#WordlessWednesday: Early Morning NaNoWriMo Write-in
Tag: NaNoWriMo
SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK? Part 1: How I Got Started
Note: When I started this series I thought it would be one post, maybe two. It turned into six. So I’ll be posting one of these every day this week.
Part 1: How I Got Started
A friend and I were talking the other day about things one could do with one’s life.
“Is there anything you really want to do?” I asked her. “Something you’ve always dreamt of?”
She didn’t even pause to think.
“Write a book!” she said.
Well, you know what my reaction to that was bound to be.
“Do it!” I shot back at her.
“But,” she said, “where would I start?”
I think there’s a lot of a people who have that dream in their life: “One day, I want to write a book.” Oddly enough, I was never one of them. Not because I didn’t always love books, but because it never occurred to me that someone like me could write one. To write a book you have to be really special, don’t you? You have to have some inner drive that makes you pick up the pen, that forces you to write or you’ll burst. You have to have the talent that just, I don’t know, crystallizes into a story. Writers are born, not made…
Or so I thought. But then I switched schools during my undergrad, and my new university had Creative Writing classes. Well, why not? I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. And it didn’t. I did well and had fun, and found that I’m not a bad writer. In Creative Nonfiction class, in particular, I found my voice, and not long after that I started a blog. However, the class that was aimed at teaching us to write novels left me with the conclusion that I was never going to be “a novelist”—I didn’t have what it takes. I didn’t have the stamina to complete that long a manuscript; I’d lose interest by Chapter 4. But more to the point, I didn’t have anything to say; the stories I had in my head were too boring, too silly; nobody would want to read them. Real writers write literary fiction. (Just to be clear, this wasn’t a prof telling me these things; I discovered them all on my own. Because I’m smart that way.)
I got my BA in spring of 2011. The previous year, I had heard about this NaNoWriMo thing—National Novel Writing Month: crazy people who sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I already knew that I wasn’t a novelist, but I had some time on my hands, and once again I thought, Why not? All you have to do to win the challenge is write 50,000 words in 30 days. Nobody said anything about it being good words, let alone quality writing anyone would want to read. Maybe I could do that. It might be fun.
So I signed up. “Write 50,000 words, and have fun”—that’s all I aimed for, that first NaNo I participated in. I started with only a vague idea where I was going. “It was the blue bowl that started it all…,” I typed on November 1st.
And I kept typing, and typing. Telling myself a story I enjoyed, about a young woman who gets sucked off into another world and how she copes. Typing and typing. There’s a cute baby in it, and descriptions of cooking in an open fireplace, and a potter who makes pots on a kickwheel, and a bit of gentle magic. Typing and typing.
By November 30th, I had 50,000 words. I’d had fun. And, to my surprise, I had a novel. I went back and read it from the beginning, and, what do you know? I enjoyed it. As a novel. And then, wonder of wonders, I handed it to a couple of other people (notably among them Lee Strauss, who had just published her own first novel), and they enjoyed it too!
I had written a novel. A real, honest-to-goodness novel.
But this story isn’t quite done yet. That particular year, Createspace, which was Amazon’s print-on-demand arm, offered NaNoWriMo winners a coupon for five free print copies of their novel, which you had to redeem by the end of June. So I got my rear in gear, proofread this unexpected novel manuscript (then proofread it again), got help with making a cover from one of the Offspring who knows their way around Photoshop and has a knack for graphic design, and less than a year from that November 1st, I had in my hands five printed copies of a book that I had had no idea I’d be able to write.
It didn’t stop there. The next November, I went back and wrote the sequel to Seventh Son. It was much harder that time, because not only was I in grad school by then, but I was invested: I had this novel planned and plotted out; it had to be a novel, and it had to be good—as good as the first one. I couldn’t just waffle on as I had the first time, this time it mattered. But I struggled on, and again I finished; that novel was Cat and Mouse.
The year after that, I’d learned my lesson (namely that trying to do grad school and writing “a real novel” is a little bit insane, or rather more so than NaNoWriMo is already), so when November rolled around I decided to write something simple that didn’t matter so much—I grabbed one of my favourite Grimm’s fairy tales, “Puss in Boots”, and retold it to the tune of 50,000 words. And again, I got a novel. That one became Martin Millerson, or: Something With Cats (because it has a whole bunch of extra cats in it, not just the booted one).
