 am: Get up.

I know this isn’t how most people roll. Hell, it’s not how I’d choose to, if I didn’t have a day job and (more significantly) a four year old to get ready before I can go to said day job. However, I do have those things, so 6 am is what happens, even when I could theoretically sleep in — my brain wakes me up at 5:45 and I start thinking about stuff, at which point I might as well get up.

Breakfast.
I eat immediately upon rising, because otherwise I forget, and if you get up and stay active for about an hour or so in the morning without feeding yourself, your body starts worrying it’s not going to GET any food, and goes into fat-storage mode, which means that when you DO eat, it’ll all get stored as… well. Yeah. So I eat right away, check email, catch up on my must-reads out on the internets, et cetera.

Blog Post.
I start putting together the daily blog post.

Daughter.
She slept in a bit, which is fine since we’re in no rush today. She piles into the office and sits with me for a bit, then demands breakfast, which I provide. After, she is given instructions to get dressed for school (and oh how I love that she’s able to do that semi-autonomously these days), and I poke at the blog post a bit more.

Wife arises.
There may be some kissing here. I ain’t sayin’.

Kate also, at Kaylee’s request, is in charge of Doing Hair. Apparently, I suck at it.

School Delivery.
Goodbyes take awhile, since I won’t see Kaylee until Friday and I need to store up as many hugs and kisses as I can.

Drop-off is followed by Ambulatory Caffeine Tropism (run to Starbucks).

More Blog Post.
That would be me, writing this.

Start Next Blog Posts.
I’m going to be on the road all day, so I’m writing a pre-scheduled post for tomorrow (probably built around a comment Nathan Fillion made about the cancellation of Dollhouse) and for Thanksgiving (on the secret practices of Ninja Story Writing). The Thanksgiving one will be scheduled to drop EARLY, peeps, so you can implement the secrets within THAT VERY DAY.

Exercise.
Kate is off to Nia, where she is working on getting her White Belt (first tier of Instructor, I gather). In the meantime, I go downstairs and do about five miles on the elliptical (30 minutes). Say what you will about gym-vs-outside-vs-whatever, this is the deal: with a kid around, it is emm-effing hard to get to the gym regularly (unless the kid’s scheduled to be in a class there themselves), and frankly it’s a pain in the ass to take an hour to get ready, go, and come back from a 30 minute workout. It is not a pain in the ass to walk downstairs and hop on the elliptical – therefore, I actually do it, which is really that part that makes exercise… you know… effective.

Why does exercise make it into the Day of Writing schedule? Because mind and body are all one thing, peeps. They call it muscle memory for a reason; I’m not just a squishy harddrive being carrying around by the meat-zombie – the whole body is the harddrive, and it needs refreshment and exercise as much as your brain to work well. Also, the workout gets some blood going to the brain, which ain’t bad.

(Not to mention Thanksgiving’s coming, and I just had a Venti Mocha — the fact is, I just need to work out.)

The elliptical faces a blank wall, which encourages my mind to wander to things I need to write today. This is on purpose.

Maybe you don’t have a home gym, or a gym-gym? Then go for a walk or something. I highly recommend it.

Shower.
Another great idea machine. My best ideas come in the shower. I wish I could find a waterproof whiteboard to mount on the wall in there.

Finish Blog Posts.
Hopefully by about 11am, but given that I’m already behind a bit on my schedule AS I WRITE THIS, more like noon.

Lunch! (And Stare out the Window)
Ham and cheese on toast. Coke Zero. Some almonds. I want to keep it light so I don’t get sleepy in the afternoon.

Also, probably dump some of the leftovers that are going to go bad while we’re gone.

Also also, get caught back up on email and Twitter and suchlike.

Write Story.
One keypress disables the wifi in my netbook (I had no idea how often I’d use that feature); another disables the touchpad. Off we go.

I’m shooting for a big chunk of words today: four or five scenes, hopefully.

Scene One done.
Go get another soda. Let the dogs outside. Rotate the laundry, if Kate hasn’t already.

Scene Two done.
Stare out the window for awhile. Think about building an addition onto the house. Finally remember to check to see if the hotel for this weekend has wifi.

Get another Soda.

Err. Wait. Is that an actually bold-faced thing? Probably.

Scene Three, done.
Walk the dogs around the block, pick up the mail. Get outside, let your brain chew on local flora and fauna. Let your dogs sniff local flora and fauna.

Dump all the mail into the recycling bin when you get home. Saves the trouble of sorting it.

Poke around the Internet. Stare out the Window.
Twitter. My own blog if there’s comments. Play the new Adrift podcast back while I’m browsing. Twitter again. Newsreader, and probably Burning Wheel’s forums, just cuz.

