Thoughts on Winning NaNoWriMo

In no particular order:

1. Writing 50,000 words isn't the problem.  Being coherent and telling something that resembles a story without lots and lots of padding when writing robotic-like for speed is.  I am convinced that this contest is for folks who just want to be able to say once in their lives that they wrote a novel.  Since I already have written four (now in various states of revision), there just isn't that novelty.  I'm more driven to write well.  Since I couldn't really write well going that fast, I'll will likely not participate again.

2. It felt good to do it just this once.  If I never do it again, at least I can say that I did it once.  50k in one month.  Whoo Hoo!

3.  Backup your work. 'nuf said.

4.  I spent almost the whole month dreaming of the novel that I wanted to write but didn't want to mess up by writing it in a marathon-like sprint.  I also tossed around plot details for two other novels.  This may account for at least some of my bad attitude.

5.  I am not sure how to describe the experience.  At first, I thought it was a sprint.  Then, I decided that it was a marathon.  Now, I think it was a marathon at a sprint-like pace--like those folks that actually win the big marathons by running 26+ miles at a 4 minute mile pace.  Good grief.  I think piddling around for a couple of years on a manuscript is just far too indulgent after you've written a novel for the first time, but one month is far too rushed.  Look, you will always have to revise later, but wouldn't it be better to be more thoughtful in your composition the first time out and save yourself the trouble of having to throw out nearly a month's worth of work?  I'd rather do a slower and better first draft and revise less than rush through the first draft and throw out everything but the title.  Just sayin'.

6.  Special thanks should go to the awesome support team:  fellow NaNos, good friends and family, and particularly the sweetheart & kids who put up with me always going off to hide in my room.  I couldn't have done it without their support.

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Thirty-Five Thousand Words and Counting

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I reached the 35k mark on NaNoWriMo this afternoon.  15k to go.  I am feeling more confident that I will make it--although, even more so than a week ago, I feel like I am running out of ideas to turn an already thin story into something that will stretch.  I think that if I ever get around to revising this for future publication, it's going to be a novella rather than a full length novel.  Of course, I may have an epiphany between now and then that fixes the thinness of the story.  It's happened before.

"Where do you get your ideas?" is a question I see often at blogs and websites of published authors on their FAQ page. 

Here would be my answer:

1. Real life--Real life is more wild and crazy than anything put onto paper or thrown up onto the silver screen.  Novels are frequently poor, pale imitations of the richness and diversity to be found in the world of the living.  While my stories all have fantasy or SF elements, much of what goes on paper was pulled right out of my head.  Friends and family could verify that many bits of dialogue, and indeed some entire scenes, are written down almost exactly as they happened.  (This should put a bit of fear, by the way, into those who dare to annoy writers.  There's a button that I keep seeing floating around various places that says, "I'm an author.  Fear me.")

Okay.  I kid.

The one caution I would put forth here is to suggest that you don't copy real people from real life and make them characters in your writing.  Bits, yes.  A personality trait or a funny habit here and there, fine.  But never the entire person.  For one thing, you can never get into someone's head well enough to really know them as well as you think you do, so whatever you put down on the pages is going to be a poor replication of the real person.  Second, because you can't truly recreate a real person in their entirety, attempting to do so could lead to offending friends and relatives that you meant to compliment.  Finally, even if you don't care if you offend the person in question, in skewering someone real in your fiction, you run the risk of developing a reputation as someone who uses their writing as a tool for slander.  That's really not a good career builder. 

If you want ideas, pull them from your memories, go out and people-watch for an afternoon, talk with friends and neighbors about their experiences.  Take from them a bit of something that can be a jumping off point for your fiction.  The more you draw from life, the more rich and real your fiction will feel and sound to your readers. 

2. Books & other Writings--Books, short stories, graphic novels, old mythologies, and such are good fodder for a brainstorming session.  Sometimes just a hint of an idea is all I lift from something I've read--an angle on a father/daughter relationship, a personality trait that you adore in a character, a theme, or a single interesting scene.  My fantasy novel that I am revising right now was imagined out of a anime movie, three old fairy tales, and a story from Greek mythology.  As much as I love books that are novel length versions of fairy tales--like Shannon Hale's The Goose Girl, I love even more original stories whose endings are not forgone conclusions--like Hale's very excellent Princess Academy, which was a Newbery Honor book.  Writing an original novel, though doesn't mean that you have to build entirely from the ground up.  Make your foundation from elements of classic stories and build your tale from there.

