Tag: inspiration

You Don’t Need NaNoWriMo

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It’s that time of year again, when the leaves are changing, the temperature’s dropping, and established and would-be writers around the country are hunched over keyboards and stacks of paper, pounding with slowly numbing fingertips on worn keys as they push, strive, claw and crawl to make the 1667 words per day needed to add up to a 50k word novel at the end of 30 days.

It’s NaNoWriMo, and that means if you travel in writerly circles, as I do, your feeds are blown up with this weird unsayable moniker, with the braggings and boastings of those who are shattering their daily word count goals, and the wails and lamentations of those who aren’t. It’s cacophonous and wearying, viewed a certain way, or inspiring and invigorating, viewed another.

Personally, I won’t be partaking. I didn’t last year, I won’t this year, and I don’t see the need in years to come, for that matter. But that owes more to my personal feelings on what motivates us than it does to the little internet carnival that NaNoWriMo has become.

As a motivational tool, I think NaNoWriMo is pretty awesome. Anything that can get people thinking creatively and telling the stories locked away in their dark, squishy little hearts is a good thing by me. And there is certainly something empowering about seeing the hordes of writers taking to the internet, each with a dragon to slay that is unique and personal and wholly their own, but which is at the same time a dragon that the writing community sets out to slay together. Swords made of words, axes of pages, slings and arrows of plots and characters all fly at the beast with the intensity, voracity, and — it must be so — insanity that the task requires.

People working together can accomplish things that, apart, they never could, and one of the really neat things about NaNo is how it transmogrifies writing — almost by definition a solitary, lonely act — into a communal rite.

And that’s pretty cool.

But the task is gigantic. It’s a moonshot with a trebuchet. A marathon without a day of training. A climb up Everest without a pack. And while the challenge surely motivates some, it’s too much by half for others. To make 50k words in 30 days requires 1667 words every day, no weekends off, no mental health days, no excuses. It’s no surprise, then, that the path to the dragon’s lair is littered with the bodies of the fallen, the strewn pages of the slain, the half-formed words of the faint of heart.

And that’s a shame.

But writing takes all stripes. Some are motivated by the challenge while some would break themselves upon it. Personally, I know that attempting a challenge like NaNo and failing would fill me with more writerly self-doubt than already hangs over my head on any given day.

I’m also leery of the gimmickiness of the whole affair. Whether you’re an accomplished or aspiring writer, going balls-out to draft 50k words from scratch smacks of spectacle rather than substance. It reeks of bluster and swagger rather than actual accomplishment (“I’ve written a novel this month, what did you get done?”). There’s a desperation behind it, I think; a frenetic surge of energy that cannot be sustained.

Really, what bothers me about NaNo is the same thing that bothers me about New Year’s Resolutions, birthday gifts to the self, and any other extrinsic sources of motivation that we come up with to push ourselves out of our comfort zones: the fact that they’re arbitrary and manufactured. We choose this day or that month to try something new, to make a change that we have apparently been wanting in our lives, but why that day? Why that month? Does the fact that it’s a new year make it easier to lose weight, start exercising, keep a cleaner house, stay in touch with friends, reconnect with family? Of course not. Does the fact that it’s November make it easier to write fifty thousand words? Naturally not, doubly so if you live in the U.S. and have the Thanksgiving holidays to contend with. We take these steps, we attempt to make these changes, not necessarily because we’ve decided it’s time for ourselves to do these things, but rather because everybody else around us is doing the same thing.

But here’s the thing. If a change is what your life needs, the day to make that change is today, whether today happens to be January 1st or the beginning of NaNoWriMo or the first day of Lent or your birthday or just another day in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable month (I’m looking at you, June.) If you’re ready to start writing a novel, why put it off until November? If you want to start exercising, or gardening, or reading more, or cherishing the lamentations of your enemies or whatever, why put it off until January?

We only get so much time on our little blue speck. You owe it to yourself to do everything you can to make your life better in the time that you have.

If writing a novel will make your life better, then you should be doing it already. Whether it’s NaNoWriMo or not. (Although, again, to reiterate, if NaNoWriMo motivates you within your existing desire and work toward writing, then, hey, go for it.)

