Category: NaNoWriMo

With a new year ahead of me, and so many thoughts swirling in my brain about things I want to accomplish, I thought I’d take a moment to focus on one specific area of great importance to me: my writing.

As I mentioned previously, writing an average of one blog a day was difficult last year. Still, I liked having the increase in content and the constant practice of using my imaginiation, literary skill, and shear will power to pump out posts.

However, with two rough drafts of novels waiting to be polished, plus a third uncompleted story I have sitting on my netbook begging me for attention, I have other important projects I want to give time to. And, frankly, NaNoWriMo, though difficult, was still amazing.

So, with that slight build up, the following are my writing goals for this year:

1) Write

For my blog, at minimum, I will post once every other day. Now hopefully it will not be an average of every other day, but actually every other day. I thought about picking odd or even calendar days, but technically that wouldn’t be every other day. I may end up doing this anyway, but I am still mulling it over, so, for now, we’re going with every other day.

I started a novel some time ago but have not touched the material in a few months with NaNoWriMo, work, and time with friends and family as constant distractions.

Each time I look at my desktop, the folder for the book is right there, waiting to opened, waiting for my words, waiting to know where the story will go. So, by the beginning of November, I will have the rough draft for my third novel written.

2) Revise

I have two completed rough drafts to work on. I love both stories, as different as they are, probably because they do not live in the same universe, or, for that matter, the same genre.

I know it will take a lot of work, but I want to polish them enough that they are ready for showtime (i.e. e-publishing). I know this will require setting a time table, and living by it, but at this moment I can at least set one goal: I will finish editing my two novels by November. Which leads me to my last goal.

3) Repeat

I will participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. With the first draft of my third novel complete by the beginning of November, I like the idea of having two rough drafts of novels to start my 2014.

Wow, 2014; that is looking way far ahead. But I wrote it. I am putting it out there into the ether. May fortune favor my boldness.

So… here I go.

There Are No More Wants, Only Needs

I wanted to be lazy. I wanted to watch TV all day in my pajamas.

I wanted to write something, but not my novel. Anything else besides my damn novel.

I wanted to clean my room, to unpack my suitcase, to wash clothes. I wanted to organize my rope, hang up my outfits, and start planning things for next year.

But it didn’t matter what I wanted anymore. All that mattered was what I needed. And I needed to write. A lot.

I needed to leave my suitcase on the floor and ignore the clutter. I needed to put off goal setting for next year until next month. I needed to allow myself to live in a room that looked like a tornado swept through it.

I needed to get up on my days off, put on clothes, go downstairs, and write. I needed to take breaks. I needed to eat, and to sleep. I needed to go to bed early. I needed to remember that if I endured, I would make it to the end.

I needed to go to California. I needed that break.

I needed to keep Thanksgiving NaNo free. I needed to give myself that day.

I needed to see my niece, who I hadn’t seen in ages. I needed to hear her laugh, and cry, and be a brat, and be super sweet. I needed to see my best friend and her husband. I needed to be reminded people loved me, with or without a published work to my name.

I needed to be pushed. I gratefully accepted the help that came.

I needed to keep going. Just keep going. And I did.

Allow Your Needs To Sustain You

Sleep felt so good, and yet never enough during NaNo. I needed more, much more, and though I know it made me feel lame at times, I also know it made the struggle more bearable.

When I ate, I stopped thinking about calories. I focused on the foods that made me happy, or more to the point the food I had as opposed to the food I wish I had. Food was a meal, but I allowed myself to enjoy it. Taking refuge in the little good I could muster would push me further.

Make Yourself Happy

Once, again on my last day of writing, I realized I had not practiced poi in weeks (since California to be exact).

I also had a headache. And I was annoyed. I had about two-thousand more words to go before I could be done. Why couldn’t I just push them out? Why couldn’t I just throw shit up on the screen and call it a day, fuck a month?

I closed my netbook, found my practice poi, stepped outside in the cold, and played. Music came from my iPhone. I sung along while occasionally whacking myself in the face or the thigh or the arm. (Like I said, I was out of practice.)

But I gave myself that time. I got some fresh air, got my heart pumping a little. I smiled. I laughed. And, at the end of my thirty minutes in the cold swinging tennis balls around, I felt so much better.

And then I finished my first draft.

A couple times a week, before bed, I read a blog. I knew I needed to go to sleep, knew I needed to rest up so I could get back to writing in the morning. But I also knew I needed to relax. I needed to think about something other than my wordcount. My brain needed a break from my novel.

And, as it so happened, reading that blog felt good, great even. It got my mind working in different directions. Got me to write (as per the comments section) about something other than the lives of my characters. It made me happy.

When you’re in the thick of it, lost in the sea of your imagination and the stress of making something difficult come to life, it’s important to take moments to make yourself happy. Find things that make you smile. Family. Friends. A good book (I’m working through How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran). A soothing hobby (I also almost finished a fucking long scarf in this month too). Something that does it for you.

If I couldn’t have been happy while also doing this thing that I loved, even when it was hard, even when it was a struggle, then this month wouldn’t have been worth it.

Routine

It was important for me to create a routine when it came to my writing.

Having a lightweight netbook helped me to carry around my novel wherever I went, but it also gave me the illusion of always being able to write.

But I couldn’t write when I was working. Or when I was driving. Or when I was too tired from work and driving to keep my eyes open.

I thought I had all this time to create, but instead I painted myself into a corner, making myself feel guilty about not churning out words when, in reality, there was no time to do it.

So I wrote in the morning, right after I woke up and brushed my teeth.

