NaNoWriMo Bad, Bad, Bad

Yes, that’s right. It is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) time again. That means lots of crazy writers–we’re talking thousands upon thousands–are all converging to try and write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month. And that month would be November.

Have I done it? Yes.

Have I succeeded? Yes.

Have I failed? Yes.

Have I a pile of wonderful, exciting first drafts that are sitting around impatiently waiting for me to have the time to come back to them since creating them during NaNo? Yes. (This is the “bad, bad, bad” part of this post’s title.)

Will I be doing NaNo again this year? Sadly, no.

Will I write at all in November? Heck yeah. I just don’t have the time to commit myself to 50K on something new. And “commit myself” is the right phrase. We’re talking creating serious mental issues if I try to do it this year. Plus then I’ll have ANOTHER first draft of a lovely story picking at me to become a lovely, edited novel for someone else’s eyes.

This is so, so true!

What, you may ask, is the lure of NaNoWriMo? For many it’s watching that little word count thermometer rise and rise and rise until it hits the 50K mark. It’s addicting really. It releases a little something inside that kicks the internal editor right on its sorry little behind. The words come flying out. The story soars and floods the page. It is exhilarating. It’s a challenge too. And for some, there are the bragging rights as well. To say you wrote a novel in a month. Well now. That’s really something!

Wanna give it a go? NaNo has a lovely support group/writers group on its website. And lovely badges to post with pride. And many other gadgetry goodness that will for sure have your hot little hands rubbing themselves together.

Enjoy!

Core Writing: NaNoWriMo and Me

Okay, so I’m not going to make it. I’m not going to cross the 50,000 word mark in my new story before NaNoWriMo ends at midnight on the 30th of November.

I knew it would take me longer than a month to write the first draft of this story before I started NaNoWriMo. (I started anyway because all my friends are doing it and it’s a lot of fun.) Now that I’m more than half way through my NaNo days, I’m quite certain I won’t cross 50K in the next week and a half.  I’ve just crossed the 10, 000 word mark. Seeing as this is a story where writing more than 2,000 words a day leaves my brain feeling a bit like a wad of cotton balls, I can’t see the pace speeding up. So, I won’t be done by November 30th. I won’t get a ‘winner’ badge this year. But I’ll have a new story. One I’ve procrastinated on for a long time because the ‘whole’ story hasn’t landed in my head like most do. It’s a one step forward at a time, punctuated by pauses, kind of story.

Will I finish the story? Yes, of course. I figure that by December 30th I should have the first draft down. While in the past I may have been tempted to push and rush and force this story to progress faster, I know that won’t work for this story.

This project is bringing out a different writer in me. My characters do not have names. It kind of works, too. While I wrote the first few plot points, I couldn’t figure out why I seemed to have so much of the storyline down, but still be so close to the beginning in terms of word count. Was I writing a short story by accident? Then last night I realized I am writing the core of the story. The muse has been feeding me the story’s core. Once that is down, I’ll have to go back and flesh out the story’s bystanders. Add more details. It’s interesting. Never before have I written a story this way. I sure hope my muse is still looking over my shoulder when it comes to fleshing out the core.

NaNoWriMo Winner!

I did it! 

I sat down today and launched myself over the 50,000 word mark and I didn’t even have to plague my characters with the rare, tropical disease called ‘blah, blah, blah’.

In case you missed the news:

So, yes, needless to say, I got around that wall and have set my main character on her steady course towards the story’s black moment where everything will go wrong and everyone will wonder with awe, (hooked and unable to breathe until it is over) how on earth she will pull it out of the fire.

I love it when stuff pulls together. It is so exciting and is the best part of being a writer. I always feel so brilliant when I inadvertently do things like this: I just realized that one of my ‘make the character’s life hell’ moments I have planned will work totally in my favour in more ways than one. You know how characters are supposed to change and form over the story’s course? Well, I have the groundwork for that. Sure, it is full of muddle puddles, quagmires and the odd tree planted right in the way of the groundwork, but it is there. Anyway, I just realized that when she loses her apartment and goes to live with this sweetheart of a woman, that she will have her eyes opened in a way that will help her change who she is so she can settle down and relax.

