What I'm Not Writing & What You Should Read

I haven’t been here in a while. You know, doing that NaNoWriMo thing. So where am I? I am hopelessly behind.

I have accepted the fact that I will not win (unless I suddenly get really productive in the next five days and write about six thousand words a day), but I am willing myself not to give up. I do not want to be a quitter.

Can you tell, I am in my I hate NaNoWriMo phase, the one where I repeatedly ask myself, what the hell was I thinking?

But, I still love my story and my characters. Well I still really like them at least. I have moments where I think they may be morons but mostly I like them.

Writing is hard. Have I said that before? I mean, I can write and write and write, doesn’t mean what I write is any good. However, writing something that is good, that is well written, that is literary, now that is hard.

More than one someone has told me that when I am feeling stuck to go back to those writers that I love, read their work and see how they did it, how they crafted sentences, paragraphs, chapters. How they moved from one scene to the next.

I used to worry that reading other stuff while I was writing, particularly well known stuff would lead me to copy that style of writing to try to write like that author. It really doesn’t happen like that, I might try to emulate an author’s style, but it will still have my voice.

So I went to the author I most would like to be at this very moment, I mean if I could perform some kind of magic and suddenly be that good. I pulled out my copy of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Just holding the book in my hands I was reminded how much I loved it the first time. I refused to go see the movie because I would watch the movie trailers and felt like I could see what director Peter Jackson was doing to tell the story and I didn’t like it.

If you are a reader, I’m sure you know what I mean, you read something that you love, you love the story, the language. Then someone makes a movie based on the book and they change it, they change its very essence. I couldn’t stand the thought of someone changing The Lovely Bones.

So I brought it out again, my intention was to look at it objectively this time, see how Alice Sebold handled scenes and transitions, and dialogue.

I opened the book and within about two paragraphs, I was transported into her story I was awash in her beautiful language and description. I couldn’t tell you how she handled transitions or anything else I was so lost in the story all over again.

Now I have to stop myself from reading because I won’t get six, much less six-thousand words written today if I keep reading.

No, I won’t win NaNoWriMo, but I still have a good start to what I think is a good story. I’m still trying, I will not quit, but I am realistic. I’ll let you know my word total on the 1^st.

Until then, if you want to read some really good stuff I have some suggestions.

First, there is always The Lovely Bones, what amazing book (in my humble opinion).

Other than that there are some pretty awesome blogs I would suggest, they are all great for writers to read but some of them are just great because …. well because they are. You’ll just have to trust me on this one.

So here goes, and these are in no particular order:

1. Stop by Penny Jars. The author, @PennyJars (aka @EVictoriaF) has had the blog for  a while but since starting NaNoWriMo has really be concentrating on her memoir. You can read her blog and get glimpses of the memoir that will come out of it. The writing is beautiful, the language will transport you, you will sometimes feel her joy as a child and other  times the pain of her childhood but you will come away enriched.

2. Any writer will appreciate Mike & Ollie by Susan Bearman (@2KoP). Susan is also writing a memoir based upon the months her premature babies spent in the neonatal intensive care unit after being born at 24 weeks (that is four months early). Each baby weighed about one and half pounds and every day of their hospital stay Susan kept a journal, documenting their medical condition and care and her feelings.  The blog is from those journal entries, which will also be the basis for the memoir. As a writer, I love the blog but as a mother, I am awestruck. Even though I know the outcome before I even started reading (and you will too if you visit the blog), every day I wait excitedly for that days post, hoping her babies have a good day, hoping there is no crisis, hoping that these tiny babies will triumph. You can become a fan on facebook, and find her on twitter @2KoP.

3. I have to admit, I sometimes buy books solely based upon what the cover looks like. It is as if the cover speaks to me.  Had I seen The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen in the bookstore I would have picked it up. (you will get the chance to do just that in April of 2011 when Crown/Random House releases it). When I read the description, I was hooked. I can’t wait for it to come out. Besides those things, I am also just hooked on Rebecca Rasmussen and her blog (also titled The Bird Sisters) a blog dedicated to artists and writers. If you are a writer or a reader you should go there, a good place to see how writers do what they do, and if you are a reader a great place to find some new reads you may have otherwise missed. I think, like me you’ll come to love Rebecca, her blog and you, like me, will be standing in line to get your copy of The Bird Sisters. Become her fan on facebook or find her on twitter @thebirdsisters.

