Squirrel!

Yesterday I mentioned in my post that when you're trying to do NaNoWriMo that all sorts of other things suddenly start to seem important.

A shining example: today when I got home from work I sat down to start my novel and started researching earthquake preparedness.  I was going to make a list and start putting together all the things our family needs in case of an earthquake, but I stopped myself because I am supposed to be writing!  I hunkered down and churned out almost 1,700 words, a respectable start.

Granted, because I have written this, there will be a massive earthquake and my family won't be prepared and my insistence on writing rather than preparing my family for disaster will look pretty foolish, won't it?  I apologize for bringing disaster down on everyone.  If you aren't doing NaNoWriMo, here's a link to a site to help you prepare for the earthquake: http://www.ready.gov/earthquakes.

If you are doing NaNoWriMo, then what on earth are you doing wasting time on my blog.  Go write your novel!

How to Write a Novel

Since NaNoWriMo begins tomorrow, I figured I'd offer some tips on how to complete a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

1. Write.  I know this seems fairly obvious, but you wouldn't believe how many "writers" fail because they don't actually write.  
2. Don't worry about quality.  During the month of November I've written some of the most awful scenes you can imagine.  I've written scenes where my main character has long internal monologues about how difficult it is to write.  I've even written scenes where my characters sit around and play icebreakers.  The truth is, these scenes can help you move to a place where you can write something good. You know what the best thing is about these terrible scenes, though?  They can be deleted in December.
3. Keep writing.  Writing a novel is like eating the proverbial elephant -  you write it one word at a time.  Don't think about how many words you have to write or how far behind you are.  Just keep writing.
4. Avoid distractions.  Are you sensing a theme here?  If you are going to finish this novel, you need to be writing.  That means that this isn't the time to take on a new project - remodeling the kitchen, landscaping the yard, teaching yourself to crochet - no matter how fun it sounds.  It's time to write.
5. Do take breaks, though.  You need to bathe.  You need to eat.  You need to hug your children and clean the bathroom and walk around a bit.  You probably even have to go to work.  You can do all these things and still succeed.  I've successfully completed NaNoWriMo while parenting two toddlers and going to school full-time.  It can be done.
6. Take chances.  I'm not saying you should drive too fast or go snowboarding.  I'm saying you should let your story fly free.  You were planning to write an epic saga of one family's struggle against famine in Ireland?  It's okay to go ahead and turn it into a horror novel if that's the direction the characters seem to be headed.  The Irish epic would have been tedious, anyway.
7. Don't be afraid to ask for help.  Last year I got stuck and asked for help on Facebook.  My heroine was just wandering in a meadow.  It was beyond dull, and I had no idea what to do with her.  My friend Meagan suggested ninja pirates.  I let my main character get kidnapped and thus was born one of the best characters in the book (according to Jacob).  And now I have a novel with both space ships and pirate ships.  How cool is that?
8. Don't be afraid to write while on narcotics.  So maybe you're not firing on all cylinders.  Apparently it's still possible to write some compelling narrative.  I imagine this advice isn't useful to most people, but I'm glad I went ahead and wrote through the fog last year.
9. Throw in some healthy competition.  My brother and I generally do NaNoWriMo together.  On the website we are buddies and can see how many words we've each written.  It is a big motivation when I see that he is 5,000 words ahead.  I can't possibly let my brother beat me!
10. Write some more.  You're feeling fat from Thanksgiving and exhausted from Christmas shopping and just realized you're still 20,000 words short of your goal?  Sit down and write.  It's not too late until December 1st.  Last year I wrote more than 12,500 words in the last three days alone.  

Anticipation

It's almost that time of year again.  The weather may be getting colder, wetter, and windier, but I'm warming up to start one of my biggest exercises of the year.

No, not Christmas shopping.  That doesn't start for another month at the earliest.

Not "No Shave November," although I've been known to participate in that, too.

What I'm excited about today is National Novel Writing Month, commonly known as NaNoWriMo.  Every year hundreds of thousands of people commit to writing a 50,000-word novel during the month of November.  Is it an impossible task?  By no means!  I have successfully written more than 50,000 words three separate years.