I kept doing NaNoWriMo, and wrote Checkmate, and Star Bright, and then a number of other novels that will see the light of publication eventually (I hope). Yes, novels. I’ve written novels, plural. I didn’t always “win” NaNoWriMo, and didn’t even do it every year since, but I call myself a novelist now.
Why am I telling you all this?
It’s because of my friend’s question: “Where do you start?”
This is the story of how I started. I didn’t even set out to “write a book”, because I didn’t know I could. But I could sit down and start typing, and tell myself a story I liked. And after a certain number of days of doing it, and then doing it again, and again, and again, I had a book.
That’s one way of writing a book: sit down and start writing.
However, that’s not the only way. I would say that’s not even the best way. There are other options…
…TO BE CONTINUED…
PS: NaNoWriMo 2023 starts this week – you still have time to sign up!
News from the Writing Trenches, January** 2023 Edition
Steve says it’s time I gave y’all an update. (Side note: I like that word, “y’all”. It’s quite fascinating how the dialect of the Southern United States has created a new second person plural, which takes the place of what the word “you” used to mean. Back in the day of The Bard and the King James Bible, “thou” meant “you, the single person”, and “you” meant “you, the several people”. Nowadays, regular English only has “you”, as in, “you one” and “you many”. But Southern US English has re-invented a plural, so there you can say “you one” and “y’all many”. I wonder if it’ll ever make it into formal, written language? End of digression.)
So, yes, update. No, I’m not getting sidetracked, why would I? It’s not like I go on guilt trips about how much I have, or haven’t, written in the last while. In fact, I was going to (but didn’t) write a blog post on that: “The Year I Failed NaNoWriMo”.
Because, that did happen last November. I failed NaNo—dismally so. I only got a few thousand words done. But then, I’d set myself up for it. I wanted to see if I could write a novel and do regular work, as well. So I booked several editing jobs during November, as well as having some volunteer work to do (and never mind starting Christmas preparations), plus a trip to the coast for some family stuff in the middle of it. On top of it I was a NaNo ML (Municipal Liaison, i.e. regional leader or cheering squad), which brings a bunch more work with it. I know, I know, laugh all you want.
In fact, setting myself up for failure was a useful experiment. I once knew someone who set himself up to fail a university course: he signed up to the class with the full intention of failing, just to teach himself the lesson that it’s okay to fail. I wouldn’t quite go that far myself; for one, university courses are blinkin’ expensive—there are a lot of cheaper ways of failing. But I started NaNoWriMo 2022 with the idea that I probably wouldn’t finish my 50,000 words. I’d done it ten times in a row before, pushed myself to the finish line, got it done. So I knew what it takes for me to do it. I’ve seen others win NaNoWriMo “on the side”, though, while holding down full-time jobs or looking after young children, and I wondered if there was any chance of me doing so. Answer: No. I didn’t even get a part of a novel written. Which was no surprise, but still stressful.
I did learn a couple of useful things. I’m not a very fast writer, I’ve known that all along. Word sprints and word wars are useless for me. It’s not that I can’t type fast, but I can’t think fast, can’t craft sentences very quickly, so my word count per minute has never been high. Some of my friends can crank out 2000 words an hour without breaking a sweat, and I’ve always wondered how they do it and why I can’t. This time, during one of our online write-ins, I decided to just write stream-of-consciousness drivel, nothing whatever to do with any story I was writing, just to see how fast I could put words on screen. And what do you know, if all I’m doing is typing without trying to make sense, let alone paint a word picture, I can rack up the word count with the best of them! However, it’s a word count that nobody would ever want to read. There were words, even mostly-spelled-correctly words making somewhat-puncuated sentences, but they were utter dross, not a story. And I didn’t enjoy the process. So, it’s not that I’m a failure at writing, it’s that I have a different writing style from the one that cranks ‘em out fast*. I’m a Slow Writer. Which, given the fact that I’m into Slow Culture as a whole (Slow Food, Slow Textiles, etc.), is kind of a good thing. And like other aspects of Slow Anything, it means you (or rather I) have to take time for it, have to set time aside, or it won’t happen.
