(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 writer1; 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-stop2 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).
(*unlimbers some very dusty html table-making skills*)
Stress
Burnout
Over-engaged
Disengaged
Emotions are overreactive
Emotions are blunted
Urgency and hyperactivity
Helplessness and hopelessness
Loss of energy
Loss of motivation and hope
May kill you prematurely4
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 for 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.
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.12 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.
Above all, keep writing.
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.
