Letter from Camp! (Camp NaNoWriMo)

So, I am deep in the midst of every writer’s favorite July activity, Camp NaNoWriMo! Okay, perhaps not every writer’s favorite July activity. I can’t even say it’s my favorite July activity, as it is the first time I have participated in it. I have done NaNoWriMo twice and won once—though the time I didn’t win, I was so close. I loved-hated both times, as it was a lot of work, and to be honest, the quality was sub-par. However, that is what revision is for! Camp NaNoWriMo is a little less stressful.

One of the nice things about Camp NaNoWriMo is that you can set your own word count, and you can even choose to edit instead of write (where you monitor time spent and convert that to words at the proposed rate of 1,000 words per hour). I chose to work on revising my novel Charybda, part of which I wrote during NaNoWriMo. Funnily, I had the bulk of the book written and used NaNo as a push to write the last part of the book. The unrevised manuscript of Charybda, in need of repairs and continuity fixes from start to finish, sat on my hard drive patiently waiting for me to finally get around to revising it. It wasn’t until the beginning of this year that I got off my behind (or put my behind in the writer’s chair, as it were) and started to work on it in earnest.

It has been a difficult road for me. I envy the writers who write quickly and require little revision on their drafts. I will never be one of those writers. I’m meticulous, which is good, but self-critical, which is not. It takes me a little time anyway, but I have occasional bouts of depression that bring all of it to a grinding halt. However, I am pleased to report that since the beginning of the year, I have made my way through thirteen or so chapters of the novel!

Camp NaNoWriMo was a fun way to motivate myself to work on my revising even more. I decided that, for me at least, 500 words per hour was a better conversion rate for time spent editing. Then, I set myself a goal of 10,000 words—which, by the by, is the minimum goal—equaling 20 hours of revision time. It sounded doable, and like a goal I might even surpass with a little dedication.

Another benefit of Camp NaNoWriMo is that it helped me realize something about revising. Revising, or content editing, if you will, is difficult to quantify. When you write, you have this nice concrete word count as your measurement. When it comes to revising, all you can measure is the time you spend working. Prior to Camp NaNo, I was setting goals based on the amount of the manuscript I got through—x number of chapters. However, each chapter is different. There was one chapter that took me two hours to ‘fix.’ There was another that took me two weeks. You see the inevitable problem.

I had been resisting the idea of measuring my revision in time, because there are times where it takes me an hour just to make a single change. That can be very depressing. How can one change really count for anything? I would be really hard on myself for things like this. Nevertheless, you have to quantify the work somehow, and it turns out that a time goal is a lot more manageable than a ‘distance’ goal. If not for Camp NaNo, I might not have ever realized this.

Even better, setting a time goal helps me work more efficiently. With the distance goal, I would get distracted and take a long time, so discouraged by how far away the endpoint was that I would give up. With the time goal, I find that the first 20 minutes or so are the most difficult, but once I’m past that, I get sucked into what I’m doing and work much harder than I would have otherwise.

I feel like I finally stumbled onto the answer for which I have been searching for some time now. There is always an abundance of advice on how to stay motivated while writing, but their is little said about the revision process. “Just keep writing—don’t worry if it stinks, you can fix that later.” There is a lot of silence when that later finally arrives. (Maybe there is a lot of advice out there, but I never seem to find it.) The answer for the “fixing it later” is to set small, manageable, quantifiable goals rather than looking at the big messy manuscript as a whole. Perhaps this should be obvious—the adage of eating an elephant one bite at a time has been around forever. For me, the problem was the quantifying of the goals. Now, I have finally settled into this system which works, and allows me to define the amount of work I’m actually doing. It allows me feel good about myself even when a single change takes an hour—because I have spent that entire hour working diligently to determine which change should be made. It gives me time to read the manuscript and make a plan for the next phase, while still feeling good because even if I make no changes, I have set myself up for success. I still get to count that hour as an achievement.

Another thing that has aided me in the revision process is giving myself rewards for achieving goals. At the end of every month, I give myself a prize if I meet my goal. Not just any prize, like going out for ice cream or something. No, this is a prize I’ll work my butt off in order to get. That’s right..a new My Little Pony! I bought a lot of ponies off of eBay, which are sitting in a box waiting for me to free them by achieving my goals. I only get one pony as a prize, though, so there are enough to keep me motivated for the next year or so.  It has worked well so far—there was one month where I did most of the work in the last week because I was so desperate to get that pony. (I don’t know if that’s pathetic or not, but I don’t care.) Now that I have a better system worked out, thanks to Camp NaNo, I’ll be well on my way to successfully earning ponies at the agonizingly slow rate of 1 pony per month. Even if the prize winning process is slow, the revising process has sped up, which is a prize all its own.

One more thing of note is that I have changed my terminology when referring to what I am doing to my manuscript. I had been calling it editing, which is not completely inaccurate. I am, after all, content editing. But since editing can also refer to line editing—going through line by line and fixing grammatical and stylistic errors, my subconscious was confused about what I was really doing. I would feel bad that I wasn’t at the final stage of perfecting the work. Now that I have changed to the term revising, I feel that it is a more accurate reflection of what I am doing. It also takes off the subconscious pressure that comes with the word ‘editing.’