Not so exciting to you as for me? Sorry, how about THIS:

Oh, not that either. Okay, well maybe I’ll sign off then. Even though I’m over the 50k mark, I still have at least another 30k to go. Wish me luck.

Sincerely yours,

Black Moment Time?

I was coming up to the ‘finish line’ in the NaNoWriMo contest (write 50k in one month) and I hit a wall. (Not literally, as I was sitting in a comfy chair in the public library.) As I sat there, gazing out the window in my favourite writing seat, I thought ‘now what?’ I had everything in mind for what was going to happen to my character when things got ‘really bad’ leading up to the climax as well as how she was going to solve all her problems and her happily ever after.

But how was I going to get there from here? There didn’t seem to be anything left to be done.

Well, after I packed up my laptop, bought a pile of used books off that damn shelf near the library exit, and headed outside, I realized that it was black moment time in my story.

Then I thought, ‘already’? I was only nearing 50,000 words. In fact, I was sitting at 49,000. What to do, what to do? It felt too soon to hit the ‘black moment’ button, but the story was there, ready, all geared up. But what about me? Not so ready.

As I walked, I realized that everything was all geared up for things to hit the shitter in my story and that what I had planned was going to take some doing. Like at least 20,000 words, plus another 10,000 for resolving loose ends. Plus, on the next draft, I would undoubtedly flesh out some things, such as setting, adding another 10,000 words or so. If I didn’t follow the story and blast the black moment right now, I was going to have my usual problem of a lagging story and a word count hovering over 120,000. Yikes.

It wasn’t a wall after all, it was black moment time.

Hitting the Writing Wall

Lately the theme in writing that keeps popping up is the good ol’ fashioned writing wall. At times, it could be confused as a form of writers block. I.e. there is something large and bulky that keeps getting in the way of a writer and their story moving forward.

Usually I do the duck and dodge to get around the wall. However, there are times when that good old wall is just like a line in that camp song, “Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, can’t go through it…”.

I’m more than half way through my NaNoWriMo novel. Well, just half way to ‘done’, but ‘almost there’ in terms of hitting the 50,000 word mark. Despite the rapid-fire way that the majority of my work in progress has flooded page after page of black text on white screen, there have been moments when I’ve sat back after typing 3000 words and gone, ‘crap. now what?’. I hate that. Usually it involves me packing up my laptop and stomping around outside, head ducked down in thought with my mind going, ‘okay, how about this? Too lame. This? No, unrelated tangent that would take me too far away from the story. This? No, flying dinosaurs would totally change the genre. This? No.’ And then BING, I have it. I’ve done the 20 questions on myself and found a way through, over, under or around that wall.

But sometimes, you aren’t so lucky, you have to go back and read through and try and figure out where exactly you started building that wall, brick by brick. And you have to go do some masonry work without letting the whole structure crumble. This is why I have begun using a method where I write down two or three or five words about the scene after I’ve written it–or occasionally before I do if I have a clear idea of where I want to go. With each scene I write whether it is an action, reaction/consequence or decision. If I just had a reaction, I need a decision. That helps helps me with progress and keeps me focused on what is really going on in the story instead of the last feeling I generated.

The other thing that helps is discussing my plot bogging problem with my crit group or some other wonderful ear over in the Agent Query community. That helps too.

And if there seems like there is no way over, around, under or through your wall, I like the method I’ve begun calling, ‘push someone off a tower’. In my current work in progress, I did just that. This scene was going nowhere. It was boring, the characters were griping and then my heroine shoved her best friend off the tower. Suddenly I had action. (They were bungee jumping–it’s not a murder mystery. Yet.) So now when I find myself thumping into a wall, I turn around and push someone off a tower. Last time my heroine got arrested. That was good for about another 8000 words.

I’ll leave you with some fitting and timely NaNoWriMo writing advice from author Janet Fitch:

“I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.” (Her therapist was telling her this.)

