Write On!

It's that time of year again. The season where perfectly respectable people turn into zombies, wild-haired hags, rabid monsters, and shades of their former selves. You guessed it! It's NaNoWriMo!

Exposition time!

I wrote a little bit about NaNo in an earlier post, but for those of you not in the know, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo is a month-long writing marathon in which participants strive to finish a 50,000 word (minimum) novel in November. The goal is sheer output. You turn that inner editor off and just write no matter how bad you think it is and by the end of the month, you should have a workable rough draft ready for editing.

/exposition

I find it interesting that a bit of controversy has risen up over NaNo over the years. Any Google search will give you arguments for and against. Personally, I believe NaNo is a valuable experience for any creative person. Especially those of us who are writing to eventually publish. And MOST especially if you write genre fiction. Here's why:

• Deadlines are a reality in the publishing world. When you sell a book, there's a manuscript deadline, a revisions deadline, a copy edit deadline. If you sell in a multi-book deal, there are even more deadlines. Learning to write to a deadline as a pre-published writer will put you ahead of the curve.


• You learn a lot about your creative process. During my first NaNo, I developed good habits that I still use. Keeping to a daily word count, for example. Making time to work each day, no matter how busy I was. I also developed bad habits including a caffeine addiction that plagues me to this day! :-D But it all jumbles together to make me a more productive writer.


• It's easy to write a few pages, or a couple of chapters and endlessly pick at them, thereby guaranteeing you will never write the last chapter. What's hard is to just finish the darn thing already. I challenge any writer, published or not, to produce a perfect piece of fiction right out of the gate. NaNo teaches writers to just get the words down, however imperfect they are. Editing can come later. Editing SHOULD come later. When you actually have something on paper to edit.


• Finishing is scary. It's also exhilarating, exciting, and invigorating. Along with the satisfaction of a job done, you get an icon and certificate when you finish NaNo. It's something you can look at to remind yourself that yes, you absolutely can do this. Writing takes a lot of faith in yourself. And sometimes having tangible proof helps you reinforce it

I highly recommend all beginning authors try NaNo at least once. It'll either affirm your desire to write, or cure you of the affliction forever. Are you ready for the challenge?

J.T. Ellison says it better than I at Murderati. And she's offering at 25 page critique to a lucky winner. The catch? You have to get your NaNo 50,000 words in to enter the drawing. If that's not incentive what is?

There's lots of helpful advice around to get you started, and get through, the NaNoWriMo writing marathon. Some of the best of this year's advice so far comes from one of the most helpful writers on the web, Lynn Viehl in her posts Pro-to-NaNo: Twenty Bits of Advice From a Pro to a New NaNo'er and Speed the Outline. Don't skip the comments either! Her readers add some good stuff, too!

This Week on the Web

I discovered a new small press fantasy publisher via Fantasy Debut this week! Bell Bridge Books is an imprint of Belle Books, based in Georgia. A lot of us Smyrna Writers write fantasy, urban fantasy, noir mystery, horror, etc. From the looks of it, it seems like BBB would be a good potential market for us. The parent company has been publishing since 1999, so they're stable. Like Samhain, they publish e-books with POD paperback versions. And from the reviews and snippets I've found, it looks like their books are high quality fiction.

I've been considering entering Voice of the Bard in the Golden Hearts, RWA's unpublished fiction contest. The ladies at Wet Noodle Posse almost have me convinced. All the "Noodlers" are Golden Heart finalists and have spent the past couple of weeks talking about the contest, answering questions, and providing tips and strategies to prospective entrants. Check out their blog!

This Week on the Web

I'd intended to make a non-link salad post this week as well, but I've been preoccupied with my rough draft marathon and let the whole darn week slip away from me. But I'm getting words! Lots of them! If I don't have a complete draft by Halloween, it won't be too much longer after that. Which means I'll have a lot of editing to do come Christmas.

Victoria Strauss posted this great guide to literary agency directories just today. She includes tips on how to interpret the directories as well as some of the hidden dangers and things to look out for. If you're searching for an agent, or about to start that process, make sure to give it a look.

Earlier this week, agent Jessica Faust blogged about pinning down a genre for your book. This is also great info for those of us starting the querying process!

Via Urban Fantasy Land, Concept Draw's Mindmap is available for a free trial for a limited time.

I'm saving this post from Love is An Exploding Cigar. I have a feeling I'm going to need it when I start the aforementioned editing. Samantha Hunter wrote a lovely blog about accepting the potential for undiscovered mistakes or flaws as part of the creative process. My favorite part? "I've come to think of flaws like a little sign that someone real made this thing." Combine that with Agent Faust's The Futzing Stops Here, and you have some real psychological limits to help avoid the cycle of endless polishing and never submitting.

This Week Around the Web

The Southern Festival of Books is on this weekend in Nashville! If you're downtown Friday afternoon, make sure to stop by Room 29 for the panel Keep it Short: Writing and Publishing Mystery Short Stories. Our Sir Otter'll be sitting on that panel from 2-3:30.

The heavy-hitting agent, Donald Maas, has made his book The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success available as a free download on his agency's website! (From Writer Unboxed).

Ever wanted to know more about working with a publicist? Romance Bandits hosted Sourcebooks publicist Danielle Jackson over at their blog.

Reaching the End

Those of you with a drawer (or box or computer file) filled with abandoned three-chapter novels, raise your hands. Yeah, I thought so. Me too. It seems like we all go through this stage at the beginning. We see a bright, shiny idea, we eagerly start to write, and then something happens. We get stuck. We have doubts. Maybe we fiddle with the opening a bit, rework the plot in our heads, scrap the whole thing and start over only to hit a brick wall. Until the next bright, shiny idea comes along.

Getting to "The End" is hard. Some of us never make it. The rest of us keep at it until we find something to get us to that finish line. For me, that something was the writing marathon.

I joined in my first NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November of 2002, and had a complete blast. If you're unfamiliar with NaNo, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel, or at least the first 50,000 words of a longer novel in 30 days. For a newbie writer, this was a daunting task! I finished, though. And along the way I learned more about my own process than I ever had during the Shiny Idea phase.

I found that I do better with lots of tiny goals instead of one big one. For example, "Write 1600 words tonight" instead of "Write a book." I also work better with deadlines and tend to be more successful if I'm accountable to someone else. You have to prove to the organizers that you wrote those words. And there's a whole community of folks in the NaNo forums that you can go to for support and motivation.

I brought all of these things into my writing routine for the rest of the year, and for the most part it's worked pretty well. Now I know when something really isn't working as opposed to me falling prey to plot bunnies or the new Shiny Idea. I stick to a words-per-day schedule, I work toward a deadline, and I tell my writers' group to expect me to complete those goals.

There's one more thing, perhaps more important than all of the above, that I learned how to do during NaNoWriMo: I learned how to beat that infernal internal editor into submission during my drafting process and to accept that my first drafts aren't going to be perfect. In fact, they're going to be crap. There will be plotholes. There will be continuity errors, spelling and grammar problems, and I tend to have compound word issues. But I can't fix any of this stuff if it doesn't exist in the first place. The writing marathon forces me to create.

This year I'm going to try something new. Instead of NaNoWriMo, I'll be taking a class over at RWA Online - Fast Draft in 14 Days and their Kia Writing Marathon. This is a new challenge. I can do a first draft in a month. Can I chop that in half? Wish me luck!

x-posted at Title Magic