Also, log into Lord of the Rings Online on the Main Machine, so that it can download updates, cuz December 1 is coming soon, and there’s a new expansion dropping that day. It’s like they KNOW about NaNoWriMo.

Scene Four… kinda halfway.
I started it too late, and it’s time for…

Supper.
Which is going to be Chuck’s Stuffed Squash Thing tonight. It SHOULD be a leftovers night, but dammit I want to try the recipe.

Also, we’ll probably watch some TV. Castle and Fringe are on the DVR, so figure we blow at least 85 minutes on both of those, not counting cooking time, so figure it’s dark by the time we’re all done.

Also also, we’ll fold and put away laundry while we watch TV. Hell, I might even pack my part of the suitcase. Watching TV is one of those (very rare) things where I don’t mind multi-tasking.

… Finish Scene Four
This will take awhile. I will get up and get another soda at least once in here.

Browse More Internets.
Kiss at least 30 minutes goodbye here.

Start Scene Five
There is going to be a LOT of window-gazing in this one, because it’s been quite a day. My goal is to get about halfway in, then leave it so I can jump into that on the long-ass drive tomorrow. (Bless the 7 to 9 hour battery life on my netbook. Bless it, I say.)

And that’s the Day.
What to take away from all of this? It ain’t all writing. Breaks are necessary. (Honestly, I’m sure I severely downplayed the number of times I’ll check the internet today.) Refresh your brain often, and spend time with the people in your life because while writing is awesome, having someone to share it with when you’re done is so much better.

That’s it.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

[1] – I could actually talk at some length about why I write in the chair/lapdesk on my netbook and not at the nice big desk all of four feet away — the one with the lovely ergnomic keyboard hooked up to the Big Fancy PC and Big Fancy Monitor — but that’s probably a post for another day. Specifically, for a day closer to the start of the month, not the end. Opportunity missed, I’ll come back to it another time.

Comments

Elissa:

That sounds a whole lot like my writing days. Not just my NaNoWriMo days either, but all of them all year long (minus the bits with family and kids and stuff, don’t have those). Sometimes I feel like a slacker when I have a whole free day to write and I only spend a few hours of it actually writing.

But all of this is true! Breaks are important for the brain! And being connected to the world and stuff is good for the creativity.

At least, you’re making me feel like less of a slacker :)

In Which You Are Amazing

Nov 25th

Amazing what can happen when you have the finish line in sight. – Nathan Fillion

Okay, you got me: he’s not talking about writing, but a (probably justifiably) cancelled TV show, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

It’s the 25th. Five days to go.[1]

By now, one of two things have probably happened — you’ve either–

What? Okay, fine. There are three things:

1. You can see where the story needs to end.

2. You can see that the story’s actually a lot longer than 50k.

3. You have no fucking idea where the story’s going.

Conveniently, you do the same thing in any of those situations.

Charrrrrrrrrge!

If 1, you are charging toward the actual finish line.

If 2, you are charging to a big crisis point. (You didn’t know there was a crisis point coming? There is. You need to leave things on a horrifying, terrible cliffhanger at 50k, so you are forced to come back to it next month. I will allow nothing less.)

If 3, you are charging to blast your way out of the marshy wasteland and into some clear territory, where you can get your bearings.

We’ve been in the Wastelands a long while[2], and it’s time to come out. As scary as they were when we headed in, we’ve gotten kind of used to them; we’ve gotten comfortable. Are they nice? No. Are there creature comforts to be had? No. Have we known the lilt of another human voice? Nope, and believe me, that’s starting to show in our eyes.

But for all that, there have been upsides: we can talk to ourselves, cry at the triumphs and agonies we’ve made up out of our of heads, laugh at the jokes that maybe no one else will ever think is funny. It’s hard to leave a place like that, where we can really let the writercrazy out.

But it’s time. We’re headed back for civilization now, and to cross that border, we need to charge – to force it.

This is good. It means one last little burst of crazy; a farewell to the wasteland.

Don’t overthink it.

Actually, to quote my wife, it’s best not to ‘think’ it, period. Whatever’s coming off your fingers and onto the page, go with it – it’s the story that wants to be told, and right now, you’re writing it just for you, so throw it out there and enjoy the process.

By way of example, I’m going to share a short bit from the story I’m working on. Bear with me.

The princess heard a squirrel-sized thump from the throne room. She knew that was bad, because squirrel-sized noises didn’t carry that far (she was down the hall and out of view of the guards) unless they were very loud to begin with, and that meant that Mak might have fallen down the chimney.

It also meant that the guards next to the throne room doors probably heard it.