It has been an enlightening summer, to be sure, and I feel that the rest of my year will be filled with even more successes.

What helps you out with revising your writing?

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...and I Feel Fine

"Apocalypse" courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Well, NaNoWriMo is over, and I came in with 43,039 words.  

In other words, I didn't make it to my goal of 50,000.  In the end, I chose not to do the final push. At the beginning of November, imagining this scenario would have caused me to react like it was the impending apocalypse.

However, I had my reasons for throwing in the towel.  It had gotten to the point where my writing had deteriorated.  I was just putting words on the page to be on the page. My characters were offering snarky commentary on the plot, had lapsed into modern vernacular, and nearly every word that I wrote offered nothing to contribute to the story.

I had reached maximum creative capacity.

I think that it is important for a creative artist to recognize one's limitations. For me, I certainly could have finished it out, but I knew that at this point, I wouldn't be able to get back into the creative groove.

I didn't want to have words on the paper that added absolutely no value whatsoever.  Up until the end, what I had been writing was of questionable quality, but was definitely of value to the story. It was in fact editable.  What I had started writing toward the end?  Not so much.  It was editable in the sense that I could highlight it and delete it. In my mind, that's not worth putting down in the first place.

Nevertheless, I did succeed in writing out the plot of my story, covering all the points on my outline (though the last part was not very detail heavy). Of my 43,039 words, I have about 42,000 that are editable and rewritable.

At the end of October, I had none.  That's a pretty incredible accomplishment.  A week ago, the thought of not finishing was really depressing.  I basically felt like not finishing was the end of the world as we know it.

But I didn't finish.  And I feel fine.  In fact, I feel great. I'm proud of myself.  I learned a lot of lessons about my writing life that I think will really aid me in the future.  I will be able to apply them on a much smaller, less extreme scale.

Did you participate in NaNo? Did you reach your goal?  If you didn't, did you still get something valuable out of it, and why or why not? Also, 10 points to anyone who gets the "and I feel fine" reference.  Share your thoughts in the comments.

Just Write

Image courtesy of Graur Codrin at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Ugh.

Dear readers, I realize did not post yesterday or last Friday, and I apologize for that.  I have been under a huge amount of stress, which NaNo has compounded. I've been struggling to keep up with the word count--as of this moment I am only at 28,274 by the Microsoft Word word count algorithm, which has been consistently lower than the NaNo word count algorithm. Par for today is 30,000.

So, I'm not drowning, but I'm swallowing a lot more water than I'd like to be.

I honestly wish I had some good, elegant writing advice today, because I need it.  The reset button I blogged about last week has become more like a snooze button on my alarm clock--I guess you can overdo anything.

But I do have some brutal, unappealing advice:

Write!

You can preface or follow that with an expletive if you are so inclined. The expletive helps if you're really angry or frustrated.  Technically, expletives don't have to be vulgar words, so go ahead even if you're not the swearing type.  An expletive is just something you say instead of something else; e.g., screaming "BLANK!" when you've stubbed your toe, instead of saying, "Ow. I have injured my toe and am in considerable pain." That's right. "Darn," "heck," "phooey," "shoot," "son of a biscuit," and other variations thereof are still expletives.

My preference throughout this has been "Write; just flipping write."

Regardless how you phrase it, it's times like these you just push through, like that time you had an essay that was due the next day at school and you started the night before.  You manage to get it done, because not finishing it is not an option.

Adopting this attitude can be good even when you are not doing NaNo--you have to be flipping determined that your work will be finished.  It won't be finished if you don't keep working on it.  So even if all you do is sit down and write one sentence, you have written.

Writing is what matters.

One sentence a day might take you a while to finish your book, but what if it was one sentence every waking hour?  That's approximately sixteen sentences, right?  This sentence right here is the twenty-sixth sentence in this blog post (if I counted right, and you count sentence fragments as sentences, too).

In two days, you would have a respectable amount of writing--and certainly more than you would have before.  If my counting is accurate, this whole blog post (excluding the invitation to subscribe at the bottom) is 36 sentences.  At a rate of one sentence per waking hour, this would have taken me two days. Imagine what that would amount to over the course of a year.  Writing is always one sentence at a time--so just focus on finishing that one sentence.  Finish one more.  But only focus on the one at a time, or you'll drive yourself batty.

Just write.

Even if you swallow a lot of water on the way, all that matters is that you get to the other side of the swimming pool.

Share any thoughts in the comments. 

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Blinking Cursor Syndrome

Making your workspace fun helps when you feel stuck.

Well, I'm at 11,390 words for NaNo as of Thursday evening!

Yesterday was a very rough day for me, inspiration-wise.  I had a very bad case of blinking cursor syndrome. It's very similar to blank page syndrome, except that it's far more annoying.  With the blank page, you feel at least some sense of being justified with your mental freeze.  There's a huge, blank space, and that can be kind of intimidating.