4. I’m not quite sure I remember how I found Christi Craig but I think it may have been through She Writes. Boy am I glad I did find her. She writes short stories and flash fiction and is working on a novel. If you are a writer, you’ll find valuable information and great writing on her blog and if you are a reader, she can point you to some fabulous authors. She is also just one of the nicest people ever. She seems to know me all too well, if you look at some of her past posts you’ll see, she writes about those things that I often am talking about (ego and that damned internal critic). Her blog is called Writing Under Pressure but she makes it look like she handles it with ease. She is also on twitter @Christi_Craig.

5. For those who know me personally, you may already know one of my dearest friends is @MendiD. She is a first grade teacher in Arizona and has a blog called 1^st Grade Tales. Mendi didn’t start her blog because she wanted to be a writer; she started it because she had some great, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking stories of everyday life in the first grade classroom. Her blog is a reminder how important good caring teachers are and a reminder how a child’s environment can affect them in school. Last year she had a student that was forever a problem. She called him Mr. Stinky Attitude in her blog. Although he got on every one of her nerves, she persevered and she turned his life around. Despite the gangs and drugs, which surround his life, he found in his first grade teacher someone who cared, who would set limits and boundaries for him and believed in him. She has, this year, a new student working on those nerves but she is persevering again. Fingers crossed for another turn-around. I keep trying to convince her to write children’s books about her experiences. Do you remember those Mercer Mayer Little Critter children’s books? She needs to write some like that about how kid’s behavior can determine how things go in school and in life. I’m just sayin’.

I of course would also recommend a few others, Meg Waite Clayton’s blog 1^st Books, Stories of How Writers Get Started; Lisa Romeo’s blog Lisa Romeo Writes;  Laura Munson’s These Here Hills (Laura is the author of the book This is Not the Story You Think It Is ... A Season of Unlikely Happiness); Beth Foulkes Lowe's blog Pine Meadow Pond Journal and of course Susan Bearman’s regular blog (see #2 above) Two Kinds of People.

Okay, now I’m getting back to writing while you enjoy these blogs, and this time I really mean it.

P.S. Hope you all enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday. Peace.

I LOVE, no I HATE, no I LOVE, no I ..... NaNoWriMo

Here we are, in the midst of week 2 of NaNoWriMo. Unbeknownst to me until this week, week 2 is the cursed week (Week 2 is also apparently cursed for contestants on The Biggest Loser - who knew?). I refuse to do much research on it – no reason to tempt the fates – but as I understand it, if there is a week when most people drop out of NaNoWriMo it is week two. Maybe it is because in week one you just can’t help but be fired up. By week two you can no longer ignore the rest of your life in order to write; you have to shower, some people have jobs to go to and after a week of no sleep in week one you now have to make up for all that has been lost.

I LOVE NaNoWriMo. It has done for me all that I hoped it would. It got me going on a new project, a fiction piece and I have found that, like I have read of other writers, my protagonist is speaking to me and telling me where she wants to go.  That is pretty cool. I’ve heard other writers talking about it, about their characters determining what direction the story goes in but I had never experienced it before. Of course kind of hard to have that happen when you are writing memoir, the past is what it is and as much as I might have liked to allow me (the protagonist if you will in the memoir) to go off in any direction, particularly different directions than those I really took, that just isn’t going to happen. NaNo also gave me deadlines, I mean, I know how many words I should be writing every day to stay on target for 50,000 words in 30 days (don’t worry the math has already been done, it is 1,667 per day). Additionally, NaNo, and Twitter as well, have introduced me to some of the coolest writers in the world who are also doing NaNo (or who aren’t or who are NaNoRebels), who send me 140 character missives of support. And that is support no matter if I’m on schedule or not, whether I’m enjoying or hating my writing day.

Wait, did I say I love NaNoWriMo? What I meant to say was I HATE NaNoWriMo. I mean really, 50,000 words in 30 days, whose cockamamie idea was that? So, every day I don’t make the goal number is just another day when I can beat myself up for failing at something I promised, myself and a few others, I would complete. And if I have to read one more 140 character tweet from the folks who already have 46,000 words written and it isn’t even the 15^th of the month I’m gonna scream! What, they have no life? They spend every waking moment writing?