“Did you hear something?” one of the guards asked the other.

“Oh dear,” the princess whispered.

“You know, I think I did,” said the other guard. “Sounded a bit like –”

“A thump?” suggested the first guard.

“That’s the word for it,” the second guard said. “A thump. I wonder –”

The princess heard another sound, then, which she also recognized, and wished she didn’t.

“Here now, did you hear that?” asked the first guard.

“I did,” said the second guard, “but that wasn’t a thump.”

“Not at all,” agreed the first guard. “Sounded more like a clang — something metal, like.”

“That’s it,” said the other guard. “Think we’d best check it out?”

“Oh dear,” said the princess.

“Well, it came from the throne room,” replied the guard. “And we’re watching the throne room for any disturbances, so it seems that’s exactly what we should be doing.”

“What’s that?” asked the other guard.

“What’s what?” said the first.

“What’s the thing we should be doing?” said the second guard.

“Check it out,” said his partner, “the noise. What else could I have meant?”

“Well, the way you said it, you could have been saying that we should just continue watching it,” explained the second guard. “The throne room, I mean. That’s the problem with pronouns, you know. Antecedents.”

The first guard tipped his head. “Ante-whats?”

“Antecedents. It’s one of those whassits. Grammatical bits, init it?” The guard shrugged.

The first guard peered at his counterpart. “Are you drunk?”

The guard scowled. “Just because you didn’t clarify the action within the sentence, don’t go accusing me –”

“Let’s just open things up and take a look, shall we?” He glared at the second guard, who matched his expression.

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Oh excellent,” sighed the princess, who had walked up to stand next to them while they argued. “I just need to pop my head in quickly and have another look at the drapes.”

The guards both blinked at the princess. They reminded her of a pair of not particularly smart owls. “Here now,” one of them said. “Begging your princess’s pardon, but we really shouldn’t do that.”

“But you just said you were going to open up the door and look inside anyway,” pointed out the princess.

“Well, we are,” said the guard, looking at his partner for support. “But we can’t have you — that is to say — didn’t you already get a good enough look?” He shifted his feet and scratched at the back of his neck. “Purple drapes wasn’t it?”

“Certainly,” said the princess, “but I can’t recall if it was more of a lilac or a plum purple.” She leaned in, as though imparting a secret. “That’s terribly important to some people.”

“I’m sure,” said the guard, who wasn’t. “But we can’t have you looking in.”

“Why ever not?” asked the princess.

“It’s… the captain,” said the other guard. “He’s not one to make many exceptions, you understand, and we already made one for you earlier.” He glanced down the hallway in both directions. “He’d be very cross with us if we did it again.”

The first guard frowned. “If we did what again?”

“Don’t start,” his partner muttered, never taking his eyes off the princess.

Don’t get me wrong; that bit amuses the HELL out of me – reminds me of Terry Pratchett, I suppose – but I have no illusions that it will survive through the editing process and into the final story.

Any of you nodding along with what I just said have missed the point.

It not about what will survive will survive to final edits. It’s about getting the story down.

It’s about writing. That’s it.

Put your head down and charge. There’s the finish line.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

[1] – Close enough. Don’t math at me.

[2] – Actually, driving across Nebraska today, so I’m still in them.

In Which You are a Turkey-day Ninja

Nov 26th

[Editing Note: I realize that, since you’re not reading this in 2009 anymore, it’s not terribly likely that the 26th is also Thanksgiving. That’s fine: read this on Thanksgiving.]

Happy Thanksgiving! (To all the USians, that is – to everyone else, um… well… it’s Thursday. Woot.)

I have no advice for you today. Today is a day of family and friends and good food to eat, so just take the day off, relax, and worry about NaNoWriMo tomorrow.

Seriously. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. You’re fine. Go have another slice of pie.

Okay, are the poseurs gone?

Good, we’ve got a lot to fucking talk about people, and a lot of work to do.

And we gotta be sneaky.

This holiday will EAT YOUR SOUL if you allow it.

The thing is this: one way or the other, we need to get some writing in today, and there’s a few tricks you can pull out to make that possible, depending on how involved you are in the Thanksgiving prep and participation.

Scenario One: You volunteered to Host this year

No. There’s nothing I can do for you. You’re out of your damned mind. Good luck and godspeed, citizen.

Scenario Two: You are attending someone else’s shindig

Much better. This is workable.

Step One: Find out what single thing everyone in attendance absolutely loves, which you can purchase or make easily and quickly, and volunteer to bring that. Bring two. (Better if you can buy it, but if you can’t, make it on a day when you’ve got your minimum word count done already.)