Amy's NaNoWriMo Timeline:  

2004 - Untitled Romance Novel:  I set this one in the town where I now live, although at the time I lived in Portland.  It's actually a satire of romance novels, and I like to think it's great comedy, but it probably sucked.  This one will never see the light of day.

2005-2008 (also known as "The Dark Years") - I didn't do NaNoWriMo, but I did raise two toddlers to school age while going back to school and becoming a CPA.

2009 - Ravenswood:  This paranormal young adult novel has been revised and critiqued to death.  Some of you have read it at one point or other.  It has been shopped about, but not lately because it has no ending thanks to my latest, unfinished revision.  I know how it'll end, but I have to actually write it.

2010 - I did start a novel this year, but not only did I have sinus surgery during the competition, but I also had a difficult plot idea involving Russian spies.  I know very little about Russians and even less about spies.  It's not the 1980s, anyway, so Russian spies don't sell.  Had I finished it, this novel also would not have seen the light of day.

2011 - Blue:  Despite having major surgery and being mostly unconscious for a week of NaNoWriMo, I fought through and succeeded!  This book remains completely unedited.  I haven't even read through it.  Isaac, on the other hand, has already read it twice, and he and Jacob maintain that it is my best book yet.  It starts as a dystopian novel (I've never claimed to be original), but then I send my characters off-planet and it gets a little Anne McCaffrey-esque.  Eventually I turn the main character into a superheroine because that's how you get to 50,000 words in just a few weeks.  Now that I think about it, I loved writing this one more than any other.  I really need to read through it and start the revisions.

But I can't start revisions now because it is almost time for 2012 NaNoWriMo, and this year is going to blow all prior years out of the water!

2012 - Untitled: This year's book is also going to be a young adult novel, this time set in an imaginary post-war society.  I could tell you lots more about it because I have characters and setting and even major plot points, but I'm not going to tell you.

Do you feel the excitement?  NaNoWriMo is loads of fun, and at the end, if all goes well, you have a book that you wrote.  That's pretty cool even if the book is lousy.

Who is with me this year?

A day of Norman Rockwell & torture

As you know, yesterday I posted sweet pictures of my children and the childhood memories we shared over the breakfast table.  It was all very Norman Rockwell.  We ate scrambled eggs and homemade banana bread.

Then I spent the rest of the morning torturing Piper in Ravenswood, since the novel is suddenly no longer complete and I have to try to write a new climax and ending for it . . . again.

As I was telling my kids over lunch (yes, we talk a lot at meals), the way you make fictional characters do things is to torture them.  If you don't torture them, then they act a lot like real people do.  They read books and watch TV and surreptitiously pick their noses - none of which makes for great literature or even a fun read.

You know how when you read a good book you get to the end and kind of wake up and think, "Whoa!  Where am I?" because you've been so sucked into that world?  Well, the same thing happens when I'm writing, which means I really felt like I'd spent the morning, to some extent, torturing Piper in my selfish attempt to get a full-length novel out of her.  The poor girl took it all quite well, I must say.

The most heartbreaking thing about yesterday's efforts, for me, is that I again have all this first-draft stuff that will need several revisions before it rises above crap, let alone blends seamlessly into the rest of the novel.  For one thing, I managed to drop ninjas in there.  I've mentioned in my blog before that Meagan saved me during last year's NaNoWriMo by suggesting ninja pirates to me, thus freeing my novel Blue from a heroine who was content to wander in a blissful meadow all day (I wish I were kidding).  The ninja pirates were awesome, and I got a new favorite character, Sebastian, out of the deal.

However, I can't have ninjas in all my books.  If I ever do become a bestselling author or even (fingers-crossed) a respected one, I don't want someone writing their dissertation on the meaning of ninjas in Amy Moran's novels.  I want them instead to write about my use of food as a reflection of family dysfunction.  It's a consistent theme, and would make a great thesis.  