So! Now you know that I did not write a new novel last November. However. I do have a whole bunch of novels sitting around on my computer in varying states of completion. A few are finished, critiqued, edited, polished. Some are finished, i.e. completed novels, but need rewriting; one needs a whole different ending. And one is only half done, and I need to write the second half and get ‘er done. Also, there are some short stories kicking around that I’ve been submitting to contests, and/or might turn into a story collection, or expand into a novella or even full novel.
All that to say, Writing? Why yes, Steve, I have been writing, thank you very much. You can stop giving me censorious looks. And something might even come out of it, very soon.
That’s Life, the Universe, and News from the Writing Trenches in January** of 2023. I’ll let y’all know when there’s more to tell.
*Footnote: I’m not saying that people who write novels fast write dross; far from it. Just that their brains work differently from mine. I can only write really fast if I write drivel; if I want to write anything worth reading I have to take my time. And that’s okay.
**Edit after posting: I just noticed that it is, in fact, now February, not January. Which tells you where my brain is at. Ah well…
#WordlessWednesday: #NaNoWriMo2019
“Beast”: A Fairy Tale Flash Fiction
BEAST
The snow kept falling thicker and thicker. Whirling, blowing, biting, cutting. Clinging to his whiskers, to his eyelashes, to the hair on the side of his face. His nose and cheeks had grown numb, his fingers so cold he could no longer bend them. When he tried to raise them to his face to brush the snow out of his beard, they felt like hard claws on the end of big, clumsy, fur-covered paws; claws that had no feeling in them and could not move to his will.
He tried to climb up the side of the ravine, reached for a snow-covered branch. Could not close his hands on it—where were his thumbs? He staggered on his clumsy legs, then dropped down onto all fours.
Like an animal.
A beast…
Keep reading this story on Enchanted Conversation Magazine
I wrote this last November during NaNoWriMo, when I was doing a retelling of “Snow White and Rose Red“. It was sort of a prologue to the story, the moment when the “prince” turns into a “bear” – except in my adaptation, he’s not a real bear, just a very hairy guy (and he’s not a prince either, being an ordinary 21st century Canadian). But then it occurred to me that this could work as a standalone Flash Fiction, a regular adaptation of the regular fairy tale, so I sent it to Amanda at Enchanted Conversation. And here it is.
You can decide for yourself if you want to take the transformation as an actual guy-turned-into-bear thing, or keep it metaphorical. I’m not entirely sure yet which one I prefer.
This and That and Bears
Mornin’, all. Steve’s been reminding me that it’s been a while since you all had an update on how he’s doing, so I figured I’d better humour him.
His big news is that he just had a labelectomy. What’s that, you ask? Oh, it’s this thing that happens in Stuffed-Animal-Land, when you have your manufacturer’s labels cut off your rear end. Steve didn’t mind them so much, but they did make him self-conscious about his back view:
So we finally took the plunge and gave him the snip. He’s hanging in there.
In other news, he’s pleased about this year’s choice of NaNoWriMo project: an adaptation of “Snow White and Rose Red”, a fairy tale that prominently features a bear. Originally I was going to work on Septimus Book 5, but then a friend suggested that we both do an adaptation of a fairy tale – the same fairy tale – so how could I resist? I think my friend is doing a SciFi; mine is going to be a contemporary mystery/romance (I hope). Needless to say, my Snow White and Rose Red are not going to be a set of fraternal twins, one blonde and one brunette, who are so sickeningly sweet and good and domestic they should have the Diabetes Association called on them.
Oh, if you want to join us in doing a “Snow White and Rose Red” for NaNoWriMo, please do! We could have a whole SWRR club.
Otherwise, in honour of #Socktober I finally got back to the socks I had on the knitting needles for the last year or so, and even finished the first one of the pair:
I was watching “Snow White and Rose Red” movies while I was knitting, so it counts as research. Youtube has quite a few Sonntagsmärchen – Sunday Fairy Tales – to watch. Did I mention the blonde-and-brunette convention? Urr, yeah – and in the 1955 version, the prince is called Prinz Goldhaar (Prince Golden Hair) to boot, and looks exactly how you’d expect him to with that name. Bring on the insulin. Good thing he spends most of the story in a bear suit! It’s still a fun movie, though. The 2012 version isn’t bad, either; in that one Rose Red swings a freshly-sharpened axe (which the actress apparently has never done in real life, judging by her completely inefficient grip on the thing), and doesn’t want to get married but travel the world and have adventures.