Step Two: Be prepared to answer questions about NaNoWriMo. Your immediate loved ones (spouse, elder children) might decide to mention it or gently rib you about it at the gathering, or some of the people there might know about it and ask you how it’s going, but the fact is this: even if that doesn’t happen, you yourself will be physically unable to keep from talking about it. It will come up, so be prepared for specific questions.

- Q: Why on earth would you do something like that?
A: It’s challenging, rewarding, and I’ve learned a lot; writing is really something you have to do to get better at, and this was a good way to get motivated. (Also, make sure to mention how many words you’ve already written – that’s a damn respectable number.)

- Q: What are you going to buy me when you’re a big famous author?
A1: Oh, I’ve a year of revisions at the minimum before anything I’m writing right now would be remotely ready, and even then it will take quite awhile to get from ‘ready’ to published.
A2: I’m not worrying about publishing right now – I’m writing for the sake of writing.
A3: What was your name again? I have such a problem remembering the little people.

- Q: What makes you think you’ll finish this? You never finish anything else.
A: (This fucker doesn’t get any of the food you volunteered to bring. Make sure they know it.)

- Q: What’s it about?
A1: (It doesn’t matter what you answer. It matters that the answer is SHORT. Boil it down to the point where it will fit into no more than two Twitter-length posts, maximum. I’m dead serious.)
A2: “It’s porn.”

Step Three: Socialize

It’s Thanksgiving, dude; don’t be a troll. Talk to people. Find out how Uncle Bob and Aunt Myrn are doing in the new house. Play with the nieces and nephews, and ask them how their after-school activities are going. Bullshit about [currently active professional sports teams]. Whatever. It’s not just about you.

(Also, you can totally use all that crap they’re talking about in your story.)

Step Four: Chow down

Again, it’s Thanksgiving. Enjoy yourself. Have some good food. That said, don’t gorge, and take it easy on the turkey. Not super-easy, but you know… easy. There’s a reason.

Make sure to ask how the [Thing You Brought] is. Did it come out all right? Is it as good as last year? Note: You may or may not actually care about the answer, but it’s important that people remember you brought the yummy goodness.

Step Five: Tryptophan is your friend.

Here’s where you’re cunning plan unfolds. Post-meal, one of two things will happen: either everyone will sit down to watch some TV and doze off, or they’ll try to fight the sleepy with a walk or something.

If option one, make sure that the clean-up crew has all the help they need. If they don’t, then help. If they do, excuse yourself and find a room to write in.

If option two, volunteer to stay behind with Grandma and help with the dishes. This will work out entirely to your benefit:

- Good karma. Come on, you’re helping grams with the dishes. You’re like the best grandkid ever.

- Always ride shotgun with the best driver. Grams had cleaned up more Thanksgiving dinners than you’ve been alive. The plates will be stowed before the walkers get halfway down the block.

- Someone on your side. When things are wrapping up on the clean-up, mention that you really should get a little more writing done. Grams will send you on the way immediately – she’s totally proud of the fact that one of her grandkids is a writer – that’s a generation that appreciates the written word, and good for them. Give her a kiss on the cheek on your way out, and she’ll knife anyone who even tries to interrupt you for the next three hours.

Taken together, this should be all the mojo you need to get some writing time before ten o’clock that night — if you know the bits you need to get written, you’ll be done in no time, and can emerge from your writer’s nook looking calm and slightly smug.

Then have another piece of pie.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Comments

Laura:

Q: What makes you think you’ll finish this? You never finish anything else.
A: (This fucker doesn’t get any of the food you volunteered to bring. Make sure they know it.)

This made me laugh for about a whole minute. This is the story of my every writing day. I should start bringing food when ever I am around family, that might keep them in line. :)

Cracking the WIP

Nov 27th

Morning, guys; how’d that Thanksgiving writing go? Eat a little too much or not enough?

Me? Oh, I’m writing this WHILE running on the elliptical, if that tells you how much I need to get done today (and how much deliciousness I shoved in my brown-sugar-n-squash hole yesterday).

*wastes five minutes trying to get a shot of himself and laptop on elliptical, while running, using the cell phone he’s also listening to music on… and crashes his phone*

Dammit, there goes my music. Hang on. This ain’t working.

*finishes workout*

*has shower*

*walks dogs*

*gets locked out of room*

*sits down, corrects all the typos in the first part of the post, and proceeds*

Okay. Right then. All that nonsense in the gym gave me an idea for the post today. Let’s talk about:

The Lie of Multi-tasking.

Here’s the basic Lie of Multi-tasking:

“It works.”

Allow me to offer a counter argument:

“Sod off; no it doesn’t.”