3.  Movies, TV, and the Theater--As with writing, ideas flow readily from these things, as well.  Many famous authors readily admit to developing their craft though writing fan fiction versions of their favorite movies or television series in their early years.  As with books and other writing, though, as you progress in your writing, you should use these stories or story elements as a jumping off point, not the basis for the story in its entirety. 

4.  Music--No, really.  Music is a great source of inspiration.  Ideas can flow from the emotions stirred in great music.  I've written to pop, rock, classical, soundtracks, and more. 

5. Artwork--The idea for one of my short stories, which is becoming novelized for NaNoWriMo, came from a piece of art linked to by one of my other writer friends.  Everything from the title to the emotion captured in everything from paintings to photographs can inspire and be a jumping off point for writing.

6. News, opinion columns, etc--Sometimes a story will come from an idea or notion that I ran across in my reading.  Good authors must first be good readers.  SF frequently comes from extrapolations of current events and trends.  If you need an idea, play the "what if" game with something that you find in a newspaper, magazine, or online news source. 

7. History--Truth is stranger than fiction, as they say.  A student of history has an almost endless supply of odd situations, well rounded villains, heroic stories, and such to draw from.

Ideas can come from just about anywhere.  Where do you get your ideas?

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Passing the Halfway Point of NaNoWriMo

Today marked the point where I leaped over the 25k hurdle on the NaNoWriMo novel.  The novel must be at least 50k words and written in 30 days.  I managed 25k in 13 days.  I don't know if I can keep up that pace, though.  For one thing, once you get past the difficulty of the opening, it's pretty much smooth sailing for the first 10k of any novel.  Ideas are flowing, you know where you are going, you are just trucking along.  Then you run into your first and then second and then third dry spell.

The other issue, of course, is Thanksgiving also happens to be this month, and I'm not giving up the opportunity to bake pumpkin pies and orange rolls from scratch, just because someone thought that National Write a Novel Month should be November... apparently because January wasn't available.

It will be interesting to see how things go from this point out.  I've had to spend a lot of time figuring out what to do between the bit I had already outlined and the turning point that is near the end.  One of the biggest challenges has been having to relive my teen years by proxy.  Boy... is some of this stuff painful to watch, even if the characters are fictional.  To you teens who are under the impression that because your parents teen years were your entire lifetime ago and then some, that they can't remember what it feels like--you are so wrong.  And I say that in the spirit of love, of course.  Go give one of them a hug and tell them that you are so glad that they survived and made it into their adult years.

To those of you who are considering doing NaNoWriMo another year--go for it.  But be warned--the experience is valuable because it teaches you writing discipline in a way that nothing else can--the pace is terrifyingly relentless.  It also teaches writers who can't seem to manage to get past the first 20 pages or so, to finish.  So... go finish!  To the rest of you who are established writers who have finished something, perhaps what it will give you is merely bragging rights to the marathon of the writing world, but that is also a good reason to do it at least once in your writing career.

As for me, since I am in the latter category, I am just hoping at this point to get mostly to the end before Thanksgiving, such that I can take a few days off, and then sail into the finish line.  We will see if that can happen.

What goals and dreams do you have for yourself?

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Robin Hood

My sweetheart and I finally got around to watching the new version of "Robin Hood" last night.  It was a fairly enjoyable movie.  The one thing that spoiled if for me, though, was the intrusive insertion of actual history.  The Robin Hood tales, as everyone knows, are set at the time of Prince John.  King Richard is mentioned from time to time as an afterthought--away on the crusades.  Still, the rest of the characters and events barely reference actual people and events from that time period.  This movie version of the tales was practically dripping with historical references, some of which--like the inclusion of the real William Marshall--were very surprising choices.  I don't think this necessarily had to be a bad thing--I'm all for history lessons wrapped up in the gauze of interesting and fun fiction, but is it really too much to ask that if you are going to include historical events and people that you use them consistently? 

