Instead of a collection of my random Friday thoughts, which aren’t all that interesting anyway, I’m posting a collection of random NaNo thoughts.
‘Cause I’m sure that’s WAY more interesting. /sarcasm
Ok, so it hasn’t been quite a week yet, but it’s close enough. If I’m lucky, I’ll churn out another 5k before midnight on Saturday.
My initial impression of this insanity is that it’s working well for my particular story. The voice is light and breezy, and it flows quickly. The material needs to move at a quick pace, and the manic speed at which I need to type helps that. I find myself doing a lot of pre-writing. In the car, in the shower, when I’m supposed to be working…. *cough* My brain is constantly trying to keep one to two scenes ahead of my fingers, which demands a lot more daydreaming pre-writing then if I’d been doing this at a more leisurely pace. I’ve also found it helpful to keep an “edits” file on hand, a place where I can jot down the stuff I know will need fixing later so it doesn’t weigh on my mind now and distract me. I have some serious research I’m going to need to do when this thing is done. But that’s okay. I love editing.
I can’t imagine this working for a heavier story, though. At least not for me. So I think choosing the right novel–for me–is key. It has to be fun, something that makes me want to write it, which is a tall order. I know, eventually, I’m going to run into scenes that I don’t want to write, and then this process is going to be painful. For the moment, though, the passion burns, and I think the massive amounts of writing everyday feed the flames. I’ve said it before, but writing a novel is like nurturing a relationship. It takes work.
In this case, it’s the work to survive a one-month whirlwind romance. Never having had one of those before, I’ve got to say it can be fun. Exhausting, but fun.
Current word count: 8255
Perhaps subtitle this one – NaNo, Oh no!
Or maybe – Don’t mind the crazy lady hunched over her laptop.
For all you non-writing folks reading, NaNo is short for NaNoWriMo, which is short for National Novel Writing Month. A month-long challenge designed to get people to churn out 50,000 words of a project. That’s not long enough to be a full-fledged novel in most cases, but that’s not the point. The point is that people who dabble but never finish anything or those who need a kick in the butt to write have a “competition” to inspire them on.
So what possessed me to sign up for NaNo? I’m really not sure. Maybe it’s coming off the downer that was the last WIP that’s making me crave a pick-me-up novel. Or maybe it’s simply the thrill of the challenge to write 50,000 words in one month. Or it could be peer pressure from my fellow Purgatorians. Or maybe it’s simply that I’ve never done it before and this is the first year when I have something ready to go in time.
But more likely it’s because I’m crazy.
Because between traveling for work and Thanksgiving this month, I have a lot less than 30 days available to spew forth 50k from my fingers. Actually, based on the number of days I will at least be home and able to write, I’ll have to turn out 2400 a day to get out 50k. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that just because I’ll be at home that I’ll have time to write.
Still I know my writing style, and I know I do my best writing when I attack a story in a mad frenzy to get it out, before I lose that infatuation with my idea. And maybe that’s why I’m doing this. Keeping the pressure on myself means keeping the pressure on my MC, and that almost always translates into a story that flies.
So don’t mind me this November if I’m lost in my own little world, typing madly at the computer. If you worry, just set down a fresh mug of coffee and some food. I’ll get to it eventually.
And before I go (nuts), have a Happy Halloween! I’ll be leaving on that first business trip this weekend, so there will be no new post until next Thursday or Friday.
Last weekend I accomplished a goal I set for myself – I finished my YA dystopian novel. Yay! And I do mean YAY. 
It’s the tenth novel I’ve completed, but the first where I felt finishing to be a relief. My first couple novels I was happy to just type The End, to prove to myself that I could do it once and then that once was not a fluke. The last few I finished and was genuinely happy because I thought they were good, well-written (or would be after editing) stories. But this last one? Thank God the damn thing is done.