One of things that’s fun about fairy tale movies is that barring the changing definitions of “handsome” (coughPrinceGoldhairCough), they’re timeless. Which is exactly what a fairy tale ought to be – what a fairy tale is. “Once upon a time” is now, is never, is a long time ago or just last week, or maybe tomorrow. Somewhere in the woods, there is a cottage with a mother and two sisters, and during a winter’s storm there comes a knock on the door, and in stumbles a big black bear…
Steve says I better make the bear the hero of the piece, that’s what it’s all about. I’ll have to have a talk with him; he has a one-track mind on these matters. But that’s bears for you.
Life, the Universe, Bears and Socks and Labelectomies. And fairy tales, too.
News From the Writing Trenches: #NaNoWriMo2017
It’s Nanowrimo.
I’ve got a bear.
I’m writing.
Oh, and it’s winter and stuff.
That’s all.
Life, the Universe, and News From the Writing Trenches. See you on the other side!
Let the Crazies Begin, or: Why I’m a Wrimo
“What’s the point?” someone asked the other day, when the conversation came around to NaNoWriMo. (NaNo-whatmo? you say. NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. You know, that Novemberly craziness where I, and several hundred thousand others across the globe, vanish into a deep rabbit hole of mad, bad and dangerous-to-know novelling, aiming to write a 50,000-word novel in the space of 30 days. I might have mentioned it a time or three [dozen] before.)
What’s the point, indeed. Why do this to yourself? Why engage in such a bout of insanity? And don’t get me wrong, it is insane. Every year, I get stressed to the hilt, moan and whine, say I’m not going to finish (my fellow local Wrimos can attest to that). And every year, I sign up again. This will be my seventh NaNo in a row. But why?
Grant Faulkner, the current executive director of NaNoWriMo, just wrote an excellent article about it: “How a Month of NaNoWriMo Can Lead to a Lifetime of Better Writing“. A lifetime of better writing. Or, in my case, writing at all.
If it wasn’t for NaNoWriMo, I wouldn’t be a writer. Because writing, dontcha know, is for special people. People who have talent. People who have passion, who must write or go insane. People who have grand ideas, big stories to tell – stories of adventures in far-off places, of lives lived in danger and darkness, of deep and harrowing emotions or high and lofty ideals. People who create unforgettable characters and bring them to life on the page. In other words, people not like me.
I’ve always loved stories, and as a kid in school, I was good at writing them. I even took creative writing courses in my undergrad studies, and a night class on how to write books for children. But what I learned from those classes, among other very useful things, was that I don’t have what it takes to be a novelist. I don’t have the stick-to-it-iveness to finish a whole novel, and even if I did, my ideas are kind of basic, trite. Light-weight, as it were. Not the stuff that real novels, and therefore real novelists, are made of.
And that was okay – it’s not like I was crushed or heartbroken about it; it was just a realistic estimation of my skills and abilities. I’m not one of those people who “always wanted to write a novel” – it never occurred to me that I could, because novel writing, dontcha know, is for… (see above, rinse and repeat).
Enter NaNoWriMo 2011.
I wasn’t going to “write a novel” – nah, I had no such lofty goal. All I wanted was to see if I could do this thing, could write 50,000 words in one month. I was going to have fun, and tell myself a story that I liked, and that’s all.
And you know what? I did. I wrote 50,000 words, told myself a story, and “won” my first NaNo. But that wasn’t all. When I was finished, I had a novel. A full, completed novel. And just like that, I was a writer.
Because a writer … is a person who writes.
And that’s what NaNoWriMo is about – writing.
The goal that all us crazies sign up for is to write 50,000 words. Not everyone makes that goal; in fact, not very many Wrimos do – a rough estimate is that maybe 1 in 4 reaches the full word count. But for the rest of them? They still write. Even if someone falls 40,000 words short of the goal, that means they’ve still written 10,000 words they hadn’t written before. Ten thousand words! That’s a lot of words, people. It’s about forty pages, printed out, and there’s novellas out on the market of that length.
And the reason these Wrimos wrote those words is because they signed up for it, and got caught up in the sheer enthusiasm and excitement that’s NaNoWriMo and swept along in the current of writerly excitement. Caught up just like I get caught up again, every year, for the seventh time in a row now. Surrounded by other crazies, talking titles and plots and word count tricks, sharing ideas and cheering each other on.
