This post started when I found some tips for beating the blogging blues, but quickly morphed into a general writing post when I found this post just minutes later.
Like anything else, writing is a craft that has to be practiced routinely. And like most things you practice, the more you follow a routine, the more likely you are going to be to improve at that craft. That said, set a routine for yourself, but don’t be afraid to shake it up once you find that routine no longer works for you.
Get into a practice of brainstorming, or doing timed writes. It often helps you loosen up and settle into your serious writing. Plus it has this added benefit of material to draw from if you find yourself stumped.
Set yourself a daily goal to force yourself to write on those hard days, a weekly goal to help you feel accomplished, and long-term goals so you know how to break down your smaller goals.
Write in the method most comfortable for you. For me, that’s the small army of notebooks spread throughout my living space and my bags. For my father, that’s the computer. My writing students are much the same way. Some of them think better on paper. Some think better staring at a computer screen. Find your preferred method, but forgive yourself on those days when you work better with the other medium.
Write about what you want. Watch the trends change in your writing over time. (This one is actually pretty fun, and has been a question in every single interview I’ve ever given!) Sometimes, you can draw on an old tangent to revitalize your writing.
Whatever you do, just get out there and write.
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:29 AM EST
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I’m currently less than 250 words from finishing my NaNovel, and thanks to a snow day, I’ll be finishing my novel later this morning.
It’s unsurprising. I always finish in odd years. (This is my fifth NaNoWriMo attempt.) This year, though, I think I had a helper.
My second NaNo attempt was premeditated. I had a fairly clear idea what i wanted to write about. I laid out my characters and settings thoroughly. I wrote a bare bones outline, assuming I’d fill in the blanks simply enough.
I finally wrapped up that first draft last month, and it’s going to take an ungodly amount of editing to make it readable.
This year, I didn’t really know what i was going to write until mid-October. It was an old story idea that had been hiding out in my writing notebook for a while. I dragged it out, dusted it off, and started planning. By the time I finished, My characters had just enough structure to make them intriguing. My settings had an interesting blend of details. But my plot was covered by an outline that was over 10,000 words long.
The rules for NaNoWriMo say that you can do all the prewriting you want, but you can’t write anything that will actually go in the novel. The outline was in third person and written rather passively. If you’ve kept an eye on my drafted chapters, you’ll note an active, first person perspective.
That means that from a 10,000-word outline has sprung a 50,000 word draft that has almost written itself. When I’ve stalled out, it hasn’t been due to not knowing what was coming next. In some cases, it was actually because I didn’t know how to phrase the next part.
It’s up to you. You can plot through index cards and shuffle them into an outline. You can just draw up an outline. The point is, they can be pretty helpful with in the writing process.
Do I have any ideas for next year? As a matter of fact, this year’s novel has three books that need to follow it, some of which has slowly started being mapped out.
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 8:18 AM EST
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I’m working on building up my resource of writing games, but for now, check out my current collection.
The point of writing games is to help jump-start your thinking, to get the pen moving, and to let you have fun. For some people, this is actually the easiest way to start writing.
If you know of other games that would make a great addition to the collection, feel free to share them!
Posted by Rebecca as Writing Games at 12:12 PM EST
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I haven’t had time to be social during NaNoWriMo this year, but there is a great game we’ve played the past couple of years that helped relax the group about writing (and it’s turned out to be better than a book of Mad Libs!)
You’re familiar with the concept of the Writing Round Robin, right? You set a time limit, say two minutes, and everyone starts a story. Once the time limit is up, the papers all move one writer to the left, the timer is reset, and everyone adds to the story they’ve been handed.
The benefit, and a bit of a time-hog, is that you can see wht you’re adding to and then it’s up to you to decide whether to ocntinue the story as is, or to give it a funky plot twist.
The game we like to play takes the Round Robin and makes it a bit more interesting. One person starts off by writing two sentences. They then fold back the paper so that only the end of the second sentence is showing. They hand the folded paper to the next person, who adds two sentences and folds back the paper. It continues this way until everyone is tired of adding sentences or you run out of paper.
One person then reads that story, much to the roaring laughter of the rest of the group.
It’s fun, it’s easy. It gets you thinking. Give it a try at your next writing group.
Posted by Ceara as Writing Games at 8:32 AM EST
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There are people who seek me out in my teaching and personal life because I have a higher-than-average grasp on the proper use of grammar, and even actively practice it myself. Sadly, thanks to one of the best books in the world, I can even give you a brief history on how punctuation came into being. I can’t explain the history of dangling participles, though, so I guess I’m not a true Grammar Geek.
Some would say I’m a grammar snob, but I say I’m just trying to preserve a dying language. Then I found this manifesto (PDF) and realized that I really am something of a grammar snob.
You must read it. It’s simply wonderful!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:23 AM EST
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This year marks my fifth NaNoWriMo, and I’m unusually far ahead of myself this year. I’m even poised to cross the finish line some time this week, or I could take off a week and not be hurting.
What’s made this year so different from years past? I think it’s been a combination of things.