Don’t get me wrong. I adore the concept. The writing might either be some of my best or some of my worst. I can’t tell yet. But the story weighed on my back like Atlas’ burden. The dystopian is supposed to be about hope and faith, but it’s a heavy story and the ending is… well, different. There’s not much humor or romance or light-hearted moments. And I’ve learned something from that.
While it was nice to try writing something “serious,” I’m not cut out for it. I was depressed and mopey almost the entire time I worked on it. The moment I typed the last word, I immediately felt better. And that tells me one thing: I need to stick to writing that’s fun and humorous. It might not be the kind of stuff that makes people go “Wow, you wrote that?” or wins awards, but my sanity requires it. More importantly, I have fun doing it.
Oh sure, fun and humorous doesn’t mean I won’t torture my MC with chronic pain or major guilt (aka ‘Twixt), and it doesn’t mean I won’t squash her dreams like a bug and screw up her relationships (aka Strange Misery), and yeah, she’s going to have to fight for her life as people drop like flies around her (pretty much anything I’ve written), but that can still be fun.
And wow – for the next few novels, I am all about fun.
Nope, I didn’t do this last week. I guess I broke my fledgling tradition. Oh well.
It’s been a boring week here. Sure, the Phillies won the NLCS, but that’s not really anything interesting on my end. (Okay, not that I post anything interesting ever, but I try. Humor me. Kthx)
We did have good friends come visit last weekend, though, and it made for such a wonderful break in routine. Friend Lindsey blogged about it already, and she was good and actually took some pics. I suppose you could say we didn’t do much. We went apple-picking and made apple crisp. We played Uno, which is not a kid’s game when the four of us get together. (Get your minds out of the gutter. Let’s just say there is drinking, much vindictiveness, and much more creative swearing.)
It was a short visit, and the perfect thing to get my mind off writing for a while. Sometimes, we all need a break from the things we love, lest we start to hate them.
And now in lieu of anything creative, I will bore you with pictures of fall in NH. One of the few things I like about my state.
Baseball. It has to be the perfect sport for making analogies. It’s a team sport that lives for individual stats. It gives you the ability to break things down into bases. And it’s the one time when it is perfectly acceptable to hit something with a baseball bat. Unfortunately, it’s not okay to hit someone, but you know when the pitcher hurls one high and inside they’re just aiming for the batter’s head, so… *cough* I digress.
Hitting people = bad.
Anyway, it’s playoff time, and again my Phillies are hoping to make the World Series. And I started thinking: getting published is kind of like baseball.
The Line-up
Now for this analogy to even sort of work, you must assume writers are the ones at bat. They are on the offense. You can’t write or publish without being proactive, after all. Agents and editors are in the field, sometimes literally defending the their in-boxes from from the writers’ queries.
Getting to Base
So how do you end up published? Well, before you can run the bases, i.e. have a shot at it, you have to get on base. That means you need to learn how to hit. In other words, someone’s taught you the mechanics of writing–spelling, grammar, etc.–and you have an idea, and perhaps even a flair for communicating that idea with words. Great, but can you translate that idea into a full-blown novel?
Strikeout: An inability to finish your novel.
Drawing a walk: The few who will be “discovered” through their short stories or fabulous online presence. Don’t count on it for most of us.
Single: Finishing that book. If it was as easy it looks, batting .300 wouldn’t be an impressive stat.
Double: Finishing isn’t enough. You must edit, research publishing, and find the courage to send that novel out into the cold, cruel world. Some people won’t bother or will get discouraged too easily and quit. If you’re not one of them, congrats – you made it to second base.
Triple: It’s been called the most mysterious hit in baseball, and aside from an in-the-park homerun, it’s also possibly the rarest hit. Few will succeed. But if you manage to snag an agent, that’s probably the equivalent. Of course, finding an agent is no guarantee of selling your book. Which is why, you need the….
Homerun: A one-book deal is like a solo homer. A two-book deal, scores you and a teammate. Of course, the distance of that homerun has to be counted too. Did you barely clear the wall, or did you smack that ball into the upper decks with a 6- or more-figure deal?
