Why You Should Try NaNoWriMo

Another July, another NaNoWriMo.

For those new to the event, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short) is a call-to-action for authors to pen a 50,000 word novel in just 30 (or 31) days. What began as an annual November event soon morphed into a biyearly event with the version of "Camp NaNoWriMo" for the summer. Camp was so successful they broke it up into two events; one in April and the other July.

I wrote extensively about my first experience with NaNoWriMo. It was an unexpected journey that ushered me from uncertain fledgling into the realm of serious writers. I didn't know just how far I could go until I used the event to challenge my boundaries. It gave me the tools I needed to silence my goblin and helped me gain trust in my writing process.

What makes this year's Camp so exciting is the ability to set your own word count goal. Gone are my days of hanging my head in shame when I can't complete 50,000 words. I've attempted the November event three times and Camp three times previously. I only "won" the first time I tried in 2011. I've set next month's goal at 25,000 while I work on building a fantasy short story collection.  I feel confident that I can attain this while balancing my work and parenting obligations.

I hope you'll join me in July's challenge. If you're still not sure if NaNo is for you or if you think 50,000 words sounds completely insane (which it does), maybe my NaNoWriMo Survival Guide will sway you. If I can to do it, so can you!

Why Taking a Break is Necessary

It is a fact that acclaimed American writer Mark Twain took a long time to write books. Over 400 pages into Tom Sawyer he felt the manuscript was feeling contrived. He put it away for two whole years before touching it again to allow his subconscious to refill.

This is not to say that I am in the same league with Twain or that my work is on par with Tom Sawyer. But I do know wisdom when I hear it. Sometimes you have to look up instead of look within. You need to take a break from your work so that you can come back to it with a fresh eye and a clear mind. It is part of the process. 

As much as I believe in my novel in progress, The Bloodsong Swords, I know that by pushing it forward now, I'll be doing the story and myself a disservice. In the mean time I've been doing a lot of painting and focusing on my Etsy store. 

During this break from writing, I find my mind wandering to other stories and characters that I have in progress. I will likely end up working on those since that where the fire is burning hottest. I know it is better to go with the flow than go against the grain where the muse is concerned.

For now, I'm going to keep looking up.

How Sharing Stories Can Help You Connect

As an artist, I always tend to be my harshest critic, my biggest bully. No story is good enough. No turn of phrase impactful enough. No word just right. It has taken me quite a few years to feel confident enough to share work. I recently joined the fold on Wattpad--a story sharing site hosting a spectrum of tales from tween fan faction to highly renowned authors like Paulo Coelho.

Wattpad is fun. It is first and foremost a community of story lovers; readers and writers alike. You can post short or long stories, serials that you update weekly, or novel-length work. There are groups to join and loads of inspiring and fun stories to discover. You can "vote" on any work simply by clicking the star icon on the page to show you liked it. You can also comment on any section of work and converse with the authors. All in all, it is a great platform to connect with an audience.

I invite you all to join in.  Read my work. Post your own work. Or simply connect with others who love stories as much as you do. Hope to see you there!

Why You Shouldn't Fear The Process

It has been nearly a year since my last post and the completion of my novel. Through careful editing, tweaking characters, and a lot of cutting, my shitty first draft has transformed into an exciting tale with compelling characters. At least in my humble opinion.

The manuscript is now in the hands of a select few "beta-readers" who will collectively provide me with my first taste of scrutiny. As long as I've been writing, I've never been this excited about a piece of work or this confident in my creation. Will my readers' reactions meet my expectations? Or have I been so completely wrapped up in my own mind that I can't see the forest for the trees?  I will soon find out.

I thought this part of the process would be easy. The work is complete. It is out of my hands. Instead, I find myself anxious and worried which is no way to live. To combat my discomfort I've taken to channeling it into new and old projects. I currently have a slew of unfinished or unpolished stories. I am a chronic "starter." As it stands, I have three incomplete short stories, three incomplete novellas, and five incomplete novels that are part of the same series. To put it bluntly, I have plenty of ideas and very little discipline. That is all beginning to change.

Process. The writing lifestyle is all one big process. There isn't a definitive line between published and unpublished. There isn't a box I can check off that shows I've succeeded. You work, you research, you dream, you pour your heart onto the page. Yes, there are beginnings and endings, but really, it is just the ebb and flow of creativity.

The one thing I have learned through this process, as hundreds of other writers have stated before me and will long after me, is you have to write. Don't judge yourself too harshly. Choose work that you're passionate about and see it through to the end.

I'll leave you with this quote from the legendary Andy Warhol:

The End

Fifteen years after a horrifying dream left its imprint on my psyche, 9 years after I used that dream for a short story assignment in college, and 4 years after my attempts to edit that story ballooned into a novel of proportions beyond my skill set, I have completed the first draft of The Bloodsong Swords.

It is gloriously flawed and virtually unreadable. It is wrought with redundancies, with instances told rather than shown, with cliché turns of phrase, and info dumps. But within that are magical moments. Characters with yearning. Unique settings. There is a story that wants, indeed demands, to be told. 

