Musings

Weekly Musing: NaNo Check-in #1

DH Hanni

Ahhh, so NaNo has officially started! This week leading up to November 1st has been one filled with anxiety, fear, and self-doubt because of the realization of what I am about to embark upon. A novel. At least 50,000 words. In 30 days. Needless to say a lot of this week trying to figure out if what I’m doing is the right thing.

My original intention this week was to prep for November 1st. What that looked like consisted of quasi-finalizing an outline, review my notes, and dust off the tri-fold board which serves as a brief timeline of events I want to incorporate into my novel. All the organizational stuff to satisfy my efficient personality. But the internal struggle of ‘Now I have to sit down and write the damn thing’ kicked in and took over.

Sure I got some things done. I tried something different and instead of prepping an extensive outline, I did a one page synopsis of what each of my main character’s story is. I included how their story starts, briefly what will happen to them, and what the ending looked like for each of them. Another thing I got done was to put into a folder maps of Wales and England, character sheets for my main characters, printed off scene ideas, and organized my notebooks of research. I also dusted off some of the research stored on EverNote and downloaded the app for my phone.

Even with the prepping, I couldn’t ease my mind. It’s a daunting task and I know I’m not ready for it. I spent a good portion of Halloween looking at NaNo’s website as a way of calming myself down and to get inspiration.

One of the best threads was about rewarding yourself as you go along. Many people were going to do daily rewards for hitting their word count. Candy was a popular one. Others planned on rewarding themselves with video game time, going to a movie, knitting, spending time with friends and family, etc.

I hadn’t thought about doing this but it makes a lot of sense. My goal isn’t so much a word count but time spent writing. One of the biggest things I’ve struggled with this year is the amount of time I’m physically writing. My goal is to write 3 hours each day. If I reach that, I get a piece of leftover Halloween candy. For every 5,000 words I hit, I’ll play a few hours of BioShock Infinite. When I’ve hit 25,000 words, I’ll pick something small from the shop on NaNo’s website and treat myself to a nice lunch. When I hit the big 50,000 word count, I’ll take myself out to a nice dinner and get myself something else from NaNo’s store. The extra kicker will be if I’m finished with the novel at that point, I get an extra special reward. If the novel isn’t finished, though, then that’s okay and when it is finished, I’ll give myself that extra special reward then.

November 1st finally arrived and it was a busy, busy day. I managed to squeeze in time to write between cleaning my house for potential buyers and generally trying to recover from being sick the past few days. I was exhausted by the time of the NaNo kick-off meeting held at a local library yet excited.

It was a small group, about a dozen people gathered on a Friday night. The group ranged in age from late teens/early 20s to a retiree. Everyone introduced himself or herself and we played a get-to-know-you game before settling down to write for an hour. A fun activity we did, one that is a really great exercise, was to either draw or write down on a notecard what our Internal Editor looks like and says. We placed the notecards into an envelope and sealed it. The instructions were to not open it up until after NaNo. It’s a symbolic gesture. A way to put that dreaded Internal Editor away for a month thus freeing up our creativity.

But I got my novel started! The NaNo website itself allows you to keep track on your work and counts the words for you. I haven’t officially entered my word total as of this blog posting but subsequent November blogs will be updated with where I’m at word count wise. Fingers crossed I’m above the daily average of 1,667.

Happy NaNo everyone!

Musings

Weekly Musing: NaNo Here I Come

DH Hanni

Next Friday, November 1st, is the start of NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month (NaNo for short.) It’s been around since 1999 when only 21 people participated but this year, over 140,000 writers have signed up. The purpose of NaNo is to write at least 50,000 words during the month of November.

I’ve never participated in NaNo and felt this year was a good time to start. I’ve got a novel I’ve wanted to write for over 2 years and have been doing lots of research for it. While the research is crucial for my understanding of the history of the time period I’m setting the book in, I have hidden behind it. I’ve been too afraid to actually tackle writing it. I have good excuses I tell myself. I’m a new writer so I need to practice more with short stories before I write a novel, right? Oh, my research has turned up something that I think might be good to explore but I’ll need to do even more research. I don’t want to make a mistake since I do have a degree in history.

What also hasn’t helped is I’ve changed the plot a gazillion times. Officially I’ve done 4 outlines. The last one I did was sometime summer of 2012. Since then, though, I’ve added a lot of notes about plot. Snippets of color-coded paper. Notes stored in EverNote. Notes stored in a Word file. I’m organized but not despite a tri-fold board filled with slips of paper listing historical people, events, and places to help keep me straight on the facts.

Now that I have less than a week before the start of NaNo, I am starting to panic. The time has flown since I made the decision back in the summer to do NaNo. I thought I was giving myself plenty of time to do as much research as possible, work on developing characters sheets, and quasi-finalizing an outline. Ahhh but life got in the way. In the midst of all of the prep work, my spouse was interviewing for a new job which he got. The catch: it’s across the country. Now we are in the midst of selling our house so who knows when it will sell (quickly I hope!) so time has been lost dealing with a huge life change. Then all of a sudden it was mid-October and I had yet to do any real prep work for NaNo.

But from what I’ve been reading on the forums on NaNo’s website, that’s okay. Lots of people are first time NaNo participants. Some are working on outlines, some aren’t, and some aren’t even sure yet what they are going to write. Reading words of wisdom from veteran participants has put my mind at ease. Just a little. The closer the calendar gets to November 1st, the more the realization of what I’m about to embark upon gets larger.