It doesn’t matter that those stories we write aren’t deep, or lofty, or weighty or important. They might be, but then again, they might not. They might be terrible, riddled with spelling mistakes, more full of plot holes than a broken sieve. But they are still stories, and they have been written. Written by writers.
And that is the point of NaNoWriMo: it makes me a writer. That’s why I do it, year after year.
Like I said, you don’t have to join in – by no means do you have to join in. But if, perhaps, this is something you think you might want to try – do it! Come on in, join the fun! It’s the best thing ever. And who knows, at the end you might have a novel in your hand – that’s what happened to me. And it was a game changer.
Life, the Universe, and Being a Writer. Thank you, NaNoWriMo!
Taking Risks
Our local NaNoWriMo group is engaged on a new venture: we decided to take things a step further and form a Critique Group. A week ago we had our first meeting, and we decided that every month, everyone would submit few pages of their work, and we’d all read it and give each other feedback. Sounds great, right?
Now, in the week since, two of our group members have put up posts on their blogs, saying basically the same thing, namely how scary it is to stick out your neck and hand over your work to someone else to criticise. And the reaction I had to both their posts was nothing so much as, “You feel that way, too?”
See, in the group, we’re all very self-assured, poised, and articulate; we have things to say and opinions to state; we’re writers; we’re cool. But, as it turns out, when we go home and look over our material for something to send to everyone, we want to pull in our little snail antennae and cower in our shells, quietly whimpering. Because sending our stuff out there into the world is risky!
So as I was sitting here this morning thinking about this, beside me on the kitchen floor played out a little drama: Louis the Now-Very-Large Kitten was stalking a stinkbug. (Don’t ask me what the stinkbug was doing in my kitchen in January. Maybe it hitched a ride into the house on a piece of firewood on which it was trying to overwinter?)
Now Louis is the kind of cat who, whatever else you can say about him, is not a tim’rous wee beastie. He’s curious. And persistent. The bottle caps and walnuts in the shell that he has slain number in the dozens, and the corpses are accumulated in the corners of the living room and under the kitchen stove drawer. So when there was this new and very interesting black little thing moving about the kitchen floor all on its own, Louis was mesmerised. He stared at it. He put out a paw and batted it. He stared at it some more, and batted at it some more – and so on.
After quite a while of this, he decided on a different approach: he tried to take a bite. And the inevitable happened: the stinkbug sprayed.
Well! Louis jerked back. He made faces. Pt pt pt pt! he tried to spit the icky taste out of his mouth. He climbed on a cardboard box to get the high-ground advantage over this unexpectedly dangerous thing, squinting down at it with eyes that were obviously stinging with stinkbug juice. He blinked and blinked again, went pt pt! a few more times – and then he went right after the bug again. More cautiously this time – he stayed well back for a few minutes, stalking it from a distance – but he kept at it. He crawled between the potted plants, flipped over the patio door mat to find it – he wasn’t going let that funny black thing get away from him. Even though it squirted icky stuff in his face, Louis was determined to get that bug. He took a risk – he got burned – and he went right back to risk again.
How very metaphorical, isn’t it? Louis the Cat and the Stinkbug. Now, I’m not saying that us writers are stinkbugs – uh, no. But that large orange-and-white fuzzball was rather inspiring this morning. He exuberantly takes risks, gets results that sting, then goes right on risking.
So even if getting feedback on your stories can sometimes sting (and sometimes stink, as well), it’s worth going back to risk it again. And the good thing is that as writers we know we all feel the same – sharing our work is scary. But we do it anyway.
Life, the Universe, Stink Bugs and Writers. I think Louis would say that the exhilaration of the hunt is worth the sting.
This, That, and NaNoWriMo’s Over
I was going to write an erudite and contemplative post for you today. It was going to be all about why I do NaNoWriMo, even though every year I just about lose my marbles with the stress of trying to finish. Or maybe about some more editorial pontifications on Point of View and Tense (first or third? past or present?). Or about the wonders of community (which actually ties right in with point #1).
But I tried to write, and it just wasn’t coming out right – I was sounding way too preachy, or, conversely, too trite, even to my own ears. I think I might have used up most of my words on my story over the last 32 days.
So I thought, forget this nonsense; I’ll just show you a few pictures. You know, worth a thousand words, blah blah.
Life, the Universe, and Five Thousand Words Worth of Pictures. Happy December!