And if you’re kicking around the idea of eating healthier, exercising, whatever, and you’re just looking for a good time to start, or you’re waiting until you’re ready, well… we’re never ready.

You just have to go and do it.

Seriously.

Right now.

Go slay the dragons.

Collecting Fireflies

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I’m flolloping around in the doldrums of the wake of finishing my first draft.

There’s depression here. An aimless, impotent feeling. I’ve gone from working tirelessly on a singular project day in and day out to … well, not. To working on side projects, to taking a little time to refocus and rethink your goals for the next few months, and I’ve felt a little lost.

It’s a lull, to be sure; a haze as transient as the weather. Still, it sucks at the feet like a bog, a slow inevitable creep of inertia. I sit back wondering if I’ll be able to make myself do it again, if I can make myself go through another six month draft, another three month edit, a brand new project, a rehashing of an old one. And I don’t know! I really wonder if I have any more good ideas in me, any more stories waiting to be told, or if I’m deluding myself that the ones currently in the telling are worth the time I’ve spent on them. Maybe every idea has a bit of validity, but by the same token, every candle in the darkness gives off a little light. The hope, of course, is that I’m not a candle in the darkness, but a raging forest fire, or at least a cozy little bonfire around which some lucky individuals might sometime warm their hands and their hearts.

But these times of respite are important for the body, mind and soul. Because as I find myself not exhausting myself on a capital “P” Project, I find there’s a little more time in my day for thought, for aimless and okay-to-be-aimless writing, for reflection, for the cultivating of new ideas, for the reviewing of old ones.

I keep a little Evernote file for potential future story ideas. (If you’re not using some sort of brain-dump software like Evernote, you should be.) Some of them are just a couple of words, some are great sprawling paragraphs. Any time an idea strikes me (and ideas striking are about like neutrinos striking screens deep below the earth — they happen millions of times a second, but only incredibly rarely does matter actually contact matter and cause a reaction) I jot it down.

Well, today came one of those lightning flashes, so I reached for the old bottle. And while I was stuffing this particular lighting strike into the jar, I took a peek in there. And there were over a dozen little fireflies buzzing around in there, dinging off the walls; some with the reckless lunatic energy, some as massive and indomitable as barges.

So I feel a little bit better about the lull I’m in. It’ll pass soon enough, and it’ll be time to get back to work, catching more fireflies, stuffing them into my jar, selecting some for release back into the wild.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Strange Seasoning

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We’re coming into one of the strangest times of the year for the writer: the Holidays.

The dreaded Holidays bring with them a legitimate army of distractions, obstructions, and pitfalls for the writer. Between a total disruption of the work schedule, extra obligations to spend time with the family you aren’t seeing regularly, and oh yeah, let’s not forget, here in America there are at least two massive debilitating food comas on the horizon. Time to write is hard enough to come by when things are normal, but things are hardly normal at this time of year.

Which is why I find it particularly sadistic to put a writer’s torture device like NaNoWriMo smack in the middle of it… but that’s a rant for another day. (I’m not doing NaNo this year, nor do I have plans to ever do it. I have better things to do with my time than subject myself to the slings and arrows of attempting to write an entire half of a novel [50,000 words do not a novel make] in the least writer-friendly part of the year. Further, if you need NaNo to finally motivate you to write that novel you’ve been thinking about writing, then maybe — maybe! — writing isn’t your thing. But there I go digressing.)

On a writer’s website I frequent, an aspiring writer, who seemed in true distress, asked the question in a state of near hysteria: with meals to cook, shopping to do, family to visit, kids to take care of, etc… how do you find the time to write through this time?

Well.

I may be a hopeless optimist, and I may be a tireless (or tiresome, depending on your point of view) motivator — I really do make myself sick sometimes with all the rah-rah-rah and YOU CAN DO IT speeches around here — but one thing I’m also guilty of is a bit of a blunt streak. Okay, maybe less of a streak and more of a huge angry puckered blunt scar. I don’t like to mince words, and most of the time, a harsh dose of the truth is a lot more helpful. (This gets me in a lot of trouble with my wife and, well, people in general, but at 35, I am who I am.)