When I had days off, I would put on normal clothes, take my netbook downstairs, and write. If I kept my pajamas on and write like I often do in my bed, I felt sleepy all day, less productive; bad bad bad.

And now, a subset of routine: breaks. Take them.

I got into the habit of work equals reward.

I’d get up, get dressed, eat while watching something on NetFlix, and then turn off the TV. If I wanted to see what happened next on Sons Of Anarchy (FYI: fucking awesome show), I had to finish a certain scene or achieve a certain wordcount range (not a specific number). I went through this cycle multiple times. TV, write, more TV.

It was a way to institute breaks, which my brain desperately needed.

Sometimes it wasn’t TV, though. On my last day of writing, when my brain felt dead, I simply closed my netbook, pulled on a blanket, and closed my eyes. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t think. I just needed to stop.

And then, magically, about forty-five minutes later, I opened my eyes, drank some water, opened my netbook, and went back to it.

Take breaks. This doesn’t mean forget about your novel. It does mean be kind to yourself and listen to your body. Hint hint: your head counts as a part of your body. Writing through a headache sucks.

So, my friends, take breaks.

Watch The Calendar

NaNoWriMo gave me a set amount of time to write the first draft of a novel: thirty days. I thought about working on an existing piece I’d started a while back, but no. NaNoWriMo is about one novel and thirty days.

This gave me two things I needed. 1- A set deadline and 2- a sense of perspective.

When I came back from California, worried that I would not make it, worried that my laziness would get the better of me again, I had one saving grace: the calendar.

I still had weeks to work. Even though I was behind, I knew if I could just get myself to sit down for long stints of time and make myself write, I could still make my deadline.

I looked at my schedule for the rest of the month, saw the days I had free, and promised myself they would be sprint days. I gave myself high wordcount goals, often over five thousand words each day. I wrote over twenty thousand words of my novel in four days, days I had off in a row when I knew I could shut myself in my basement with just my music, my netbook, and my novel.

I also figured out when I could write before work, possibly after (which is hard for me; I work best when I just wake up and go) and what days would be the worst to write. I worked my calendar.

Wordcount Is Everything, And Nothing

The point of NaNo is 50,000. The magic number. The ultimate goal. Wordcount was stressed to me, and it stressed me.

I had to make a daily quota or I would fall behind. I had to set a higher quota to make up for my lost amount of quota or I would fall even further behind.

It was the thing that loomed over my time when I was at my keyboard. And, as such, occasionally it did more harm than good.

If my first goal was to get to a certain number, I found writing harder. I struggled to hear my characters, imagine what would happen next for them, how they would react, because I had that number thumping in the background.

When I stopped, thought about the scene, thought about the people in it, how they would feel, react, what they would say, the words came. I worried about wordcount after I finished a scene, after I painted the landscape, after I expressed the mood of the moment, the feelings of the character, the experience they had.

If I fell short, I went onto another scene or I went back and enhanced the visuals or delved more into the emotions.

Wordcount takes care of itself if you write for your characters, not for the number.

I did it. I wrote a novel in a month. That was big and heavy and hard. Not surprisingly, having endured twenty-seven days of wordcount hysteria, I learned a few lessons along the way.

The first, surprisingly, mimics one of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of this year.

Endurance

NaNoWriMo lasts an entire month, thirty days to pump out fifty-thousand words. When I first started, I was excited and scared but hopeful. My first week of NaNo was amazing. I was pouring out my words each day before work and found myself way ahead of schedule.

And then the second week rolled around. I went on a trip to California, a vacation I had planned for quite some time, and thought, Oh, I’ve got this. I’ll write while I’m there, no problem.

And then the jet lag set in. And there were classes I wanted to attended. And I just had to spend time with people because, for goodness sake, they live on the left coast, thousands of miles of way.

In a heartbeat, I fell behind. I got down on myself. I wondered if I was going to make it.

But I kept writing.

When I came back home, I still wrote. Even as my daily output had slowed. Even as I struggled for ideas of where to go. Even as I wondered if my novel was worth writing. Still, I kept writing.

I endured. Sometimes all you need to do is gut it, push through, slog and scramble and suffer, but endure.

Adversity

In life, nothing is easy. Nothing is easy. As soon as you think something is easy, you learn it is not.

As I worked my way through fifty-thousand words, I was writing with one hand tied behind my back: my ‘s’ key worked only half the time.

This was a major issue at first, seeing as the password to enter my netbook contained that letter. Thankfully a co-worker informed me of how I could pop up an on screen keyboard and at least log into my computer.

But that was only the first in a long sequences of annoyances, starts and stops. I had to use the copy and paste function whenever I wanted to write an ‘s’. Think about this for a moment. Count how many times, just in the paragraphs I’ve written so far, or in just this paragraph, that I use the letter ‘s’. And think about this: that doesn’t even include the capital. One of the characters in my novel goes by the title ‘Sir’.

The mental hoops I jumped through to get beyond my keyboard issue was the height of inconvenience, but I did it. Yes, it sucked. Having the vibe going. Knowing what you want to write, and you can feel the words ready to pour out of you, but you have to keep remembering cntrl-C each time you want an ‘s’ or you have to find the a capital ‘S’, copy it, paste it, and then find the lower case version again, copy it, paste it…

I don’t know why my keyboard decided ‘s’ is going to be finicky. I have noticed it works fine when my netbook is cold, which I’m exploring as a possible solution.

But I digress. Even with that annoyance, I kept typing. Even when my brain was all headache-y with the confusion, I still found a way to pump out my words. Even when life threw me a curve ball, I learned to adapt, adjust, and find ways to make that shit work.