My goal is to weed out all of the mundane and amateur and present to the world a version of this story worth telling. I feel obligated to do justice to the people and places that have lived in my unconscious mind for all these years. There is a lot of work left to do and I will admit that I am dreading the mountain of rewrites. There are points of view to eliminate, scene after scene in need of fresh envisioning, an entire restructuring.

Typing "The End" is only the beginning. I am up to the task even if I do feel like I'm in over my head. I've come to enjoy the writing process that once terrified and frustrated me. I can finally call myself a novelist. Up next: published novelist.

Why I Write

It was proposed in my writers group that we begin some fun extracurricular activities to help motivate our work. The question was asked, “Why do you write?” It took me aback momentarily.  What a silly question, I thought, but was stimulated into deep contemplation. The short answer is that I write because I must. There is an undeniable yearning inside me to tell stories and so I do. Of course, it was not quite so easy to fully embrace my calling. 

My journey to this place where I, after all of these laboring years, finally feel comfortable calling myself a writer and desiring to make money solely by creating works of fiction has been tremendously long, winding, and often confusing. Kind of like the previous sentence. 

My fondest early childhood memories include reading in bed with my mother. I lay swallowed up under the adult sized blankets with a stack of Dr. Seuss books as my mom embraced an Agatha Christie mystery. Those fond memories also include my father telling me absurdist bedtime stories where the characters were creatures that did nothing except be exceptionally silly. Better yet, late Sunday mornings when I was (finally!) allowed to wake my dad up, I would crawl into bed with him while he spun tales of animals who would never coexist on earth having an adventure. Imagine a giraffe and a penguin going to the candy store together—those were the best of times. 

I will provide some context by saying that he was and still is a blue-collar warehouse worker and my mother a housewife. I didn’t grow up in a house of artists or writers or film makers but I was reared in an environment where imagination was celebrated and encouraged. 

My language arts skills were nurtured further in public schools where I was years ahead of my peers in reading and writing. I even had the honor of reading a copy of The Tortoise and the Hare on stage at my kindergarten graduation. In third grade, I had a poem about a snowman submitted by my teacher and printed in the local newspaper (the clipping still lives between the thin plastic sheet and sticky back of a photo album in my parents’ house). In later years, we were assigned to write stories that would be shared with the younger grades. These works of fiction were even illustrated by us, laminated, and spiral bound. 

In fifth grade, I wrote about two neighboring dandelions that fall in love and in sixth grade about a skateboarding ten-year-old boy who plummets down a sewer and ends up in the land of the Leprechauns where he is charged by the Leprechaun King to find his lost daughter. (Steal these ideas if you like—Just remember they were written by a ten and eleven year old girl, you horrible person, you.)

In eighth grade I wrote an autobiography as a final project for English class. In the section where we project what our future will be like I wrote that I wanted to be an English teacher or a writer.

Then came high school. Oh that glorious period of endless mischief, reckless abandon, and insane freedoms. Those four years transformed me. By graduation I had my heart and mind set on becoming a criminal profiler just like Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs (which I read numerous times the summer between senior year of high school and freshman year of college). After one semester of criminal justice, I reckoned that lifelong exposure to death and the criminal psyche would be too damaging to my spirit and so fell back upon my original passion, stories. 

I changed my major to English and my minor to Creative Writing since it was not offered as a major.  This plan also flopped. I didn’t want to spend the bulk of my time critically analyzing old pieces of writing as English majors do. I want to spend my time writing new pieces of fiction. So, I came to the conclusion that I should quit school and rethink life. This, coincidentally, is an extremely easy decision to make at age 22.

I chose to go back to school after a year or so of working part time with no aim or goals to fuel me. I knew I needed some direction or I would be destined to slave away at retail stores for minimum wage the rest of my life. What could I do that would be an affordable education and rewarding?  I landed on interior design, which I postulated would satisfy both my left and right brains with its mix of creativity and logical order. Boy was I wrong. Studying interior design was essentially studying architecture, which for me left very little room for the kind of freewheeling open-ended creativity that I yearned. Buildings exist in the real world, after all, and have to be structurally sound. 

After a period of soul searching I quit Interior Design and moved on to art school to study what I really wanted to study: Fiction Writing. Yes, there really is a BA (or BFA if you’re so inclined) in Fiction Writing available and I have the student loan bills to prove it. The two years I spent constantly creating fiction were some of the most rewarding years of my life. I left them behind feeling impassioned toward my calling. I also left them with a desire to seek out a stable form of income for myself and so the career-building phase of my life began. 

I quit what I considered my “while-at-college-job,” moved across country for what I thought would be better work and came back to the same “while-at-college-job” within a year of receiving my BA. It was a crazy ride that pushed me farther into financial troubles but it was well worth the effort if only for the intense personal and spiritual growth I acquired while on the journey. I regret nothing.

The latest phase of my life has been my coming to grips with the fact that there is no stable form of income to be found if I’m going to do what I love. I need to create a job for myself, not work for someone else. What I intend to create is a career selling fictional tales that I have conceived and written. 