“Time Management” is the sort of catch-phrase that makes people nod along when it’s mentioned and roll their eyes when no one’s looking. Books like First Things First and Getting Things Done are often quoted, rarely read, and even more rarely put into use. (Or, if they are, become a ritual of masturbatory to-list-maintenance that doesn’t actually accomplish anything, but which looks really good. Productivity Porn, is what it is.)

Now, I read both books because I put together a class on Time Management and my audience (a lot blue-collar guys in management roles) needed to get better at it but were never going to take the time to read a couple books and boil all that stuff down to something they could use. The end result of all that research was a two-hour class during which the students get a blank pocket notebook and a double-sided business card on which I printed the entire ‘manual’ for the class.

Let me see if I can boil it down for you even further, because none of us have time to read a couple books right now, either.

Most of that class focuses on Doing, because we suck at Doing. Between people interrupting us and babbling away with no provocation, reminders from our email and calendar, our phones, Twitter, IM clients, facebook, Tumblr, new readers, and… you know… a life, it’s just hard to block out some uninterrupted time and then actually use it for whatever task it was intended to be used for.

So we try to do two things at the same time.

My laptop, perched on the elliptical: Proof that I am not that smart sometimes.

You know: Write while visiting with family. Write while making lunch. Write while… anything. While running on the elliptical, maybe.

I’m mentioned in at least one other post this month that there are very few activities during which I’ll multi-task; I think the list includes “folding laundry” and “watching a TV show” and then ends. Pretty much anything in my life that I think is important enough to do, I think is important enough to get my full attention — when that doesn’t happen, the end result of the two ‘intermixed’ activities usually sucks.

I mean… yeah, if I tell you “I’m going to try to write a blog post while running on the elliptical”, it doesn’t take a genius to say “dude, that’s going to suck, and both things will suck as a result”. (Yes, I know: I didn’t figure it out until I tried it, but I’m not that smart sometimes.)

Let me propose this theory: every single activity you try to mix with some other activity will suck just as bad as “typing on the elliptical”, but you may not notice it right away.

I sort of forgot that rule — I did a lot of juggling yesterday so I could sneak off down to my sister’s laundry room and get some writing done (sitting on her dryer with my netbook up on a workbench next to it), and it left me with the false impression that I could juggle things even more tightly — that I could actually do something while doing something else at the same time. The efficiency!

Again, I’m not too smart sometimes.

We’ve got a four days left on this NaNoWriMo project of ours. Thanksgiving was fun, but the time for family/writing juggling is done. It’s time to Crack the WIP.

That means focus.

So, here’s a few rules I (try to) follow to help me DO during those times I have allocated for Doing.

1. Focus on one task at a time.

- Think of the schedule for my day on Tuesday; the focus on a single task doesn’t have to go on for hours at a time. If you get on a writing streak, sure, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 30 minute sprints. 20 minutes? Sure. Whatever works.

- Eliminate all distractions. Shut off Twitter, Gmail, YIM, AIM, GTalk. Close your door, if you can. Make sure the cat, dog, kids, spouse, and coworkers are all are fed.

- Don’t multi-task, and don’t let yourself get interrupted.

2. Seriously, don’t #*$#ing Multitask.

Multitasking: the fine art of avoiding two things you don’t want to do by working on both of them simultaneously.

The supposed efficiency of multitasking is an illusion — it hurts your productivity, increases the chance of error, and generally makes the end product of your work suck more than it should. Don’t do it.

The human brain is amazing in many many ways, but it positively sucks at concentrating on two things at once. As soon as you try, you can guarantee you’ll miss something important.

3. Control Who Has Access to You

Stop and think about something for a second: who has unrestricted access to you at virtually any time?

Ask yourself, seriously, because it says a lot about who you are.

I set my GTalk Status as Busy most of the time because I know that there are very few people who will be comfortable sending me an instant message anyway (provided they feel they have a good reason). Here’s a happy (non-) coincidence: the people that know me well enough to ignore that message are the people on my All Access list.

4. No one else gives a crap if you Finish.

No.

No they don’t.

Not even him. Not her either. No one.

Not even me; I’m distracting you RIGHT NOW with this post.

You are the only person who cares about getting your story done, and the only way to make that happen is to viciously (perhaps anti-socially) defend the blocks of time you set up to write.

You must do this. You must be cruel. Crack the WIP. Make everyone obey.

Even you.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

Much love to Rowan Larke, who coined the phrase “Crack the WIP” on Twitter a few days ago, and graciously gave me permission to use it here.

“Finish for me.”

Nov 28th

When I’m in the doctor’s office filling out those first-visit forms, and I get to the section that asks if I have any history of mental illness in my family, I check “Other” and write in “My sister runs marathons.”