So I responded the only way I could think to: The same way you make time any other time of the year. Sure, you’ve got Holiday Things clamoring for your attention to the left and to the right, like a swarm of needy toddlers who have just learned that you will actually come running the moment they say “daddy”. And yeah, maybe you’re more obligated to devote time to these Things than usual. But the way you take time to write now is the same way you take time at any other point in the year.

You prioritize. You set values on the things that matter to you and you allocate time accordingly. Maybe this is the year where instead of waking up at 3 AM to go Black Friday shopping, you sleep in until 6 instead, and get up to write while the rest of the family is fighting for their lives in the mad crush of humanity trying to get to the Tickle Me Elmos of this year. Maybe instead of sitting around watching the Lions lose on Turkey Day (a favorite national pastime) you sneak off to jot down a few words. Maybe you don’t have to cook EVERY SINGLE DISH for your family’s dinner, and with the time you free up, you can escape to your study (or your car, or your bathroom, or your wherever) to get some words on the page. You might upset a few people when you bust up their traditions, but you’ll stay on target for your WIP.

Or maybe you multitask and pull double duty. Wake up even earlier to do your writing before the family wakes up, or stay up late to pound the page after they fall asleep. Keep the laptop on the kitchen counter while you’re cooking and season your draft while you season the mashed potatoes. Jot notes on characters and plot points in your favorite organizational writer’s app while you’re waiting in line to shop at 4 AM. Granted, you do this, and you’ll certainly have some consequences: sleep deprivation and overly salty mashed potatoes at the very least.

Or a lunatic altered personality that grins vacuously at a computer while stirring a bowl full of, apparently, WHOLE UNCUT VEGETABLES. Who could be that happy? Who could use a computer at all in the kitchen without destroying it immediately with splattered sauce and flying crumbs?

Or, and here’s the really crazy part where we entertain notions that maybe we don’t want to, you don’t.

It’s tempting to think that with the time off you could or even should get tons of extra work in on your writing. But you don’t have to.

This is not me telling you to make like Elsa and let your writing go over the holidays. Momentum matters, and you’re gonna be turkey-drunk enough to have plenty of trouble getting back in the rhythm when the world returns to normal. By all means, write when you can. But the world isn’t going to stop spinning, and your novel won’t collapse, and your writing hand won’t wither to an ashen husk if you take a little time off.

Writing can be something like a second job, and we need time off from any job if we want to not lose our minds.

And let’s be honest: during these strange days, we lose our minds enough to begin with.

LOOK AT ME ENDING NOT JUST A SENTENCE BUT A WHOLE BLARG POST WITH A PREPOSITION

ENGLISH TEACHERS DON’T CARE WHEE

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

8 Writer Excuses (That Are Total B.S.)

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As I get closer and closer to the end of my project, it gets harder and harder to write. Like a magnet that simultaneously pulls you in and repels you, the finish line of the first draft is a daunting milestone in the life of a novel, one that looks impossibly bigger and bigger the closer you get to it: an alien obelisk growing out of the horizon of an uncharted planet that never actually seems to get any closer.

As such, it becomes easier and easier to make up excuses not to write, and those excuses become more and more reasonable-sounding.

Here are a few of them (not that I’ve used any of these myself during this project or any other, OF COURSE.) Eight, to be precise. Why eight? I don’t know. Eight is musical. Eight is my lucky number. Eight is also how many I happened to think of before I realized I was using this blog post as an excuse not to write.

So.