Okay, I’m better now (and so am I). No, I’m not schizophrenic, really. It is a love/hate relationship with NaNoWriMo for almost everyone I talk to who is attempting it. If you know anyone doing it, ask them how many times they have started and not finished, not reached the 50,000-word pinnacle. It is a whole bunch.

Just in the interest of transparency here, I am behind, way behind in word count. I’m hoping to make a bunch of it up tonight and tomorrow night but we’ll see. Good news is I still really love my protagonist in my work in progress (WIP). She is taking me on a journey and I’m letting her lead the way. So, as long as I don’t pull out the dagger to run through my own heart and end it all, whether I reach 50,000 words by November 30^th or not is really beside the point. I have the beginnings of what I think will be a really good story and I just gotta keep plugging away at it.

If you are doing NaNo find me there my name is JulesJeffs, if you are on twitter find me there @julesjeffs (I know, original).

I still want to “win” NaNoWriMo. It is a source of pride, particularly since I told all you people who read my blog, the 12,000+ members of She Writes and anyone else who read my tweets that I was doing it, but not winning doesn’t mean I lost.

If I don’t post on December 1 that I did it, would someone remind me of those words, and come take the dagger from my hand. Thanks. Gotta run, lots of words to write.

The NaNo Debate -- A bit of a Rant

About the beginning of October, I began to hear the buzz, as writers prepared for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. (In case you don’t know what it is, it is writing a novel in 30 days, well at least 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.) I’ve never done it before. A few years ago, just the thought scared me; I didn’t know what 50,000 words even looked like. Last year I was in the midst of the memoir and couldn’t imagine working on something else, I mean really, what would I write? This year I once again told myself and anyone else who initially asked, that I was in the midst of revisions of the Memoir and although I would like to imagine working on something else, I still didn’t have anything to write. As November 1^st approached, the buzz became a loud droning sound as many writers on She Writes as well as women I follow and respect on Twitter talked about starting NaNoWriMo on November 1^st. I wished all of them the best of luck.

I now knew what 50,000 words looked like; it looked like about one quarter of my first draft of my memoir, not so overwhelming within some context.

E. Victoria Flynn (@PennyJars) had weeks before been commenting on being a NaNoRebel and I assumed, without asking mind you, that it meant she was not participating in NaNo. On October 31st she again mentioned NaNo but with a different tone, so I asked her if she was going to do it. She replied she was and asked, “And you?” I originally told her no, then it started to swirl around in my oft-empty head and the little bit of competitiveness in me started to kick in. The whole business starts at 12:01 a.m. on November 1 and I made the decision to join at about 10:30 p.m. on October 31. Maybe not one of my brightest moments. I still had no clue what I would write. I would very much like to blame here my twitter friends who were and are like cheerleaders prodding me on and telling me how “You can do it Julie!” But, I must take responsibility for myself, I’m the one who registered on that site and said I would do it, or at least give it that old college try.

I had looked through some notebooks at notes I had written about ideas for stories and there it was, a voice and character I had only started to think about but already was in love with. On the first, I met with my writing friend Charissa, told her about my idea, and asked her to read my first 500 words. We talked about where I thought it was going. She gave me such positive feedback and lots of ideas about all the different directions I could go in.

So now I am hooked and all signed up for NaNoWriMo and as is my usual way I am already behind in word count. It is good for me though. It gives me deadlines and the competiveness forces me to put butt in chair and try at least to write something.

What has surprised me though is the debate about NaNoWriMo. One of the women on She Writes who I respect and admire wrote an entire post about why it is not for everyone. I’m in complete agreement. It, I am certain, is not for everyone, but not only her post but also many of the following comments seemed so negative. At least to me it felt like many were saying that if you rushed to put 50,000 words down in 30 days you weren’t really writing well, you weren’t honoring the craft of writing and you were, in a sense, taking to the extreme Anne Lamott’s suggestion that it was okay to write “shitty first drafts”. Although many people agree with Lamott that your first draft is just a that, a draft and doesn’t have to be  and won’t be publication ready, much of the comment on She Writes and other places, was that to write 50,000 words in 30 days was hurrying so much that crap was too nice a word for whatever was produced. Participants were somehow then making a mockery of real writers.