“So you have these options, but which one to go for? When in doubt, make trouble for your character. Don’t let her stand on the edge of the pool, dipping her toe. Come up behind her and give her a good hard shove. That’s my advice to you now. Make trouble for your character. In life we try to avoid trouble. We chew on our choices endlessly. We go to shrinks, we talk to our friends. In fiction, this is deadly. Protagonists need to screw up, act impulsively, have enemies, get into TROUBLE.”

“The difficulty is that we create protagonists we love. And we love them like our children. We want to protect them from harm, keep them safe, make sure they won’t get hurt, or not so bad. Maybe a skinned knee. Certainly not a car wreck. But the essence of fiction writing is creating a character you love and, frankly, torturing him. You are both sadist and saviour. Find the thing he loves most and take it away from him. Find the thing he fears  and shove him shoulder deep into it. Find the person who is absolutely worst for him and have him delivered into that character’s hands. Having him make a choice which is absolutely wrong.”

Love it! Good luck getting over, under, through or around your wall.

Flaming Fingers

My fingers are burning up my keyboard so amazingly fast that there are flames shooting out all over the place.

Okay, maybe not. But I did write 4,228 words in about 3 hours this afternoon. That’s pretty fast. My word count for NaNoWriMo is now 13,052. Wahoo! And the story is officially over the starting hump and all the fun action gets to happen now. Either the story is going to roll out before me like some grand red carpet, or the earth in front of me is going to crumble and fall away like some video game. One or the other. I’m kind of hoping for the red carpet, but seeing as I don’t know what the next big key in the story is going to be–you know, the one the story sits on–it really could go either way.

Oh, and it seems to be taking more of an urban fantasy feel than a chick lit feel. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not seeing as urban fantasy is pretty much the next genre bubble that is about to pop. If it hasn’t already. At least there are no vampires. (Nothing against the undead or those who write about them.)

So there you have it, a NaNoWriMo update.

Down to NaNo Business

Today, I officially began writing my story for NaNoWriMo. I must say, I am a writing machine. In the span of two hours, I went from 0 words to 2888. And they even make sense. Plus, I think I even have progression working in my favour this time. However, I’m not sure if I introduce a story hook in a compelling way and soon enough in the first scene. I did spend some time tinkering with that. But this is, of course, a rough draft and as Chris Baty, Program Director over at NaNoWriMo said in his pep talk email of November 1st:

“The books we write in November won’t start out like the novels we buy in bookstores. Because the novels we buy in bookstores didn’t start out like bookstore-novels either. Nope. They started out as way-less beautiful, way-more exciting things called first drafts. These are the dinged-up cousins to final drafts, and they’re packed with crazy energy and laughable tangents and embarrassing instances where a main character’s name shifts six times over the course of a single chapter.”

I agree wholeheartedly. And that is why, I am not so worried about whether my story starts off with the biggest bang that it could. Part of the reason why is that I don’t know the whole story yet which means that I don’t know what’s going to be the best way for it to begin. In fact, I’m pretty certain that I’ll be changing the beginning in at least one or two or eight ways before the story is considered ‘ready’.

If I can keep things going, I will be done my 50,000 words in a span of 34 hours (nonconsecetive). Does that sound right? Seems a bit…fast. Then again, I have tossed down over 80,000 words in a month, so 50,000 shouldn’t surprise me.

I pinched this timely photo from Inner Geek.

Now if that NaNoWriMo website wasn’t so amazingly slow that I could actually check in on my NaNo buddies and upload my word count…

NaNo-Uh oh?

I’ve promised myself to write a new story for NaNoWriMo this month. I even have a story idea that has been flouncing around in the back of my head for at least 6-8 months. No worries, right?

Well maybe if the genre I write in wasn’t dead. Seriously. I had a published author tell me the story of how her chick lit novel didn’t sell, despite editor interest, last year. I’ve heard agents proclaim that the genre is dead. Can’t sell a thing. Not so good for the unpublished writer of chick lit, is it?

But I have faith. I really enjoy writing chick lit and it is the genre for which I get the majority of my ideas. There has got to be a way. In the meantime, what is a gal to do when she’s promised herself to write a NaNoWriMo story but the story idea is <eeek> chick lit.

I suppose it means suck it up and write it! Write what you love–that’s always the advice they give out, isn’t it?