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Nano Nono

In keeping with the Nanowrimo theme this week, I’m going to ramble on for a while about it, too. Of course, my perspective is a tad… different, not least because I don’t do Nano, and will probably never do it.

Why not?

Mostly because the main purpose of Nano is something I’m already doing – trying to sneak in writing whenever I can (let’s not mention the large quantities of failing caused by narcolepsy, diabetes, kitten, full time job, and the various interactions between all these factors that leave me with rather less focusable time than I’d like).

Outside all the publicity and enthusiasm and the tendency of people to work harder at something when they have a commitment (particularly one made publicly) what I see as the basic point of Nano is that if you can manage to write a modest amount every day, it adds up remarkably quickly. Fifteen hundred words a day over thirty days works out to 45 k words – not quite a novel, but a solid kind of start on one.

The basic guidelines don’t change:

• Park butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, and write.
• Resist the temptation to fix, edit, or throw it away.
• Resist the temptation to reread yesterday’s wordage before you start.
• Minimize distractions (or ignore them).
• It doesn’t have to be great. It does have to be finished (especially when you’re looking at a raw first draft – although if we’re talking the first half of a raw first draft, you keep going until it is finished).

That’s all there is to Nano and writing in general.

Of course, writing something someone else is going to want to pay money for is a different beast, but mostly in terms of polish and cleanup (we won’t go into the partly-finished novel I have where I need several days of focused concentration to sort out the timelines because it’s so far off the rails it left left field behind a long way back and has tied itself into knots that I have to tease out before I can go forward. This is what happens when a pantser writes in disjointed bits and pieces – also known as gets interrupted by life being a major bitch). How you handle that part is a personal thing, but I find I need to be able to concentrate and focus much more in edit-mode than in writing mode.

The other side of this is the ten-thousand hour theory: you don’t get seriously good at anything until you’ve invested around 10k hours in it (or, for writers, you can go with the alternative of a million bad words before you get to the good ones. That works out at about… a hundred words per hour, which really is pretty low. I usually get anything from five hundred per hour up, more – way more – if things are really going well. I think my record is in the order of 30k in a day.

In any case, the point of Nano is both to practice writing by doing it – actually writing something – which has the combined effects of building a writing habit (first hit is free, after that you have to steal time), getting your brain accustomed to the idea that butt in chair plus fingers on keyboard plus word processing open equals shut down the internal censor and let the wordage flow (you can clean up any overflow later), and bringing you closer to the point where you’ll be really good at it. Or if you’re already really good at it, it will help you stay that way and get better.

Unless, of course, you’re me and you know damn well that committing to something like this will just add stress and shut you down. Then you don’t Nano. Instead you commit yourself to writing something – anything – every day until you’re in a better place where you can do a Nano.

Swallowing A Fly — #2 How to plot

Yeah, I know, I changed the title.  You’ll have to deal.  Also, unlike my friends I’m not blogging about Nano because I’m a rebel that way.

So I said you have to start the novel with a character who has a problem, and preferably that problem has to be one that has a concrete solution.  I.e., don’t have your character wish for world peace, unless she’s a beauty pageant contestant.  There is nothing your character can actually do on her own to bring about world peace.  (Unless she has some weird superpower…)

Her goal has to be something more concrete if still challenging, like say rescuing her little brother from fairyland, getting a date to the prom, or drinking all the coffee.  (NO, wait, that’s MY goal.)

Many novels start with a bang, and then sort of straggle into the weeds of “Why am I reading this, again?”  (This is when I skip to the end, read the last page and put it away before they infect me with meandering.)  The problem with most, if not all, beginner novels, is that sometime in the middle of the story, I find myself wondering why in heck I’m bothering.

That’s because the author has lost the plot.

To not lose the plot, I invite you to contemplate the little old lady who swallowed a fly.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, she swallowed a bird to catch the spider, she swallowed a cat to catch the bird etc.  Note that starting with the original problem (It might help to know that in regency slang at least to swallow a spider was to go deep into debt you can’t escape) she swallows each animal to catch the last — i.e. to try to solve her problem.  And each time her problem gets worse.

Your character, in the same way, starting with a problem on which they act in what has to be a somewhat rational manner (unless it’s one of my refinishing mysteries) and where the result backfires horribly, must engage in attempting ever bigger solutions (to bigger problems) and having them blow up even bigger.

Of course, unless you’re writing a nihilistic story, at some point the series of ever larger failed solutions must end, and there must be a beginning of actually improving things.