I’m working a part time job that requires me to work an awkward split schedule four days a week and a few hours two other days a week. This has created a situation where I cannot attend events and write-ins because they’re mostly held while I’m at work. Not having the social aspect, which is one of my favorite parts of NaNoWriMo, has forced me to not be overly distracted. I end up writing 1,500 words in half an hour with no one to distract me with geeky plot ninjas.
This split schedule also leaves me with an odd schedule for writing. My mind has fallen into this mode where it looks at any time I have off from work as precious writing time. As a result, I’m usually motivated to plop down at my computer and write a couple thousand words every chance I get. I’m so worried about running out of hours in the day that this really does keep me focused and moving.
The other thing that I think has really made this year’s NaNovel such a successful venture is that I spent the last two week of October planning. I planned out my second NaNovel by outline with character notes along the side and bottom of the file. It was a very bare bones outline because I was afraid of doing too much prewriting. I now understand that it’s only too much prewriting when you can turn it into the novel manuscript with very little work.
This year, I wrote an outline that was unusually detailed with ideas and notes for introducing characters and their background. I wrote in such a way that no sane person would ever be able to turn it into a straight manuscript…unless that author was Robert Anton Wilson, perhaps. (It also helps that I wrote the outline in third person while planning to write the manuscript in first person. This also led to some outline bits that didn’t make it into the novel because the narrating character couldn’t possibly know them.)
Of course, it probably doesn’t hurt that I have the minimum daily goal for each day written on my calendar. Each day, I write my total word count for the day in green if it’s higher than the minimum daily word count. (The day I fall under the count, I’ll use red to motivate myself.) That visual reminder is inspiring in and of itself. I may have to remember it for other projects.
It really is nice, though, to realize that I’m over 60% of the way through my NaNovel with no end of plot in sight. I’ll be done with my story before National Game Week starts next week!
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 7:31 AM EST
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It’s not uncommon to see one of my writing students completely stumped as they begin their rough draft. They have their map and outline beside them, and they look frequently at both, but we require that the student start with a broad statement that isn’t anywhere on either the map or the outline.
Some of them are looking for the “perfect” sentence (at which point I remind them that a draft isn’t going to be perfect). Some of them look at the blank piece of paper and panic, the products of a standardized-test-happy world. A few of these write their name on the paper to get rid of the emptiness, only to find themselves staring in panic yet again.
Perhaps I should print off these tips for getting started on the writing (which really moves past the starting part).
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:50 AM EST
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This year marks my fifth attempt at National Novel Writing Month. It marks the first year that I’m not a Municipal Liaison (The only other year I wasn’t ML was my very first year.)
As has been my luck, it would appear that i will be keeping up with my tradition of winning in my odd years. But what I don’t think I ever could have seen coming was how this novel would play out.
During the last two weeks of October, I planned out my novel in outline form. That alone was over 10,000 words long, not a single bit of it eligible for cutting and pasting into the novel so I was still within the rules for not actually writing my novel before November. I spent the last weekend of October prepping my writing journal for November, and wrote out the minimum necessary word counts on my calendar, complete with a spot to write my word count at the end of the day.
The plan was simple. I’d struggle to make word count each day, and then record my total word count in green if I was ahead or red if I was behind. Even better, my sensei offered to make do crunches if I got behind- one for every word I was behind. I hate doing crunches, so it seemed like a good plan.
It all went out the window on November 1. I wrote an unprecedented 3,725 words. Here, now, on the morning of November 6, I’m starting the day with over 20,000 words written. I’ve never written anything so quickly in my life.
The explanation is a simple one, though. My novel is set in a private performing arts high school, and the main character is studying dance. As a result, I’ve incorporated some ballets into the story. The first lesson I learned is that virtually nobody creates torrents for ballets. The second lesson I learned is that the libraries in culturally sophisticated Seattle really don’t carry ballet, either. (The third lesson I learned is that some librarians can be condescending half-wits, but that’s a whole other story.)
I did manage to get my hands on one of the two ballets last week, and discovered to my horror that I had one week to get the tape back to the library. The ballet in question is right near the middle of the novel. It was enough motivation to kick my writing into a very aggressive schedule, and I’ll be writing the ballet’s chapter later on today as a result.
Naturally, though, I’m going to need a major break once today is over. I’m so far ahead that I’m thinking about allowing myself a few days off to recover. I might just try to wrap up this novel by the weekend, though. It’s just been a crazy ride.
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 8:35 AM EST
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I’ll be the first to admit that I almost never read the first sentence of a story. Seriously. Most of them are so pointless (and none of them will ever compare to the first line of my favorite book) that I just breeze past it.
I was reminded of this as I watched Ceara try to start her NaNovel yesterday. At one point in time, she did actually have that sentence planned in her head, but she forgot it. So she stared at the screen for several minutes before she finally got something typed out. (The line, “It’s only a first draft,” come to mind…)
This morning, I read an article, one in a series on the front page, that addressed the first line itself. One day late doesn’t really hurt, I suppose. In the end, it really does come down to preciseness of language, but there are people (not me) who will put a book down after that first line if it doesn’t draw them in.
Just something to keep in the back of one’s mind when one is editing…
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:20 AM EST
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