Some Cheese for My Philly Steak?
Yes, please. Obviously, this analogy reeks of cheese.
But the great thing about baseball, unlike some other sports, is how many games you get to play in a season. The more games, the more at-bats and the more tries you get to swing and hit something out the park. And like learning to hit a baseball, the more you write, the more you improve and the better your chances are of writing something that brings a stadium to its collective, cheering feet. (Not coincidentally, the more I learn about the publishing business, the more convinced I am that you need a stadium’s worth of people to say “yes” before you succeed.)
But whatever your passion–be it writing, baseball, painting, etc.–you have to make the decision to get to the plate. And swing. And keep swinging. To go down swinging. Yes, take the time to learn how to improve your swing, but keep swinging. You’ll foul a lot. Miss a lot. Swear a lot, most likely. Yet one day you’ll probably make it to first base. Another day, hopefully, you’ll make it beyond.
The difference between showing and telling is one those little issues that tend to drive writers nuts. What’s the difference? When do you know which technique to use? So Dee Garretson, who you might know as Melia from AW, invited several awesome writers (and accidentally asked me, as well) to dedicate a blog post to showing versus telling. So, using my WIP, I’m going to try to demonstrate the difference and explain why I show in some places and tell in others.
So first of all, what’s the difference?
When you show something, you’re letting the reader make an inference about what’s happening.
When I don’t budge, the old peacekeeper nudges his subordinate. “Get her.”
The younger peacekeeper freezes, his mouth hanging open. I can almost feel sorry for him. He probably wasn’t so different from me at one time. He tries to harden his face as he wraps his fingers around my wrist, but he’s not fooling either of us. His hand trembles.
When you tell, you’re spoon-feeding the reader information. Thus, the above example might be re-written as:
The younger peacekeeper seems reluctant to touch me.
Advice to new writers generally consists of “show, don’t tell,” but it’s not that simple. So how do you choose?
Although showing is generally more interesting for the reader, both have their uses. A novel full of nothing but showing would be long, tedious, and boring. Same is true for a novel filled with nothing but telling. In general, it’s a good idea to think of showing when something is inherently interesting, or it makes for more dramatic reading (e.g. builds tension, describes character, etc.). Telling, on the other hand, is good when you want to speed through the boring but necessary bits or stay true to character (e.g., in first person POV, particularly, the MC might just acknowledge an emotion such as “I hated him”). And sometimes, you just have to do what the story requires–what best benefits the pace, the rhythm, the voice.
In the example above, I chose to show the peacekeeper’s reaction to my main character for a few reasons. First, his behaviors (his mouth hanging open because of the order, the trembling touch), I hope, do more than describe simple reluctance. This is an early scene in my WIP, and my goal is for a reader to get the sense that some people are in awe of, or maybe even fear, my MC for reasons unknown. Merely describing the peacekeeper as reluctant doesn’t quite convey that. Second, as part of a larger scene, the interactions of the peacekeepers with my MC–and my MC’s reactions to them–should be building tension and raising a lot of questions. Thus, I want to focus attention on them.
At other times, though, my goal is just to provide the reader with information quickly because, although it’s necessary background, it’s not crucial that they dwell on it. Telling is ideal. So, at one point, my MC describes the apocalypse that changed her world:
The proctors teach that during the Cleanse, the Benefactor came for the unholy and impure without mercy. He sent the oceans to rise and swallow the coasts, and the glaciers to descend and cover the north. What He couldn’t reach with water He blew away with air or burned with fire. The land was taken. The elements closed in.
Very quickly the reader learns that some nasty environmental changes took place, and that a religion rose up around them (by then, the reader knows that proctors are like current-day ministers or preachers).
I could have conveyed the same information by having my MC sit through a lesson about the apocalypse, but it would be tedious and probably boring. And it doesn’t fit or serve the plot.