There are two ways to do this, one being gradual, by having some of the solutions that backfire give hope or point the way to the solution.  (Foreshadowing, m’dear, foreshadowing.  I always forget it when I’m tired/sick.)  The other is abrupt.  For the abrupt one you need a plausible way to turn your character around.  Something disastrous must happen that makes the woman stop swallowing ever larger animals and start thinking.  Say, the fly escapes.  Or perhaps one of the animals makes so much noise she can’t sleep at night.  Anyway, there must be some sort of crisis that makes her wonder why she’s chasing down and swallowing animals even though this hasn’t worked in the past.  This will lead to her giving up all hope of solving her problem — aka, the black moment — and then, in what I call the “mirror moment” if it’s a character based novel (one in which the character is at least partly responsible for the situation.  Situations of world destruction are a little different) the character takes a really long look at him/herself and realizes that because of some innate characteristic, he/she has been doing it all wrong.  And then he/she changes the approach and swallows a tether (metaphorically speaking) to pull all the animals out.

In such a situation, whatever they swallow next is the crisis and when the villain (of course there is a villain.  Are you writing litcherary tovarish?  Then you don’t need my advice) who first forced them to swallow the fly in order to try to solve the problem caused by the villain finds out they’re changing strategy, he’ll confront them.  And so, the main character will have to fight the villain, and this will be the climax.

However the climax should flow directly from your initial problem.  There is no “I am in the middle of the book, and I have half to go, I’ll have the character do random things.”  The old woman doesn’t swallow some flowers to beautify the place and a freight train just to make it easier for the animals to travel.  No.  She swallows a bird to catch the spider and a cat to catch the bird and a dog to catch the cat.

This means that though the premise is nonsensical, if you grant the original premise that a person can swallow a bunch of large animals and stay alive and that the animals too stay alive inside her, then you have a logical chain of events.

Now, go you and chain your plot likewise.

Next week A plot in search of a theme.

To Nano or not to Nano

In case you haven’t figured it out by the last three MGC posts, NaNoWriMo is almost upon us. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. It is the bane and the boon of many writers. We look forward to it with excitement and, at the same time, more than a little fear. Excitement because of the challenge and fear because how in the world are we going to write a complete novel in a month?

True confession time. I’ve done NaNo several times before but only once “officially”. By that I mean that I’ve only signed up on the national site once. Part of the reason is I’m not much of a joiner. Part was because I did NaNo for myself and not anyone else. So why join a national site? Shrug. That’s my warped sense of reasoning there.

Anyway, at our last critique group meeting, I asked the other members who would be taking part. Two instantly shot their hands up in the air. They first took part last year and discovered the goal of writing 50,000 words over the length of a month helped motivate them into putting butt in chair and words on the page. The others looked at me with varying degrees of non-comprehension to fear. So, after explaining exactly what NaNo is, I started trying to address the fear.

And this is where I deviate from the traditional goals of NaNo.

When you tell someone that they have to set a goal of 50,000 words over 30 days, eyes will glaze, complexions will pale and breathing becomes shallow. You can smell the fear in the air followed almost instantly by denial. There is no way they can write that much. They have jobs and families and real life and and and. . . .

So I go straight to the heart of NaNo, at least to me — committing to do something for the month. Not every writer writes novels. They write short stories or flash fiction. The thought of having to write long works turns their stomachs and they dig their heels in. Then there are the writers who agonize over every word. A good day for them is getting a couple hundred words down on paper. Then you have the writers who edit as they go. How in the world are they supposed to write an entire novel — and edit it — in 30 days?

So here’s my approach. You set a goal. Preferably, you accept the full 50k word challenge but, if that blows your mind to such an extent that you shut down, you set something more realistic — and you work toward meeting it. You don’t beat yourself up if you fall short on your daily goal. The final goal at the end of the month is what you have to keep your eye on. Sit butt in chair and write. Plain and simple. Write.

Something else you have to keep in mind is that you don’t have time to edit when you are doing NaNo — at least most of us don’t. So you have to turn off the internal editor and just trust yourself. Editing will come after you finish the challenge. Since 50K words is a very bare bones novel for most of us, we’d be going back anyway to fill in the blanks and flesh out the details.

What I have found NaNo does best is teach writers to trust themselves to write. It might drive plotters crazy because you don’t have time to site down and do a detailed outline — much less fight your characters to keep them sticking to your outline. For pantsers, it is an exercise in letting yourself go but with the knowledge that it needs to make enough sense at the end of the month that you can edit it into a workable manuscript.

Another way I deviate a little from the original goal of NaNo is that I don’t insist on folks starting a brand new piece for the challenge. As a working writer, if I were to put aside a current project for a month just for the sake of NaNo, I’d go crazy. The project I stopped working on would continue to demand attention. Worse, by the time I went back to it, there is the possibility that I will have lost the voice. That is a very bad thing — who wants a shapeshifting kick ass heroine who suddenly sounds like a ditzy airhead?