Today I also read a blog post by Laura Miller on Salon.com. In it, she asks that those of us considering it please just not write that novel. The title to her article is “Better yet, DON’T write that novel Why National Novel Writing Month is a waste of time and energy. Miller thinks we should spend  more time reading rather than writing “crap”, and she goes on to write:

"Writing a lot of crap" doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November. And from rumblings in the Twitterverse, it's clear that NaNoWriMo winners frequently ignore official advice about the importance of revision; editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive. "Submitting novels in Nov or Dec?" tweeted one, "Leave NaNoWriMo out of the cover letter ... or make it clear that it was LAST year's NaNo." Another wrote, "Worst queries I ever received as an agent always started with 'I've just finished writing my NaNoWriMo novel and ...'"

As someone who doesn't write novels, but does read rather a lot of them, I share their trepidation. Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it? Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it's likely to produce more novels I'd want to read. 

Okay, I get that certainly there are plenty of people who aren’t smart enough to realize that the 50,000 words they blurted out during NaNoWriMo are not ready for publication. They are, as they are meant to be, the beginnings, a shitty first draft, the bare bones of the novel that you may then spend the next year editing, revising and rewriting. Those people, who hit the send button for the queries to agents on December 1, are the same people who will send any crappy first draft out to agents and editors without a second thought.

Miller points out that it appears there has been at least one true “hit” that came from a NaNoWriMo participant and that is Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen. I would probably bet that what Sarah Gruen wrote for NaNo is nothing like the finished product that became a New York Times Bestseller, but it was a beginning, an exercise in writing every single day and getting a crappy-bare-bones-first-draft down on paper.

Those who don’t like the idea of NaNo have every right to ignore it. But why do they have to be so negative about those who dare to try? Can’t we all just be a little more supportive of each other for those things we do that scare us, which test our boundaries, which stretch our limits just a bit?

I have no intention or desire to skydive, my sense is, "Why jump out of a perfectly good airplane?" I can, however, still be supportive of someone else who finds it exhilarating, who uses it to face fears or push themselves to do something that scares them a bit, or someone who just enjoys it. Because that skydiver isn’t spending their time doing something I consider more worthwhile or better for the world at large, doesn’t mean I have to put them down for it.

Miller actually, in my mind becomes rather mean-spirited when she writes:

The last thing the world needs is more bad books. But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced.

Here's why: NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it's largely unnecessary. When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in. "Write Your Novel Here" was the suggested motto for an in-store NaNoWriMo event. It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

Rather than squandering our applause on writers -- who, let's face, will keep on pounding the keyboards whether we support them or not -- why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers? Why not celebrate them more heartily? They are the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built. After all, there's not much glory in finally writing that novel if it turns out there's no one left to read it.

Wow, sorry I’m not the good person you are Ms. Miller, I’m just a lowly stinkin’ writer. But wait, Ms. Miller,  you are a writer too are you not? Do you not write a column for Salon? Why would you so quickly denegrate the profession that earns you your living? Some of us would love to have that ability, to earn our living writing instead of squeezing our writing into the other spaces in our lives while we do something else to support ourselves and our families.

Miller does however offer a suggestion of something to do in place of NaNoWriMo which is called the 10/10/10 challenge in which a couple of women, Melissa Klug and Kalen Landow read ten books in ten categories in ten months, that is 100 books in 10 months. They chose to read books outside their normal tastes to challenge themselves. You can read about their challenge here. I am impressed and would love to take on such a challenge, when I’m done with NaNo. I mean we all agree the way to be a better writer is to be a better reader.

For now, I will continue to try and squeeze out my 50,000 words by the end of the month. I will at least give it my best effort. If I try my best then in my mind I have won. I will not have a finished novel even if I do get 50,000 words written but I will have started and pushed myself beyond my normal limits. If I fail, it does not make me a failure at being a good, intelligent, worthwhile woman and human being. So to all of you who choose not to participate in NaNoWriMo, I hope you have found your own challenge that helps you to grow and reach your dreams. I support you in whatever it is you choose to do. For those of you participating in NaNo, best of luck, I hope you are enjoying it for whatever reasons you choose to do it.

Now, if only I could use the words in this blog post to add to my total word count for NaNo I would be set.