Blinking cursor, on the other hand, is worse in that it seems to be mocking you. "Ha ha! You've written all of this and now you're stuck! Loser!" Each additional blink seems to be another cry of "Loser!" from the impudent cursor.

In the past, I've allowed this to conquer me.  But today, I had a word count to meet, darn it.  So you know what I did?

I made my work space as fun as I could. I turned on my favorite tunes with a good, solid beat.  I lined up a few of my miniature My Little Ponies on my laptop. 

Then, I shut my eyes and just started typing.

It was amazing how once I didn't see the cursor anymore, once I didn't have the challenge staring me in the face, that the words finally started flowing.  Now, I made all kinds of typos, but that is easily fixable.

When I finally opened my eyes, I had fun My Little Ponies to look at, and the awesome beat of my favorite music just kind of kept the fun going.

Suddenly, I was just on a roll and kept going until it was done.

So yeah...just some random thoughts from me.

What helps you with blank page, blinking cursor, and other related syndromes? Share your thoughts in the comments. 

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Totally Random Tuesdays: NaNo Update!

All right, y'all.  I haven't gotten started on today's word count, but I am up to 6,304 words as of yesterday evening.  Of course, if you follow me on twitter (@ALSVossler), you already know this. I nearly up until midnight working on it. I pushed myself yesterday more to finish a scene in my outline than I did to get to my word count goal (which I exceeded by nearly 800 words).  Now I have only two more scenes in this 'act' of the novel, one of which should be relatively short.  I say should because my writing always seems to get away from me and ends up being way longer.

All in all, I am pleased with myself.  Of course, an auspicious beginning does not necessarily mean a fortunate ending, so hopefully I don't lose my momentum.

Happy writing to all those who write--even if you're not doing NaNo!
 

Out of Order

I'm writing like a woman possessed; my cat Phoebe is trying to possess my coffee.

My first NaNoWriMo weekend has been an eye opener for me. I always knew I could crank out a lot of words. When I first embarked on this story arc, I wrote at least a thousand words a day in a fury of inspiration.  It was as I progressed that things really slowed down.  I would get bogged down, still having ideas for what was ahead, but because I didn't know how to get from point A to point J, writing would come to a standstill for months.

So, after the slow-going process of the last several months, it was pretty exhilarating to crank out all the words that I did between Saturday and Sunday: 3,507 words! Whooohooo!  My arm is actually sore from patting myself on the back.

However, NaNoWriMo has kind of opened a new horizon for me as writer.  I decided to try something that I haven't really done before: write a part of the story out of sequence.

[dramatic music plays]

For some writers, this is not exactly a big deal.  But even though I've always been a very spontaneous "Meh, doesn't really matter whether things happen systematically or not" kind of person, for some reason I have this hang-up about writing the story out of sequence.  I don't even do outlines, usually. In fact, I really hate outlines. There have been times in the past where I would jump forward and write, well, maybe a snippet scene or just a brief sketch of a scene so I won't forget it, but I actually refused to develop the scene further until I actually got there in the storyline.

Oh, I'd have flashbacks and flashforwards, but only if they were specifically part of THE PLAN.  Yes, even without an outline, my stories have to written in a certain order.  Certainly, spontaneity is allowed and even hoped for, but only if it's spontaneous at the right time.

But, to kick off my NaNoWriMo novel, I did the unthinkable.

I started writing the end first.

[A woman screams in the background.]

All of this, and I wrote an outline for this novel.

So why the change of heart?  Well, I realized that I was going to have to pound out as many words on the keyboard as humanly possible in 30 days.  Without an outline, I figured I'd get lost and wander around like a stray homing pigeon whose homing abilities have somehow been removed (I should get 100 points for writing the worst simile ever). I need to stay focused.  And honestly? I've had the ending for this in mind, like, ever since I got the idea for this story (well over three years ago).  I'd never written it, because, you know, it would be out of sequence.  But, I figured that this would be something I would be able to write very quickly, since I've been scheming and plotting (hah) it for years.

So, I wrote a scene out of sequence.  And the world actually kept spinning.

I now realize this is something I should have tried a really long time ago. It has been awesome, and it's even helping me plan the things that are going to come prior to this scene.  If things need to change, then I can make a note of it and then change the ending scene.  Not a problem.

It has been so freeing.  So, if you're trapped in the must-be-in-sequence mindset, and find that you can't seem to get any writing done because of it, try jumping ahead to a scene you already have and really want to write. Obviously, you'll insert it into the story in it's proper place, but try writing it now instead of waiting until "you get there." I had been given this advice before and refused it out of hand.  But now, I see that this advice is really good.  At least give it a try once.  Even if you don't like it, the world won't stop spinning!

Do you have any hangups about writing things in order?  How willing do you think you would be to try writing scenes non-sequentially? Share any thoughts or questions in the comments. 

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Because of NaNo, posting might be erratic during November.  If you don't want to check back every single Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday just to see if I've posted, use the form in the sidebar to subscribe. You'll get any updates from me sent straight to your email inbox!