She tells a story about one of her fellow marathoners who ran most of the way with her on her first marathon. He was either in his late fifties or early sixties, and he was a vet: dude had run a half-dozen marathons or more. He stuck with Bonnie pretty much from about the fourth or fifth mile on, because little sister was unsure of herself — she just didn’t know if she was going to be able to do it — she’d never tried anything even half so long in the past, and she was struggling more with her own mind at that point than the run.

So he stayed with her. He coached her through the miles. Told her what to expect. Told her when the walls would come, and when the second winds would be there, and what each cramp meant, and how to deal with it and get through it and keep going.

About the 17th mile, he said, “Bonnie, I’m going to slow up now, and I want you to keep going. You’re strong, and you can do it. You get through the 18th mile and listen to the people cheering, and you’ll get there.”

She said she wanted to make sure he finished. They ran little bit longer before he answered.

“I’m not sure I’m going to finish, Bonnie. Maybe not this time. I don’t want you to slow down, because it’s hard to speed back up when you’re this far in, so you have to keep going. You finish for me, in case I can’t.”

So she said she would, and she ran, and she finished.

Less than 10% of the people who start NaNoWriMo actually finish. It’s not a fact anyone really publicizes, but it’s there. We are in rare air, here, and we have to make some promises today.

We have to finish, even if the other people who’d been running with you might not.

We keep going, because other people couldn’t, and we’re finishing for them, to prove that it can be done.

We have to finish because we’re the ones who can.

I’m behind right now. I had a rough day yesterday where I needed to be a dad a lot more than I needed to be writer, and just couldn’t get to the keyboard until late, at which point I was too tired to write sense. So I’m short on days and short on words. I think I’ll finish, but I dunno for sure.

But I’ll keep running if you do.

All right? Let’s do this.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

My sister tells me that she saw her running partner in the mass of people at the finish line; that he made it after all. Don’t count yourself out, even if you start slowing down. Nothing’s over yet.

Comments

Nick:

Funny – you don’t know this, but I think you were my running partner. I hadn’t done anything like NaNoWriMo before… In fact, I hadn’t ever written more than 20 pages for anything, and those 20 were for a college class. Throughout this event, your advice really helped me out. If nothing else, it certainly entertained me when I needed it. I finished today. I expect that I’ll see you milling around the finish line soon enough.

Doyce:

A couple years ago, I was running a triathlon. The swimming and biking were fine, but when I got to the run (which was nasty — super-hilly), I let out this huge sigh of defeat after about first half-mile and started walking.

This guy behind me, who hadn’t said a word the whole time, says, “Oh No: I’ve been setting my pace off you this whole race; you ain’t quittin’ on me now.”

It got me through.

Thanks Nick. You have no idea how much I like knowing these posts have helped people. And congrats on finishing!

***Dave:

Your posts have been excellent advice, sir. NaNoWriMo could do worse than buy them off of you and then recirculate them each year at appriately spamful intervals.

Crossed the finish line this evening … but still have more race to run.

Chuck:

While the metaphor here is obvious (not a knock against you; I mean, NaNo as marathon is an idea within easy reach), the way it’s framed and the stories around it are priceless.

Nice work.

– c.

In which I am the Mean Parent

Nov 29th

I almost never tell my daughter she’s smart. (I do, sometimes, when I forget not to and it just pops out in response to something unexpected she came up with.)[1]

That’s not because she isn’t – by all accounts and early testing, she’s a bona fide smarty pants and will no doubt excel at her chosen profession (a profession that probably doesn’t even exist today, and which she’ll have to patiently re-explain to me and my doddering old friends every time she drops in for a visit) – it’s because ’smart’ isn’t the thing I want to reinforce/reward during her formative years.

So what do I reward with praise?

Hard work. Attention. Focus. Bottom line, that’s where success comes from. Smart is nice, but I know a lot of smart people who can’t hold down a job or pay their bills or even take care of their kids; a lot of pretty people too.

There were better writers than Zelazny back in the day; he was successful due to a solid work ethic. (And talent, sure, but talent honed with practice.) There are more talented writers than Stephen King, but some work of his is more likely to survive to 2200 simply because there’s more of it (ignoring the fact that I think he’s an as-yet unrecognized laureate of American literature). Again, the guy works.

It was not always fun, but they did it anyway.

This lesson was a hard one for me to learn, because I had a lot of smarts and talent in high school and college – never really had to work at anything. Then I got out into the real world and people actually wanted me to… you know… hit deadlines. Show up to work on time. Stay until quitting time. I couldn’t hold down any part-time job in college simply because I didn’t know how to work, and learning that took me almost ten years.