Rejection and self-doubt

The day of my surgery I received an email rejection for my novel Ravenswood.  It was a lovely email to come home to, let me tell you.  Good thing I was already thoroughly numbed with painkillers.  It's now been rejected six times, which means I only need three more and it'll be just like Harry Potter . . . or something.

I was thinking about Ravenswood last night as I lay awake unable to sleep.  (Note: when people lie awake in movies, they lie on their backs and gaze up at the ceiling, their faces projecting the pain and hopelessness of the scene.  Unfortunately, lying on my back is excruciating right now, even on the painkillers, so my expression of hopelessness was directed into my pillow.  I can't even fail as decorously as I would like.  Okay, sorry.  I'll stop whining now.)

Do you like the stock photos I snagged off the Internet?  Note the white bedding and white jammies?  See my post from last week if you missed the discussion on stock photos.

Anyway, I thought about my characters, especially the supporting roles, and decided that they are all flat as a pancake.  There's no depth, no edge, and I found even thinking about the characters too dull to attempt.  This is not a good sign.  I know at 2 am I am predisposed to feel pessimistic, but now it is nearly 2 pm, and I am still not in the mood to fix the human pinballs I created for my main character to bounce off of.  No wonder it keeps getting rejected.

I'll admit that I love my characters.  I can see them in my head and usually find them amusing as all get out.  However, I don't think I've written them as cool as they are in my head, and I'm afraid to read Ravenswood over again and find out.  I am such a wimp.

Similarly, I still have not started revisions on Blue, the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo last fall.  I know that one is a catastrophe.  I mean, I wrote it in 30 days, so its status as a work in progress is a given.  However, I also missed a week or two in the middle having surgery and had to polish off nearly half of it in the last few days (probably while taking painkillers and not eating).  This is the one for which I actually posted a request on Facebook for ideas on how to get the sucker moving.  Meagan, bless her heart, suggested ninja pirates, and I used them to get my character to stop wandering in a boring - although lovely - meadow.  Quite an accomplishment considering that this is a novel that includes space flight.  By the end of the book I had turned her into a superhero.  It's like one of those awful satires of desperate Hollywood movies, but Jacob says it's my best book yet.

And then there's the one about the accountant that is no longer an embryo, but is still just a fetus (the novel, not the character).  I'm determined to keep her from turning into a superhero or having any kind of special powers.  However, while the story is simmering on the back burner, one of her clients has been taking on an uncanny resemblance to Tony Stark.  He doesn't have a metal flying suit . . . yet.

It's probably a good thing that I'm planning to return to my day job in a few more weeks, although the tax returns moldering on my shelf in my office aren't that much more attractive than my paper-thin characters.

Speaking of plots...

A couple of blog posts ago, I mentioned that I have started a new book and that the main character is an accountant.

When I start a new book (except when I'm doing NaNoWriMo), what happens is that I get a character in my head, and then that character has a lot of conversations with other characters.  They're interesting people, and I enjoy listening to their conversations with each other.  There's drama, there's conflict, there's something to listen to in my head while I ice my knee at physical therapy because ESPN just doesn't do it for me.

The problem is that it's a bit like watching an episode of Seinfeld.  There are lots of amusing vignettes, but no plots.  So I spend weeks or months getting to know my characters and trying to convince them that they have to do something more than just sit around and talk.

When I'm doing NaNoWriMo, it is a whole different situation.  I don't have time to get to know my characters and politely suggest that they do something with their lives.  I have to come up with 50,000 words RIGHT NOW, so they have to get their butts moving.  That's why this last year my fairly normal teenage girl had been stabbed, traveled to another planet, been kidnapped by ninja pirates (thanks, Meagan!), survived a bombing attack, been drowned in acid that turned her into a superhero, stole a spaceship, and saved the planet by the time I'd come up with 50,000 words.  That is desperation, people.  Jacob loved it.

Lacking the NaNoWriMo desperation, so far my main character has complained about her boss, argued with her boss, and flirted with a client.  Amusing, but none of this is going to get us anywhere.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to bring ninja pirates into it, and I'm just not sure what that has to do with public accounting.

There might be a good reason why I tend to add paranormal elements to my fiction.  What do you think?  A mind-reading CPA?