Month: November 2009

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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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.

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^{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.}

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.

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.

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^{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.}

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.

Continue reading “#NaNoWriMo: In Which You are a Turkey-day Ninja”