Category: NaNoWriMo

November 6, 2017 / 1 Comment

NaNoWriMo Tip

            Hey, y’know what I realized over the weekend?  It’s NaNoWriMo!  Who’s trying it this year?
            I’ll be honest. I’ve never tried it myself.  By the time I first heard of it, as it was just starting to gain popularity, I’d already been writing professionally for a year or two.  Might’ve even already been writing full time (non-fiction, but still).  For the past eleven years… well, every month’s been about word count for me.
            That doesn’t mean I don’t have some ideas and thoughts on NaNoWriMo.  In fact, a lot.  At this early point in the month, I have one very firm reassurance, and one solid tip.
            Which I shall share with you now.
            First piece of reassurance.  No matter who you are, I can tell you with absolute certainty, you are not going to sell the manuscript you write this month.  No agent will consider it.  No editor will look at it.  It’s just not going to happen.

             HANG ON!  This isn’t a kick-in-the-gut thing.  This is liberating.  It’s freeing.

            I’m not saying nobody will ever buy this book.  But what we’re doing during this month is a first draft.  A rushed first draft at that.  It’s going to have plot holes and factual errors and typos.  It will, trust me.  It’s a fantastic starting point, but it’s going to need more work after November 30th. No question about it.
            Again, this is a good thing.  Stop worrying about if an agent or editor or your significant other is going to like this. They’re never going to see it.  This draft is for you and you alone. Be selfish.  Go crazy.  This is the “dance like nobody’s watching” part of the process.  Let your creativity run wild, eat nothing but chips, drink nothing but whiskey, run naked in the coffeeshop, and don’t worry about anyone else and what they may think.  They can see the second or third draft, maybe, but not this one. Do what you want to do with it.  Do anything.  Because this is just the first draft.
            Okay, don’t actually run naked in the coffeeshop.  Yeah, I know they smile at you a lot there, but they’re paid to be nice to you.  They don’t want to see that. Especially not in a place that sells food.
            Second thing—the solid tip.
            Write.
            That’s it. Just write.
            I know that sounds kind of flip and arrogant, but stop and think for a moment.  Like we just said, this draft isn’t for anyone else.  We’re not going to worry about spelling, research, current hot genres, book advances, any of that. All that matters for this month is getting words on the page.
            Sooooo… get the words on the page.
            In my first drafts, I change character names halfway through.  I snip off plot threads and remind myself to pull them out later. I snip off some characters halfway through, and then jump to the alternate timeline version of the book where I killed them sixty pages ago (like I now know I should’ve done in the first place).  And I can do all this because this is going to get another draft.
            For now, the most important thing is to just write.  Put words on paper or on the screen or on your arm or your friend’s shirt or whatever medium you’ve decided to work in. Stop trying to filter or rein in your creativity and get it all out.
            So for now…
            Go write.
agentsblockdraftseditingNaNoWriMotips
April 24, 2015 / 4 Comments

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

            Both of you who are still here, many thanks for your patience during my long absence.
            The title’s a pop culture reference to some band my mom listened to a lot.  Garfunkel and Oates, I think…
            Okay, I’ll warn you right up front, this post is going to annoy some of you.
            I wanted to talk with you for a few minutes about cooking.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, cooking and writing are great parallels.  There are certain rules that must be followed, but there’s also a degree of personal style and taste involved for both the creator and the consumer.  We also understand that while almost all of us can do it on a simple, day-to-day level, there’s a big difference between that and cooking on a professional level as a chef.
            In cooking, we understand there are certain time elements that can’t be changed.  A three minute egg needs to boil for (big surprise) three minutes.  I can’t bake a cake in half the time by turning the temperature up twice as high.  Trying to speed these things up doesn’t improve them.  We all get that.  We all understand it.
            This is true in a lot of things.  If I’m building a house, I need to let the concrete in the foundation set before I start working on the frame.  Doctors often need to do procedures in multiple steps to give the patient time to heal.   It’s boring as hell, but sometimes you actually just need to watch paint dry. 
            Likewise, I think there’s a time element in writing.  The more it gets rushed, the more I end up with… well, a burned cake.  Or a crappy foundation.  Or severe hemorrhaging.  Or a lot of smeared paint.  Pick your favorite metaphor.
            That being said, there’s a lot of pressure to rush through writing these days.  I’ve seen more than a few would-be gurus pushing a business model of quantity over quality.  The ease of publishing through Amazon has made the idea of moving slow seem… well, clunky and antiquated.  It draws comparisons to, dare I say it, dinosaurs.  And with the raw amount of stuff being e-published, I think all of us have a lurking fear that if we don’t get our idea out there now, someone else is going to have it out there first thing tomorrow.
            But the most important thing, above all others, is for me to write well and write something good.  Churning out 6000 words a day or 300 pages for NaNoWriMo is an achievement, yes.  But it’s better to have 2000 good words and 200 polished pages if I want to do something with them.
            Odds are, that’s just not going to happen in my first draft.  Or my second draft, especially if that’s just a quick pass with the spellchecker.  Or my third.  Maybe not even my fourth.  Oh there’s always a chance that my first book is just pure gold on the first pass, but the majority of us just don’t have the ability or the experience to put out material that doesn’t need work.
            Yes, us. The book I just turned in took six months, start to finish.  It went through four drafts, and there’s no question in my mind it’s going to get another.  In the end, I even asked my editor for more time.  Because it needed more.  A lot of my word choices, my phrasing, my structure… it was all first-pass stuff.  It wasn’t really bad, but it also wasn’t good. Definitely not great (although I like to think there were still a few moments of greatness in there somewhere).
            Writing takes time.  Like the cake or the surgery or the paint, I can’t rush through an edit draft in a day and expect to get the same results as someone who spends three weeks going over their manuscript line by line.  My first draft is never going to be as good as someone’s fifth or sixth draft.
            Because of this time factor (ready for more angry comments?), I often find myself questioning people who say they wrote a book in a month.  Or even six weeks.  I completely believe a draft can be written in that amount of time.  I wrote the first draft of 14 in about six weeks.  But a finished book manuscript?  Something ready to hand off to an editor?
            You’ve probably heard of Stephen King.  You probably also know how often he’s been mocked and criticized numerous times for the speed he puts out books.  I mean, he’s got to be putting out how many novels a year?
            Two.  That’s it.  Less than that on average, really (although he did have a bit of a dead zone (zing!) after getting hit by that van).  In forty years of professional writing, he’s barely had fifty books published.  And so many people still call him a hack because he churns stuff out at such a fast rate…
            Now, going slow isn’t an ironclad rule.  Just a few weeks back I pointed out that some folks go so slow they pretty much come to a dead stop.  And sometimes everything just lines up and a draft takes a few days.  No two projects are the same and no two writers are the same. 
            But if every draft of every project goes fast… maybe I should take an effort to slow down for a while and see how it affects my writing.
            Because the goal for all of us is to be great.  Not to rush toward good and stop when we get there.
            Next time I’d like to have a quick chat about zombies.  And vampires. And mysteries.
            Until then, go write.
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