Allow me to digress.  Some years ago, when I was working for the Medieval Unit of the Family History Library, I put together a couple of booklets for my husband's family that had charts and biographical data on the famous people the family was descended from.  Being descended from a colonial governor meant that a little ways back, they are descended from peerage, and even further back, from a handful of kings and queeens.  Edward II of England and his wife were two of those.  Fast forward a few months later and we got a call from the siblings-in-law.  They were very excited to tell us that the family was descended from William Wallace.  They had apparently gotten this information from seeing the movie, "Braveheart." I hadn't seen the movie, so it took a while for them to describe the critical scenes such that I could understand why they would think they were descended from William Wallace.  The end of the discussion went something like this:

Them:  So you see, we are descended from William Wallace.
Me:  Er... No, you aren't.  He didn't have any surviving descendants.
Them:  Well, not officially, but he had a child by an affair with Edward II's queen.
Me:  No, he didn't.
Them:  Well, maybe not according to the history books, but it could have happened.
Me: No, actually--it really couldn't have happened.  Isabella was a five year old girl living with her parents in France at the time when William Wallace was executed.
Them:  oh....

Oh, and did I mention the best part?  The child depicted as being William Wallace's at the end of the movie would have had to have been none other than the future Edward III, King of England--not some younger sibling--the actual ancestor of the British Monarchy.  So, apparently, the British Monarchy is descended from a Scottish rebel and not William the Conqueror, as we have hitherto supposed.  Good grief.  All this because the writers and producers of a popular movie decided that they needed a little romantic action to spice things up.  You know... because the actual story itself isn't interesting enough.

So... going back to "Robin Hood," the historical deviations did not have such far reaching consequences as in "Braveheart," but they were still distracting.  It almost seemed like, aside from actually making up some stuff that didn't really happen, bits of history and people were cherry-picked and dropped in, scattered in random bits here and there.  Many of the events and supposed precursors to events were played completely out of order.  It was totally distracting.  (Never mind that the father of the fictional Robin Hood did not write the original Magna Carta.  That a commoner would have done something like that, given that nearly all were illiterate and ignorant of the laws of the land is just laughable. It's a nice thought, though.) 

And frankly, even though most viewers of the movie were arguably ignorant enough of the details of British history not to have noticed what I did, adding fictional history bits out of order did nothing to enhance the original Robin Hood tales.  Those tales, I would argue, are interesting enough on their own that they didn't need enhancement. 

Applying this to writing, it is important to keep the details of your setting consistent.  One advantage of creating a SF/Fantasy world is that you don't have to spend oodles of time researching history to write the story.  On the other hand, you must spend oodles of time keeping track of the world you created so that everything from the monetary system to the way magic works is consistent throughout the entire book. Otherwise, your readers will be having "huh" moments all over the place.  If your setting is historical, you similarly have a duty to use it correctly.  I'm all for creative license, but some things are just ridiculous--from cultural anomalies and historical events being played out of order to the odd sight of a 110 lb. woman wielding a broadsword successfully in battle.  Do your homework, and your readers (and movie viewers) will thank you.

What setting issues have you noticed in movies or books lately?

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Freelancing

Scott Card directed his readers last week to The Freelancer's Survival Guide written by SF/F author Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  I spent part of last week reading it a few bits at a time and found it both interesting and very helpful.  If you are looking for specifics on the current state of the publishing industry and a step-by-step how-to, this is not what you are looking for.  Rusch barely skims the surface details of the day to day aspects of writing and publishing.  She does, however, go fairly deep into the emotional how-tos of being your own boss, schedules, success, failure, and so forth.  I especially enjoyed her two pieces on handling jealousy (your own directed at others/other's jealousy directed at you).  What a deft and delicate handling of a difficult subject.  Having been on both sides of that issue, much more the latter than the former over the years, I appreciated the advice from someone who has been there and then some.  I also really appreciated her pages on Success and Expectations. I had never really thought through the various definitions of success and the problem with managing your own and others expectations.  If you read no other pages, read those--and sit down for some quality pondering time and solidify in your mind, and perhaps in a journal, your definition of success and your goals for yourself.  Goals not written down and striven for are just wishes.

What is your definition of success?

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Do Imaginary Friends Have Childhoods?

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I've hit the 10k mark with NaNoWriMo.  Feels good.  I am completely wiped out, and I feel like it's finals week in college, but somehow I keep plugging along.  Today, Kendra finally... well, noticed, Dax.  It was sort of cute and fun to write, which was a change over yesterday.  Yesterday's writing just felt like work.  The fact that Kendra thinks of Dax as real reminds me quite a bit of my imaginary friends that I create in my stories when I write.  The longer I work with them, the more real they feel.  I know them better than I know some of the people around me.  I hurt when they hurt.  I know their weakness and their strengths.  I always come away from the story dreaming up more just because I want to know more about their lives, loves, and losses.

