NaNoWriMo- On Success and Failure

So its the final day of National Novel Writing Month. At this point I'm sure many of you, like me, are scrambling to reach their 50,000 word count. But I'm taking a break in this moment to talk not only about succeeding at the NaNoWriMo challenge but failing it as well.

Today, some of you will hit your 50,000 words. Some of you already have and are going for an even larger word goal. And that's AMAZING. Maybe 80% of the words are crap. Maybe you don't even know if it works as a story. But you wrote a novel in a month. That's an astonishing feat of dedication. You worked hard and even if you don't come back to this novel in the near future, you earned some valuable writing experience.

For some of you, maybe this is the first novel you've ever finished. That's even more amazing, because now you know you can do it. With enough hard work and dedication, you can type 'the end' on a book. I hope you write many, many more.

For others this is their tenth novel. Which is also SO cool. You've put out so many books and even if they haven't all been winners, some of them are. Some of them have or will taken you all the way to down the publishing road.

If you won this year's NaNoWriMo, pat yourself on the back. Take a breath. Then put away your draft and take a well deserved break. You can edit out all the terrible parts later.

But some of you may have "lost" NaNoWriMo this year. But honestly, why think about it as a loss? Whatever you managed to write--10,000 words, 20,000 words, 30,000 etc--that's still a good chunk of a novel. You're still one step closer to a completed draft. Maybe you're close to 50,000 but you won't be able to hit it today. That's fine. Take your time. What does it matter if you finish a draft in a month and a day, a month and a week or even two months? That's still a tremendous accomplishment.

The bottom line is, NaNoWriMo isn't for everyone. Sometimes people draft slowly. That's a valid way to write a novel. As long as it gets done and you're proud of it, who cares that it wasn't written in a month? You're still a writer who wrote a whole book. Celebrate that.

I've won NaNoWriMo and I've lost NaNoWriMo. Sometimes, I burnt myself out writing in October before I hit November. Last year, my life was too emotionally tumultuous and I didn't write a dang thing in the Fall. I felt terrible about it because fast drafting is my skill. I felt so unproductive and like I lost my creative spark. But then I hit spring of 2016 and I fast drafted two novels. Those novels weren't better or worse because I didn't write them in November. They were still drafts. Messy drafts, but drafts none the less.

So if you tried NaNoWriMo at all this year, whether you won or "lost", pat yourself on the back and celebrate. Not many people would even attempt what you guys did and you deserve all the credit in the world for it. Tomorrrow's a new day of writing and who knows what it will bring!

Writing Sprints!

No 'Lessons from Anime' today because its taking me much longer to write that anime nihilists post than I thought. And I've been writing other stuff lately. Namely 19,000 words of the fourth book in the HOUR OF MISCHIEF series in the last three days. And since NaNoWriMo is coming up, I figured this would be relevant.

I basically write via sprints. I'm not a slow and careful drafter. I attack the draft with all of my terrible first sentences and messy plot mistakes and useless dialogue and I just let it fly. Better to get everything down and edit it later than risk losing interest in the story. But writing sprints can be hard for some people, especially writers with perfectionist tendencies who like to edit as they go. If that method works for you, that's fine, but if you find yourself never finishing anything because you keep getting bogged down in the details, maybe its time to switch it up.

Writing sprints involve writing and absolutely no editing. They can help you finish a draft, even if its in an extremely rough form. But drafts are never final and it doesn't matter how many times you have to edit it. You can edit the book when its complete. You can't edit words that aren't there.

So here are some tips for NaNoWriMo and writing sprints and general!

1. Don't read. At all.

I know you might want to go back and read your work. Don't. Unless you forget if you mentioned an important plot detail earlier or not, don't. If you go back and read, you'll feel the urge to edit and you'll break your pace. If the last section you wrote is crap, you can edit it later.

2. Don't get bogged down in difficult sections

Having trouble with a scene? Let yourself breeze past it in a paragraph and keep going to more interesting stuff. You can even skip over the scene and go back to write it later. One of the hardest thing in writing sprints are transitions between scenes. Don't stress over them. Just go.

3. Outline

Not everyone is an outliner, but I always sprint best when I know where the plot is going. That way I can set goals and I've already envisioned scenes in my mind before I write them. When I finally sit down to type it out, it flows much easier.

4. Bribe yourself

If you're settling down for a big writing sprint, bribe yourself with rewards. I once bought a bag of starburst jelly beans and ate one for every 100 words I wrote. This makes the process of writing fun and tasty. And if you're good at writing sprints, kind of bad for you.

5. Don't Give up

If you get behind during NaNoWriMo, don't be disheartened. There's plenty of time to catch up. You might have a day you just can't write, but maybe you'll write 3,000 words easily the next day. Its a whole month. Don't beat yourself up about it, even if you ultimately fail. Writing sprints are a difficult thing to learn, and ultimately, as long as you get to the end of the draft, its still a win.