I’m better now, and when I praise Kaylee I praise her for the thing I think is most valuable:

“You worked really hard on that, and you did a good job. You should be proud of yourself.”

That’s what NaNoWriMo is really about. Finding the time. Sitting down. Finishing something big. Slogging when it’s not fun, and not losing control when it is. In short, doing the work.

So, let me be the first to say it:

You’ve worked really hard.

You did a good job.

You should be proud of yourself.

(Now get back to work. Have fun.)

1 – I try not to tell her she’s pretty all the time, also, but at that I utterly fail, due to this.

Comments

The Fierce:

This is exactly what I told my mom when she asked me why I never said I wanted to be a writer “when I grew up.”

I love writing as long as I don’t have to do it. Sitting at a keyboard and having some production goal set sounds like a lot like purgatory to me. It takes all the joy and love out of it until that magical conclusion of “I’m done!” happens.

My mom, she sits and makes her stories happen. She works. She treats it like a job.

I bask in the light of my inconstant muse and sometimes we play together.

My mom hates that I don’t have the same challenges she has when writing. I point out that she gets paid a lot more than I do for it, and the fact that she can sit and just -write- has almost everything to do with it.

Nicole:

BRILLIANT.

I was a precocious child and proud of it, but somewhere along the line, I realized that I hadn’t done a thing to deserve being smart, and when that was the main thing people ever noticed…

I mean, she’s going to appreciate that you see when she works and what she does, not just the result.

Greg Stolze:

Interesting. I tell my sons “It’s good to be smart, but it’s more important to be kind.”

-G.

Bonus Reading:
TERRIBLEMINDS: The End Of The Beginning: Now The Real Work Begins

Fleeing the Sinking Ship

Nov 30th

The NaNoWriMo boat is sinking. Some folks saw the writing on the wall early on and got off the ship when they could. That’s fine: they’re safe, but they didn’t get to see some of the cool things we did.

And we’ve seen some mighty fine things, haven’t we?

Speaking just for myself, I saw ships exploding and squirrels talking; I saw my wife laugh aloud at lines from the science fiction part of my story, the fairytale part, and my essays. I got to read one of the “Forest of Anything” fairytales to my family’s kids for bedtime on Saturday night. The kids liked it, and the adults listened in and seemed to like it too.

I got a text from my mom the next day:

“Your dad said to me today: ‘Doyce really can write. Isn’t that something?’”

That felt pretty good to read. Good feelings.

And that’s all nice, but… not to repeat myself, the boat is sinking. It’s time to get off.

Here’s what you need to do.

Note: this is not a series of tips on what to do with your story now that it’s done. Chuck Wendig has already written that post for you today. It is exactly what I would tell you, with the added bonus that it is (I suspect) better said than I’d have said it. If you want to see those tips, go read his post.

No, this is just a post about what you do to wrap up NaNoWriMo. I’m basically writing advice for myself most of the time anyway, and as I’m not done with my story, I can’t really write about what to do with it when it’s done.

1. Pack up your most precious belongings.
Make copies of your story. Multiple copies. Put them in several locations. I’ve recommended Dropbox in the past, but you can simply email a copy to yourself, or upload it to google docs, or just put it on two different computers. Me? I’m doing several of those things.

2. Make sure you get your seat on the lifeboat.
Go to nanrowrimo.org and verify your word count. There are instructions on the site, but the basic idea is you copy all the text from your story, paste it into a box on your profile page, save the profile, and it verifies that you’re awesome.

3. Help others.
Not everyone is done yet. For some folks, it is going to be down to the wire, and I’ve been there, so let me reassure you: encouragement help. If you’re on Twitter, watch the #nanowrimo thread and throw a quite “you can do it” at people who think they can’t make it. Pull those stragglers out of the water and into the lifeboat. Dive down into the water if you have to. We are nothing if we can’t both survive and help others survive as well.

I will come in after you, if necessary.

4. Don’t look back.
I do not recommend that you go back and read the story right now. Wait until January first at the earliest.

5. Once on the shore, celebrate.

Are you kidding me? You just wrote fifty THOUSAND WORDS (or more). Buy yourself something pretty. Dance on the roof. Take an entire day to get caught up on all the DVR’d shows you missed. Have End-of-NaNoWriMo sex. SOMETHING. You’re done writing the story, so it’s ENTIRELY OKAY to break your arm patting yourself on the back.

A moderate amount of celebration is encouraged.

6. Thank the crew that got you there.
Go back to nanrowrimo.org. Donate. Give back. They do some good things, these people, some of them for you, so say thanks. If you don’t have the funds for it, check out their helpful page on ‘how to donate if you don’t have money’.