Music was a real help today.  I am listening to a collection of tracks from the group Two Steps From Hell.  They write trailer music--for some of the biggest movies out there, actually.  Everything from the Twilight Movies, "Enterprise", and "Prince of Persia" to "Young Victoria" and "Up".   Most of their music isn't available for sale, but you can find a nice selection on YouTube, if you'd like to sample it.

The advantage of listening to soundtracks while writing is that I can get into an imaginative mood without my brain being distracted with lyrics.  Soundtracks are also written to tug at your emotions at critical parts of the movie, and as such make good background music for writing emotional bits of stories as well.  Some favorites:

Little Women, The Secret of Roan Inish, Dead Poet's Society, The Man From Snowy River & Return to Snowy River, New Moon & Twilight, both of the more recent Pride & Prejudice offerings, North & South (the BBC miniseries), anything by Gary Pozner, Patrick Doyle, Trevor Jones, or John Williams, both Narnia soundtracks, and all three Lord of the Rings Soundtracks.

What are your favorite bits of background music?

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More NaNoWriMo

It's day four of NaNoWriMo, and I am already feeling a little burned out.  When I went to Orson Scott Card's Boot Camp, I cranked out 10k words in 24 hours.  At the time, however, I was holed up in a hotel room with three roommates and no other responsibilities.  I just had to keep myself fed and somewhat rested and turn in a manuscript by the deadline.  This is different.  To keep up with the 50k words in one month goal, you have to crank out a mere 1667 a day.  No problem, right? 

Monday went fine.  I exceeded that goal by 1000 words.  The next day was Ryan's birthday.  I was lucky to get out 1000 words in the few hours I had to write around lunch out & birthday prep.  Wednesday was better.  Today, so far, has been a real struggle--issues with children, a doctor's appointment to take out stitches, etc. etc.  I still need to write five hundred words before midnight, which is just six hours away and will be filled with homework, chauffeuring duties x2, dinner, and other evening activities before moving on to lunches, showers, and dishes.  And... I'm starting to not feel so creative.  This is a marathon, folks, not a sprint.  And yes... all of us have day jobs whether we are being paid for them or not.  To all you NaNos--hang in there!

The story itself is going really well.  It seems to be developing organically, likely because I don't have as much time to over think things. I did spend about 4 hours yesterday on housework while trying to decide how Dax and Kendra's world worked.  The novel is based on a short story.  When you make a story longer, though, it also needs to be deeper.  This means quite a bit more world building--particularly if it is SF/Fantasy.  This world is mostly contemporary, but some of the fantasy elements needed to be thought out.  Even if all of the "rules" don't go on to the paper, I need to know them in my head in order to be consistent. 

What kind of worlds do you dream of?

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NaNoWriMo & Editing

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Today was the first day of my first NaNoWriMo.  2458 words were cranked out this morning and early afternoon.  I can't say that I'm completely satisfied, but it is progress.  My biggest issue is that I am writing so fast that I am barely thinking about what I am writing, for once.  I guess that's good, for this type of workshop experience, but it has left me feeling like an uncreative robot instead of a dreamer.  Since I've already finished writing four books (all now in various states of revision), I don't need the "finishing" aspect of NaNoWriMo, but it is good for me to get to original writing again after a year and a half of revising and editing.  I hope some good will come of it.

To balance out the bleh feeling of writing too fast for four hours today, I decided to do some more editing on my fantasy novel.  Both the Wise Reader and the sweetheart gave the new revisions a thumbs up, both citing feelings of depth being added to what had been a more boring stretch of the book.  I guess I am going in the right direction.  Chapter 7 doesn't need much more than a light edit, which I worked on today.  Hopefully, I can fix the long and dry Chapter 8 to my satisfaction before turning it into the Wise Reader on Friday.  I love the otherworldly quality of Chapter 7.  I miss the feeling from childhood of constantly being amazed and delighted at new things, and I enjoy following Izabella around her new home as she discovers things that I can only dream of. 

A dream, though, can be a nightmare.  It will be interesting to see how she handles what follows.


What do you dream of, if given a chance?

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