So here’s my question: how many of you are taking part in NaNo and how are you approaching it? Are you joining one of the local support groups and taking part in their activities or are you sticking to the lone wolf school of writing? Are you starting a new project or working on a current one? Or do you think NaNo is the biggest joke ever played on writers? (I’m sort of leaning toward the latter, at least part of the time, and I have this vision of a couple of guys sitting around laughing at all the writers they’ve pulled this con on.)

One last thing, a group of MGC regulars — bloggers and commenters alike — have put together a Halloween Sale for some of their work. You can find a full list of the works on sale over at my personal blog. Please wander over and take a look. Thanks!

Post Delayed on Account of Toddler

Hey, all you serial killers (and batch: don’t want to discriminate). Wee Dave decided two hours before his usual wake-up time was an excellent time to rouse himself from slumber (much like Dread Cthulhu, ftagn) and make a hash of my writing time. The Creature is sated (for now: souls digest quickly, though not easily) but the rest of the morning requirements bay sharply at the doors of the mind. I’ve got a chunk of post, but certain thoughts are proving … recalcitrant. I’d use whiskey to beat them into submission, but I understand that’s frowned upon by certain company. Converse amongst yourselves, for the nonce. When you hear the phrase “character driven” applied to writing, what does that mean to you? What should it mean? I shall return, anon…

Why Do We Do This To Ourselves?

When you take dictation from the voices in your head, it’s easy to forget that not everything works the way those voices tell you. This might have a little something to do with the way so many writers fall for smooth-talking political hackery (along with the issues that often come along with the whole negotiated relationship with the real world thing) that promises to make things better for everyone.

Hell, despite years of trying to strangle the little monster, I still have a strong idealistic streak that pops up at the most inopportune moments (I’m sure as hell not in SP4 for my benefit. Actually, I should probably admit that I spoke up because I have this horrible tendency to see something that needs to be done and get in there and do it. Then wonder why everyone is pissed off at me for upsetting the status quo. No, not at all idealistic there).

Then of course we writers have this tendency to repeatedly push our own buttons and wind ourselves up into tight little balls of self-perpetuating angst. I’m not going to list examples of when I do it because it’s too damn depressingly long a list, and I’ve seen plenty of other writers do the same thing to themselves. I actually kind of have Sarah’s permission to say that she’s one of them and she’s winding herself up right now and probably somewhere between depression-crash and vibrating with worry over something that probably won’t happen.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Apart from the voices in our head telling us all the interesting stuff that usually just happens to fit nicely into our beliefs (but not always, and sometimes we can’t tell that what we’re hearing inside our skulls doesn’t match what we think we know – compare some of the themes of Harry Potter books 5 through 7 with some of J. K. Rowling’s comments, for instance. I can guarantee that I’ve found a ton of “hey, you! You with the fingers! Listen up before you drive us all off a bloody cliff!” messages when I reread my older stuff. It’s got to be older material because anything too recent I read what I think should be there instead of what actually is there.)

There is a simple answer, of course. And unlike most simple answers, this one is actually more or less correct: we do this to ourselves because we’re human. Being writers, we tend to ramp up the neurotic/creative side of the human spectrum, often to the kind of levels that aren’t normally seen in the wild without something else being severely damped (and being writers, what gets damped tends to be contact with the world outside our skulls, since it’s usually boring and unfulfilling compared to the ones on the inside, as it were). We’re not the only people who do it – who hasn’t heard of or met the co-worker with the… interesting beliefs, or the person who’s so open minded absolutely anything can take up residence in there? We just tend to do it as a career choice.

On the slightly more serious side, one of the reasons this sort of things happen is that when you pair a ridiculously powerful pattern-recognition engine (namely the human brain) with random or uncontrollable events (life in general), you get superstition in all its flavors, complete with the lucky underwear that’s become more hole than fabric but can’t be disposed of because you’ve got to be wearing it when you take an exam or you’ll fail. Or the self-perpetuating belief that you can’t write unless you wrestle three sharks before you start (and win, presumably, since I imagine it would be kind of difficult to write anything from inside a shark).

Or the idea that in order to be worthy you have to be a literary writer – that one is a bit like the self-esteem canard in that it gets cause and effect precisely backwards (for the confused: people with high self-esteem tend to do better in life. They have high self-esteem because they work for what they achieve. Handing people ‘achievements’ in order to boost their self-esteem causes an immense amount of damage, but try telling that to the people who run the schools these days): literature is nothing more than something that speaks to a lot of people over a lengthy time frame. If it’s still popular fifty years after first publication, it’s got a good chance of being literature.

I could go on, but I’m sure everyone here can figure out the principle. After all, most of us have managed to stay on at least civil terms with the world outside our skulls.