Also, go around to those people in your life or out on the internets who helped you get through this thing. Your spouse. Your kids. Your family. Your friends.

7. If necessary, book another cruise.
I’m not done with my story. Roughly speaking, I’m halfway in. So I’ll keep writing in December and January (at a slightly lower daily wordcount), and I’ll keep recording and posting podcasts until I’m done.

And then I’ll see where I am.

If you’re not done with your story, keep writing. Make it as consistent and regular as you can — every day if at all possible, even if it’s only a page. It’s a page more than you had.

And read. Lordy lordy, I can’t tell you how happy I’ll be to have more time to read again.

That’s it. The ship is sunk. We’re rowing away, headed for shore, but the story isn’t over. The journey isn’t over. (It never is, til we’re dead, and maybe not even then.)

There is always more work to do. There is always more fun to have. There is always another adventure.

This is the Forest of Anything.

Get back to work.

Have fun.

Comments

Doyce:

I blame today’s nautical analogy on the movie 2012 (which has left deep scars and brain lesions), and on the fact that we listened to all of Garth Nix’s Drowned Wednesday during the Thanksgiving roadtrip.

Sam Downingsays:December 1, 2009 at 3:34 am (Edit)

Best part of this post: the bit about your wife LOLing at your story. Very cute.

Actually, I lie. The best part was the internet high five. That was awesome.

#NaNoWriMo: My personal retrospective and thanks.

Nov 30th

So over the course of the month, I got 50,128 words in on Adrift. Also, 22,508 words worth of NaNoWriMo Essays in on the blog (now collected in an ebook), for 72,636 total (and actually a bit more, cuz I kept writing today, but whatever).

A pretty good month.

There are sort of two stories going on in Adrift. One is the scifi thing, and the other is the slightly more episodic series of fairytales that Finn told his daughter back when she was little and Everything Was Good.

These are the last two things I wrote in those stories, before I hit the NaNoWriMo End.

Adrift

“Thank you,” he murmured, then stepped back and clapped me on my shoulder. “Go.”

I went.

And the Princess stories:

That was how the princess learned about the Spring Tree, and started on her greatest adventure yet.

I’m not done, but those a pretty good ‘end of section one’ lines.

Roughly speaking, I’m about halfway in, so I’ll keep writing in December and January (at a slightly lower daily wordcount), and I’m going to keep recording and posting podcasts until I’m done with that also, but November has been a good start, and I’m enjoying the hell out of the way it’s all unpacking from the spare little frame I built on Twitter.

I need to thank my wife Kate. She’s heard more excerpts from this book than anyone, but she’s heard them all in the wrong order and didn’t complain (much); she kept my distractions to a minimum, and she drove about nine hours of our 12 hour drive yesterday, just so that I could write and finish a day early.

And she’s awesome, just in general.

I also want to thank Chuck, Jennifer, Greg, Meera, Nicole, the Colorado MLs, ***Dave, Nick, Laura, Paige, Tina, Stephanie, Lise, De, Linley, Evf, Linda, Yi Shun, Ptocheia, Rebecca, Cynthia, Michelle, Ann Marie, Maggie, Frankie, Kaelin (Hyetal), Megan, Elysabeth, Danielle, Robert M, Eve, Velvet, Trev, Mur, Brian, Cat, Jamie, and the absolutely insane number of people who retweeted links to these posts around Twitter and the rest of the Internetverse. I started these posts for me, but I finished them because of you guys, and I’m really kind of proud of them.

You make me think about writing, and think better about writing. Thank you.

Tim White’s helped me so much with the podcast stuff. He gets a line all to himself.

And the story? This crazy story about a father trying to find and help his daughter?

The story is for Kaylee, which should surprise no one at all.

Comments

Chuck:

That biggum word count.

High-five, chief.

And… uhh, you’re welcome? Glad to help in my own largely insignificant way. :)

– c.

Jamie Harrington:

Way to GO! I am way impressed and so proud of you for writing for the kidd-o.

But, then again what don’t we do for them, ya know?

These essays are friggin bananas BTW. I didn’t even Do nanoWriMo and I still read every last one of them. Next year can you just repost ‘em in a timely manner so I will read them again?

I mean… suuuure I could go back and look at them or whatever… but I think I’d rather have you do it. :)

Doyce:

I’m planning on doing *something* with the nanowrimo pieces next year, I’m just not sure what, exactly. For sure they’ll get reposted. Might also make a free ebook out of them, just for the hell of it and for practice with making ebooks in various formats.

And that, as you know, is exactly what I did.

The End.