The last 18 months have been all about finding a balance between working a day job, writing a novel, and having a personal life. It is not easy. I’m still learning but getting better with every month that passes. I’m also unlearning bad habits like procrastination and being overly critical of my first drafts.  I feel more fulfilled now than I ever have. I will keep my pen on the page and my fingers on the keyboard until I look back and find a body of work of which I am proud.

“Seek and you shall find.” Never a truer statement was said. I sought out a path that never existed because I didn’t trust my instincts or my heart would lead me right. I think that is something we all have to go through, a testament to the power of personal growth. And maybe some of us don’t.  Maybe some people are born knowing who and what they are and work every moment toward those ends. It matters not what path you take get there as long as you arrive.

Why do you write?  Post answers in the comment section. I'm interested in the motivations of other writers (and people in general) and would love to hear about your journey.

2012

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. I, for one, have enjoyed stepping away from my fiction for a time and spending time with friends and family that I put on the back burner while pursuing publication.

As 2011 comes to end, I cannot help but reflect on the year as a whole. A lot has happened to me both inside and out. I took the effort to make this blog a priority. I helped start a writer’s group with two amazing and talented individuals that has become a cornerstone of my writing progress. I drummed up all the moxie I had and began seriously writing my first novel. I participated in National Novel Writing Month and discovered a potential that I never knew existed inside of me. I have released that little goblin living inside my head that whispered doubts in my ear and infused me with fear of failure.

I will reap all the benefits of these actions in 2012. By mid to late summer, my first book, The Bloodsong Swords, will arrive. My fiction baby will have been birthed, reared, and grown prepared to face the world on its own two feet. I know that not everyone will like it. I just hope that more people like it than not. 

It is an exciting story full of colorful characters and places that span over 1,900 years.  There are gangsters—a lot of gangsters—vying to fulfill an ancient prophecy and they all have supernatural powers. If I had a gun to my head, I would call it science fiction, but really, it is so much more than that. It is in essence an urban science fiction historical action thriller. Obviously, genre bending is going on in all directions. 

I dedicated December to my day job. Retail work takes on a completely new level of insanity during the holidays and I have had little free time to write. January will be a very important month. I still need to finish my first draft. Then the editing and rewriting begins. I am going to make a bold statement and say that 2012 will likely be the most important and pivotal year of my life. By the time 2013 rolls in, I will have transformed from an aspiring writer to a self-published author and life will never be the same again.

I want to thank everyone who has followed my journey thus far. I wish everyone an exciting and safe New Year’s celebration. Cheers to 2012!

5 Keys To An Effective Writers Group

I helped to form a writers group a few months ago. I and two other writers gather biweekly to discuss our work and cheer on our progress. We even created a group on an online writing community site to keep in touch between meetings and lay the hammer down on each other if needed. This has become a powerful and invaluable motivator for me to reach my writing goals. Here are five insights into what I find makes a group work:

1—Keep it small:  You want to be able to read work from every member and give reasonable feedback to each person. This will become complicated with too many members. Reading the work of others will inform and improve your own writing. Remember to read as a writer. You want to notice the craft as well as the story. You might find a key technique to unlocking a scene you have struggled with. You may find a point of view you haven’t attempted that would fit perfectly for a story or chapter you are stumbling over. 

 2—Have a variety of topics:  In my group, each member has some formal training in fiction writing but none of us has published in a prominent way. We all strive toward publication in the near future. It does not matter if every member is writing the same genre or to the same audience. In fact, it’s often helpful to read something dissimilar to what you’re working on. If you all worked on a story about talking animals for 2^nd to 5^th graders, the group can become competitive and therefore useless.

3—Keep clear guidelines:  We strive to send out at least 1000 words for each session. This number gives a focus and everyone is clear on expectations. This is a small enough amount to easily complete over a two-week period yet large enough to make good forward progress. We also have a simple policy of no excuses and no disclaimers. Everyone has a busy life these days. We work multiple jobs, have families, and other obligations that get in the way of our goals. Make sure the group guidelines are fair to all the members. You should want every member to succeed!

4—Focus on the writing:  Everyone works at their own level. We don’t care if you’re producing a novel, short story, creative nonfiction, graphic novel or children’s book as long as you’re writing and submitting something for the group to read. I often hear horror stories about people leaving groups because the critiques turned into bashing sessions.  This is unnecessary. Critiques should apply to the craft and your gut reactions to the story. This keeps personal feelings out of the mix. What passages did you find effective? What confused you or caused you to stumble? What stuck with you after reading? Some aspects of craft to keep in mind are movement, sense of place, dialogue, sensory and character descriptions, voice, tone, point of view and vantage point.

5—Have fun:  The odds are you will quit a writers group that bores or shames you. You’re likely taking things far too seriously if you’re not having fun. A writer’s group should be a safe place to experiment with story ideas and craft. You should never feel that your work is under par or under valued. Keep the tone light but constructive. Meet somewhere lively like a coffee shop or restaurant where you can talk, giggle, and not disturb other people. If you’re having fun, you are likely to stick with it and with each week, closer to achieving your writing goals.