  1. I don’t have time. This is probably the easiest to claim and the easiest to dispel. Unless you’re one of the rarefied few doing this writing thing for a living, this is probably true on some level. (Then again, those rarefied few are long past making this excuse.) But the fact is, we all get the same 24 hours in the day, and time can be stolen in bits and snatches from any number of sources: lunch breaks, wasted time in front of the TV, hell, I’ve been known to forego an hour or so of sleep to get it done. The fact is: if it matters to you, you will find time or you will create it from the raw fabric of the universe.
  2. I’m just not inspired to write today. We tend to think that writing is a sort of magic, and on some level, it is: Where else does the average person get to play god like a writer? And on some level, some sort of inspiration is required, but not in the way we think. You need a decent (not awesome) idea, and you need the willingness to work at it, to stick your hands into the clay time and again, shaping it and molding it and firing it and destroying it to start again. That’s it. And some days, the writing does feel like the gods themselves are pushing your cursor around the page, spilling their divine wordseed through your brain and onto the page. But far more often, writing is a little bit like playing nose tackle: it’s a whole lot like getting your brains smashed in, again and again, and crawling back to take another one on the chin. To reiterate: inspiration may strike now and then, but you’re a whole lot more likely to be struck if you drape yourself in tinfoil and wander out in the storm carrying the biggest TV antenna you can find.
  3. I can’t write when I have xxxxx going on. Again, anybody could claim this at any time, really. Life happens to us all, bringing with it a stew of relationship difficulties, livelihood uncertainties, existential doubts, or, well, just name it, really. There’s always something going on that we could use as an excuse. And sometimes, to be fair, it’s a valid excuse. When your house has burned down or you’ve just lost your job, it’s maybe a good time to take some time off the writing project, because that sharknado will bleed through into your work. The thing to be wary of is allowing yourself to continue making this excuse beyond the time when it is reasonable to do so. Momentum matters, and this excuse will destroy your momentum if you let it.
  4. I’m not any good at writing. Well, pardon me for saying so, but who the hell is? Writing is a skill like any other. No budding musician picks up a guitar and starts shredding like Steve Vai. No wannabe singer just spontaneously spouts the perfect lyrics and harmonies one day while driving to work. This thing takes time, and the beginning writer is allowed — if not expected — to suck. It’s a thing to be embraced and accepted and forgotten about. We’re all toddlers that have been chucked into the deep end, and we’ll either figure out how to keep our heads above the water, or we’ll half-drown and be terrified of water for the rest of our lives.
  5. My idea isn’t going anywhere. Ideas are as wonderful and varied as the fishes of the sea; some of them have huge, smoke-belching jet engines, while others are lost puppies trembling in the thunderstorm. Some slide along under their own power for a while (but, really, THE POWER IS YOU) while others have to be dragged along by the wrist, kicking and screaming and whining every step of the way. But the fact is, if you’re not working on it (and as tempting as it is to think that thinking about it or outlining it or in any other way laying the groundwork for it counts as working on it, none of those things actually increase the idea in any way, none of them move it closer to the goal), then at best, it’s a tricked-out Bugatti sitting abandoned in a ditch. At worst, it’s a busted-out, multicolored hoopty sitting abandoned in a ditch. The constant, of course, is the ditch. Your idea won’t get out without some pushing.
  6. It’ll never sell. I’m probably unqualified to be dispensing this sort of advice, but I’ll do it anyway: if your primary concern for a story is whether or not it will sell, then maybe, I dunno, you need a new idea. What sells your story is that it’s your story, told in a way that only you can tell it. Plus — frankly — it probably won’t sell anyway. The market is a bloated jellyfish floating around on unpredictable currents; maybe your story will get snared in the tentacles and carried off to the promised land, maybe it won’t. But if you don’t love your idea, if you’re not burning to write it whether it sells or not, then the story is going to languish in the unpublishable depths, whether the jellyfish scoops it up or not.
  7. My idea isn’t original. Yeah, sorry, but this one is absolutely true. I’m one of those pessimists that feels every story has been told before, every arc has been explored, every wrench in the gears has already been thrown there, multiple times, by multiple monkeys. (See tvtropes.org if you don’t believe me.) The upside to all this is that it doesn’t matter. As I mentioned above, what sells a story — what people love about a story — is not the nuts and bolts of the story itself. That stuff should be practically invisible. What sells it is all the you-juices oozing out of all the nooks and crannies you build into the story. And that stuff only gets in there if — again — you love what you’re writing.
  8. I just don’t feel like it. Here’s where the real harsh truth sets in. Again, outside of the rarefied few, writing isn’t a job. It’s not something that people are depending on you to do, it’s not like paying your taxes or fixing that loose board in the back porch or taking the car in for an oil change. The world will keep on spinning, and you won’t go to jail or into the doghouse if you don’t write. But if you really don’t want to write — and that’s true for, I dunno, a week? A month? — then maybe — just maybe — it’s not that important to you, and maybe — just maybe — you ought to just save all of us the trouble and stop beating your head against this particular wall.