And that's just five tips to make NaNoWriMo easier for you! Get out there and write :)

Writer's Thoughts!!!

Today, a rare Saturday post!

A few days ago I posted the first episode of a new video series called Writer's Thoughts. I just wanted to give a bit more information about the series here on the blog. These are short, hopefully humorous videos capturing the erratic thoughts of the writer during the various stages of the writing and publishing process. They're only 3-5 minutes long so short and sweet.

I don't know how often I'll be updating this series (optimistically once every two weeks), but take a gander if your interested  and subscribe to me on youtube!

Writer’s tips: Pinterest and the Visual Writer

I adore Pinterest. I also hate it. And can you really blame me? It is both a magnificent tool for brainstorming and character development and a ginormous time waster. I mean I can say I’m gathering images for my book and developing my ideas but I’m also just looking at pretty pictures.

But I’m not here to berate Pinterest for stealing hours of time away from me. I’m here to praise it for its help with the idea stage of the creative process.

I am a visual reader. Being a lover of film and theater all my life, I like to picture books in my head, not just read them. It’s an amazing feeling to get so lost in a book that you forget you are even reading words. My mind starts subconsciously painting the scenes for me. I am a visual reader and I am also a visual writer. I love finding little images that remind me of my characters. Finding images that suit my ideas really helps spur them on and encourage me to start, finish and edit projects.

If you are a visual writer as I am, here are a few Pinterest tips to help you cultivate your ideas in the midst of your procrastination.

1. Make a board for each book. A lot of people have writing boards for general book inspiration but if you put ALL your writing related pictures on one board, it will get cluttered really fast. Book boards work much better if you keep it to one book idea per board. Its more organized and its easier to identify a theme between the pictures. It looks prettier, honestly.

2. Whenever you are stuck on a scene, head to Pinterest and start pinning images that relate to the characters you are dealing with. Get lost for awhile in a maze of pictures and maybe your mind will get unstuck. Or maybe you’ll spend two hours getting lost. Either way, your book board just got a whole lot fatter

3. Use Pinterest for inspiration. Not feeling any of your current book ideas? That’s alright. Go browse random art boards and see what jumps out at you. Maybe a picture will spark an idea and send you down a rabbit hole to a new writing adventure. Pinterest is great for that kind of thing but also annoying when you already have ten other ideas. It’s a mixed bag.

4. When all else fails: look up delicious recipes. This is actually a horrible thing to do for your productivity. But, on the other hand, it involves awesome food.

So there you go. Simple tips for the visual writer on Pinterest. Get writing and, if you can’t find the motivation, get pinning! And if you're interested in writing and general nerdom, follow me on pinterest here.

Giving Plot to the Plotless (Introduction: The Experiment)

When it comes to starting a book, there are two kinds of writers: Pantsers and Plotters. We've heard this many times before, and by now most of us know where we stand on the spectrum. We either start writing and fly by the seat of our pants, letting our writing lead us where we may, or we sit down and outline our book from start to finish before we type the first word. Or, sometimes, a mix of both.

For awhile, I thought I was a pantser because, hey, I never wrote down outlines. I thought about the story in my head for a few days, then started writing. But as I matured as a writer, I realized I'd always been an plotter at heart. I was just too stubborn to put the outline down on paper.

In fact, its kind of impossible for me to be a pantser. When an idea hits me--a really good, I-need-to-write-this-down-now, kind of idea-- it often explodes. Within a few days of daydreaming I have the beginning, middle and end basically plotted out in my head and character arcs and relationships nailed down. I just need to fill in a few gaps and pieces before I'm ready to roll. My ideas mature very quickly and its hard for me to step into a story having no idea where its going to go.

And then, last year, something happened. Almost a year ago today in fact. I met my friend. We'll call her 'T' for short. T and I were talking about two of our characters in one of our writing conversations. She was recounting her main character's past and I kept on chiming in saying 'oh yeah, my character had something similar happen to him'. Eventually this expanded. Our characters would get along, we decided. In fact, it would be very interesting to write a conversation with them. Just one conversation to see what happened.

They had a conversation. Then we decided to write another scene. Then another. And yet another. Slowly, other characters started getting involved as we experimented relationships. New plot threads came in. And we just kept going, and going, and going. As of now, we have written about 2,000 pages of material.

Yikes right?

It gets even better. Now we're trying to distill all of this original material into a series of books with a plot. And it isn't easy. But it is one of the most fun and strange experiences I have ever had writing.

This is an interesting journey I've embarked on, and a long one. But I think its worth writing about because it has been a really unique experience for me. I'm an plotter who's been taken by her characters and dragged by the seat of her pants through hundreds of thousands of words of scenes in just a year.

The journey is still going, but let's see how far we've come, while discussing writing tips, outlining and plotting. It might have some good lessons for NaNoWriMo in there, as well. ;)

Stay tuned for Part 1: The Affair.