I’m not alone, though, as NaNo encourages people to join a home region within their state or country as a means of connecting writers. Ideally each region will have a leader, ML they are called, whose job is to organize the kick-off party on November 1st and subsequent write-in sessions. Write-in sessions are in person gatherings where writers get together and well, write. Writing is a solitary sport but sometimes a group of writers just need to get together. I’m guessing that creative energy gives a writer a needed boost. So while I don’t know any of the other people in my region, I’m looking forward to meeting them.

Throughout the month of November, I’ll be providing updates on my progress towards that 50,000 word goal as well as what it feels like to be a first-time participant. Scary but I am hopeful it will be a great learning experience and yes, even a bit fun.

Musings

Weekly Musing: Don’t Do That!

DH Hanni

The following pieces of writerly advice are sayings I can’t stand. I understand the good intent behind these. It’s to encourage writers to be as strong of a writer as possible. To get beginning writers away from being tentative and instill confidence in their abilities. In a way its like telling the writer if you do any of these, the rocket is going to blow up! The world will end! We’re not dividing by zero people; the world will be okay. Some very famous writers have violated these rules and the world still spins.

Your first sentence really needs to grab the reader. How many of us honestly remember the first sentence to any story we read? There are the ones that are famous first lines like ‘Call me Ishmael’ or ‘It was the best of times, it was the worse of times…’ but those are stuck in people’s minds because they have been repeated often as a couple of the most famous lines in literature. If you pressed a lot of people they wouldn’t be able to identify which books those are from (Moby Dick and A Tale of Two Cities). So is the first line really that important to the average reader? Does the first line of a story really turn on or turn off readers? Are readers that judgmental that if a story’s first line isn’t intriguing, the rest of the story must be rubbish? For me, I fall into the group of readers who don’t remember and don’t care what the first line of a story is. I couldn’t tell you what the first line is of my favorite books. It’s not how I determine what I’ll read and to base my entire opinion of if I should read a story or not upon the first line seems incredibly limiting and illogical.

Don’t use big words. If a reader has to stop reading to look a word up in the dictionary, you’ve lost the reader. This seems incredibly insulting to the reader. This piece of advice seems to advocate authors restrict their word choices to average, common words. But the beauty of language is its complexity and evolution. More complex, longer, or even less common words serve a purpose when a simple word just can’t fully convey what the piece requires. I can understand shying away from using strings of complex or archaic words; too many of those come across as pompous unless that is what the author’s goal is. But to advise writers from staying away from uncommon words is silly. Heaven forbid the reader learns a new word! In school I was taught if you come across a word you don’t know, first try to glean the definition from the context it is used in the sentence. If that doesn’t work, look it up in the dictionary. Even the Harry Potter series has words I didn’t know at first and it’s aimed at young adult readers. If a reader gives up on a piece because an unfamiliar word sends their fingers running for a dictionary then that is a symptom the story has a problem. A good story will stand up to occasional dictionary consulting.

Shorter sentences are easier for the reader. This one I can understand more why it is advised because if you read a lot of the classics or literature, it’s not unusual for a sentence to take up several lines on the page and yes, it can be taxing on the eyes and mind to keep track of everything going on in said sentence, however, with the proper placement of punctuation and the right training, you can keep up with the action in the sentence. Shorter sentences have their appeal. I suppose. Easier to read. Easier to digest. Take small bites. Chew your food thoroughly. The beauty of longer sentences is they can communicate a rush of emotion or thought. To capture stream of consciousness. Shorter sentences are great for building tension, to describe action, and for short bursts of emotion.

Your characters shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ to each other. Huh? Why? When I read that piece of advice in a writing book, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the author’s reasoning. Essentially what the author was arguing was you as the writer should be showing the characters are in love. Okay, I get that part, show don’t tell but if the characters on a page are to be as real as possible, to act as real people, they need to speak as real people speak. Real people say ‘I love you’ to each other. I can’t imagine a story with the relationship between a parent and child, two people in love, or the bond between a pet and its owner with those three little words never being uttered. Words are how people express how they feel. In the real world we show and tell each other every day how much we love someone.

If you want to shift POV, end the current scene and start another. Can’t have multiple POVs in a scene. I think this piece of advice comes from how most modern books have gotten away from being written in the third person omniscient a lot of literature used to be written in. Reading books written in that POV can be frustrating and confusing for the reader yet many of the classics are written from this POV. It is possible, and sometimes necessary, to have multiple POVs within a scene without having to use *** to denote a POV change. Sometimes it is important to the story for the POV to shift to a different character briefly. The trick is to be subtle about it. As a reader I don’t pick up when POV shifts so I wonder how often the average reader does and it throws them off?

Adverbs weaken the writing. Again, does the average reader notice the number of adverbs used on a page? In a chapter? In a book? I don’t think they do and believe this is something only other writers pick up on. Adverbs are looked down upon as weakening writing because they are viewed as indicators of passive writing rather than active writing. Instead of the character being the one doing the actions, adverbs give off the impression the action is happening to the character. I agree with the character being active rather than passive. I also agree writers should aim for strong prose but for some reason reading ‘she said in a soft voice’ grates on me more than ‘she said softly’. Less words to explain the same feeling.