And that is what you always have to decide: what best serves the story–the pacing, the characters, the plot? I’ve reduced entire chapters written specifically to show readers how generous/bad-ass/weird my characters are into single paragraphs of tell because the chapters didn’t serve the story well enough. Conversely, I’ve spent lots of time working out my characters’ mannerisms so I can show how they react when feeling certain ways (Do they run when upset or dig their nails into their palms? When they’re angry, are they the type to hit things or bottle up their rage inside?). When to use those details versus when to spoon-feed will depend on the importance of the scene and whether showing drives the plot.
And thus ends my show and tell. For undoubtedly better explanations and examples, check out these awesome blogs:
Another week down. Three times makes this Friday Free-for-all thing an official tradition now, doesn’t it? Or maybe it just makes me lazy? So here we go….
1. Goal for October: finish the first drafty of the YA dystopian I’ve been working on. This will either be really easy (because I fear it’s going to be short) or really hard (because I’m wrong about the length and/or I will have a glorious month of post-season Phillies baseball to enjoy). Right or wrong, goal accomplished or not – this means I have a guaranteed win.
2. Do I have the look of someone who’s used to receiving rejection? Occasionally, projects at my job need to send out rejection letters. When this occurs, people invariably turn to me to write them. It’s like they know how many I’ve read over the years….
3. For all my whining about the husband’s garden, there are times when I appreciate it. Like this week. When I got to eat homegrown watermelon in October.
4. Have been feeling the urge to get a second tattoo again. The problems with this are: 1) I don’t want to spend the money, 2) I don’t know what I’d get, and 3) I don’t know where I’d put it. Am reaching a tentative deal with myself that I will not get another tattoo until I (well, my agent) sells one of my books. That ought to give me plenty of time to figure out the answers to issues 2 and 3. Right? I hate being so practical.
5. I was the idea woman this past week. Two ideas, one of which actually sounds promising. Neither are very well-formed yet, but I’m not used to having any ideas spring to mind this fast. So this makes me happy. Maybe the old imagination is starting to work again.
And there you go – another short list of random crap. Have I ever mentioned how boring my life is?
And yet again – more random bits picked from my life over the past week like the molding berries on an endless row of raspberry canes. Or something.
1. Plucked more elderberries for the future wine. Strangely, they did not turn our fingers quite so purple this time. Am very confused.
2. A note to publishers: I understand using the pages in the back of a book to advertise, especially if it’s to advertise the next book in the series. But beware of how you might piss off readers when your advertisement includes–in big letters–spoilers for the book someone is currently reading! Major spoilers, I might add. You know, the reader might accidentally see them. Won’t name names, but I’m still seething about having the ending to that novel ruined for me.
3. ‘Twixt went out on sub to editors. Hold me.
September 27 to October 3 is banned book week this year.
If you’re reading this, chances are you believe in such things as freedom of expression, sharing information, and the general goodness of an open society that values the exchange of ideas no matter uncomfortable they make a particular segment of the population. In other words, you understand that you don’t have to agree with every idea espoused in a book to believe others should have the ability to read that book if they so choose.
According to the American Library Association, the two most common reasons books have been challenged since the turn of the century (that would be year 2000 if you’re like me and keep forgetting that it’s not the 1990s anymore) are for sexually explicit material and offensive language. In other words, we’re not even talking about people challenging books because they contain detailed information on how to build a bomb or annihilate an ethnic group of your choice. We’re talking sex and profanity, which strikes me as about as American as football and cheap beer, but whatever.
You can find the ALA’s list of the 10 most-challenged books of each year going back through 2001 here, and the the most-challenged books during the 1990s here.
Some of my personal favorites that have appeared on those lists include:
His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
Earth’s Children (series), by Jean M. Auel
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle
Blubber, by Judy Blume
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl
A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
And, frankly, too many more to list. In fact, a couple years ago I bought a book for a friend’s son after it came to my attention by being challenged (And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell). How’s that for publicity?
So how many of your favorite books have been challenged recently?