Now, look. I’m hardly an expert, but I do have about 300,000 words in various stages of completion between my second-draft first novel, my nearly completed first-draft second novel, and almost two years’ worth of drivel here at the blarg. Whether any of it is any good is a question for people smarter than me, but I have all that while scores and scads of people out there are just dreaming of writing someday. That’s something. And I certainly didn’t get it by listening to my excuses.

Speaking of which, it’s about time I take my own advice and go work on my project.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: The Sounding Board

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What do you think of when you think of the writer? A few days (or maybe weeks) worth of stubble? Empty bottles of liquor clinking around the derelict typewriter as he hammers away on a hopeless draft? A dark room, leather-bound books, lots of oak? A pathological aversion to sunlight? A tendency to yammer or babble, even when nobody else is in the room?

There’s a reason writers face such stereotypes, and a primary cause for that reason is that writing is so overwhelmingly a solitary activity. After all, no matter how many people you involve in the process, it all ultimately comes down to just you and the blank page. The overwhelmingly intimidating blank page. The soul-crushing perfect white expanse. The gaping void waiting to swallow your futile effort at wordsmithy. At the end of the day, it comes down to the writer and his blind, fumbling self. Or, sometimes, his multiple, ever-arguing, ever cross-contradicting selves.

Most of the writer’s problems are problems he must solve by himself. Plot’s knotted up? Well, it’s your plot — nobody else even knows what the various bits of twine and frayed yarn you’ve snarled like a plate of stale spaghetti are attached to. Characters misbehaving? You’re the only one inside their heads, you grab the bonesaw and go hacking around til you figure it out. Theme not coming through? Well, theme is subjective, so maybe you’re off the hook there.

There’s no denying it, we’re on our own most of the time.

(Photo by Drew Coffman.)

But.

There’s a wealth of good to be gained by inviting somebody else into our lairs, though seriously, it’s probably a good idea to clean up the liquor bottles and the lunatic scribbles covering the walls first. Because as much as you understand the Rube Goldberg machine that is your broken story, you’ve been living with it for a while. You’ve become desensitized to some of its finer features, like how a hoarder isn’t bothered by the pure funky wave of cat-pee-stink lurking in the dark corners of her house. You don’t even notice the peeled wallpaper, the layer of sticky film on the linoleum, the ring around the tub.

But when you spin out the tale and talk out the problems to somebody else, all of a sudden, it’s like turning on a floodlight in a dark alley. It’s like throwing open the window on a musty study. It’s like calling the cops on a house full of drunk teenagers. All of a sudden, all the little stuff you’ve been ignoring looks stupid bad; all the unsightly bits are not only eminently visible, they become outright embarrassing.

How did I miss that?

Where did that even come from?

What, to be direct, in the fargo was I thinking?

Whether the friend (and make no mistake, if they’re listening to you prattle on about your story for any length of time beyond five seconds, this person is your friend, and one you probably owe a few adult beverages to in exchange for the favor) who’s loaned you an ear has any solutions to offer or not, you will see your work in a whole new light, simply by virtue of the act of putting it on display for somebody else to see.

You just can’t catch it all by yourself. The echo chamber between your ears makes you deaf to the nonsense you’re spitting. The smoke you’re blowing up your own butt blinds you to the blemishes in your draft. (And yeah, I realize if the smoke is going up your butt, it would have a hard time blinding you, just … I’m almost there, okay? GOD.)

I’m not even talking about a beta reader. Make no mistake, you need good beta readers. But I’m talking about long before the beta reader stage. Maybe even before you’ve finished spawning the ill-formed first draft.

You need that sounding board.

And you owe this person for listening to your drabble.

Find them and be nice to them.

(For reference, this week’s SOCS prompt was the suffix -ing. While it’s virtually impossible to write without using this little structure, I thought that for the sake of doing something to death, I’d document my usage. Also, as an English teacher, I enjoyed the exercise. I used -ing 40 times in this post. Thirty times as a participle, eight times as a gerund, and twice as part of a non-verbal word. Yeah, I’m that kind of thinker. Sigh.)

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.