Sam

Finish well.

That command doesn’t mean what you think it does.

We might all agree we spend a lot of times beating ourselves up for not getting things done perfectly.  How terrible!

Let’s be honest, if we talked to other people the way we talked to ourselves we’d be in jail.

I think you need to give yourself credit for doing something.  Anything.

Let’s say you didn’t finish the words; did you write any words?  Did you write 1000 words?  Did you write 10?  Did this make you realize that you need to create margin in your life to become a writer?

There are more wins here than just one!   I’m not going to say anything prescriptive here, but I’m going to try to encourage you.

1) You tried something most people will never try.  Google the statistics of people that want to write a book but don’t try.  It’s shattering.  I’d rather try something and fail miserably than sit and wonder what it would be like to try.

2) You value words and their power.  You don’t take words for granted and you don’t take the creative process for granted.  You want your words to matter.  And they do.

3) You know that it’s work.  Yes, it’s work.  It’s not as romantic as it’s portrayed in movies.  You have that knowledge now and others may not.  This is huge.  This enables you to read with deeper appreciation for the process of writing as well as the magic of it.

Don’t be discouraged for any reason.  This is just the beginning.  Don’t let your dream be put on hold any longer.  Keep writing and do it for you.

This is the final Video About a Book for NaNoWriMo.  You definitely want to check this one out.

 

 

Click below to purchase.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I don’t know what Point of View your story is written in, but here’s something to try if you’re stuck.

I mixed my POV’s up.  This is not uncommon at all and many writers do it, but I found it so liberating when writing.  It forced me to think about what the other characters are experiencing and it gave me a chance to feel the motives.  Here are some guidelines.

1) Process action through the judgment of that character’s eyes.  It was easier for me to write a scene thinking about how a character would feel about it (scared, excited, guilty, etc.).

2) Reveal certain unknown motivations through the character’s inner dialogue.  I love this so much because it creates an eager want for the reader.  The character knows something that no one knows and they’re conflicted about it.  The only ones that know are the reader and that character – but no one knows the full extent of it.

3) Conflict conflict conflict!  Having the story go from different POV’s really helps to add conflict. This person feels this way against this person.  This person is upset what another character did.  Fill in your conflict here, but just know I went from a well of conflict to an ocean of it when I started experimenting with POV’s.

Hope this helps!  Keep writing and thinking what your characters are thinking!

When I finished the actual 50,000-word, I expected something to happen.

And it didn’t.

I wanted to see fireworks.

I thought it would be this unbelievable feeling.

I thought I would be elated, like I was walking on air; but I looked that that word count and thought boy this story has so much longer to go.

Keep this in mind in the final week.

1) You’re not producing a final draft, you’re producing a first draft.  Just write like a madman/madwoman and forget all else.  Don’t worry about being done, just worry about writing.

2) You may not be finished when you’re done.  I know I’ve said this throughout, but I feel like the most important benefit of NaNoWriMo isn’t the finished manuscript; it’s the writing habit you’ve established in a month of novel-writing.

The best gift you get from NaNoWriMo is the gift of a different YOU.

3)  Don’t be afraid to take time to jot down new ideas.  Personally, I wouldn’t work on any new ideas until this one is finished, but I did get a slew of new concepts for novels, short stories and nonfiction while I was coming to the end here.

Now that I’ve been writing at least 1700 words for the last month, I know that I can make those projects a reality.   I know that I’ve done it for the joy of it, and Stephen King says in the final line of On Writing, if you can do it for the joy, you can do ti forever.

I don’t know what this will be on December 1, but I know the person that started writing every day for writing’s sake isn’t the same person as he was on October 31.  Keep writing and you’ll change.  You’ve always been a writer, but now you’re formalizing it.

Again, in the spirit of keeping writing no matter what’s going on as we approach our final week of NaNoWriMo, I want to talk to you about keeping it moving.

One of the problems I had (even this morning as I wrote) throughout this process were days that I sat in front of the screen and wrote words that felt awful to write.  I mean, they felt terrible.  As though I was trying to write in a foreign language, upside down, while listening to another language being taught to me.  But I still kept typing to my goal.

I’m going to take a quote from Joanna Penn on this one.

“When you’re reading your work, the words will all look the same whether you were feeling bad when you wrote them or good.”

Yes, that’s a great idea, isn’t it?  You’re not going to know how you felt (for the most part) when you wrote the scene.  You’re just going to have the words.  And no matter what, upon re-write, you have to reshape them.  No one that reads your final draft is going to know how you felt when you wrote them either.

So here are some ways to keep moving when you don’t feel like it.

1) Be moved by the emotion of the fact that you’ve established a daily writing habit, over a beautiful masterpiece that was enjoyable to write.  Now, this idea is eclipsed by the joy of writing that awesome scene, sometimes.  But you can’t depend on that emotional high every time you sit down in front of a blank page.

2) As a professional, there are days when you don’t feel like doing what you do, though you still love being a professional.  Think of writing a little more like a business and less like sitting in a field of flowers allowing creativity to roll across your free-spirited soul.  Yeah, that picture seems invigorating, but it’s unrealistic.  This is work.  Art is work.  Creativity is work.  And I’ve learned what doesn’t cost you, doesn’t change you.

3) Make the word count be your goal, because it’s emotionless and measurable.  You have to use hard data when you are measuring your success.  Make those words being on the page your data, not the feeling you get putting them there.

That’s all for today!  Keep writing.  Tomorrow we head into the final stretch!

There is an older movie starring Al Pacino called Scent of a Woman.  Pacino plays a bitter veteran who hires an impressionable and anxious young man to accompany him through the streets of NYC for Thanksgiving weekend.

One of the best scenes takes place when Al Pacino asks a young lady to tango with him in a fancy restaurant.  She confesses to him that she does not know how, and he says an amazing line leading to an even more spectacular choreographed dance sequence.

“If you make a mistake and get all tangled up, just tango on.”

Watch the whole dance sequence here.

Like me, you’ve probably got tangled up in your plot at some point.  And like me, there was a tendency to feel that I can’t continue on.  But just like Al Pacino said, “There are no mistakes in the tango.”

If you get tangled up, just tango on.  Here’s how:

1) Don’t let plot inconsistency keep you from writing.  If I overthink it, I become paralyzed and stop writing.  This is distracting and can derail us.  Truth be told, there are probably holes in the story line big enough for the foundation of a house.  But that’s why God invented editing!

2) Don’t let the science of a situation make you get a PhD on Google.  This one has been the MOST tempting for me.  I don’t know about weather conditions, types of drugs, or anatomical facts about the human body.  Google is a couple clicks away, begging me to go down a research rabbit hole.  Again, I can leave a blank space and make a note and come back after I get the plot laid on the pages.  But I am not stopping the flow of the story for the facts of the science.

3) Don’t let the stop sign in a scene become the stop sign of your writing.  There are scenes that I haven’t been able to tidy up yet.  So, as I was writing I felt like I was losing the scene, I did something unconventional.

I just jumped into a different scene.

Almost all the times I left a scene to write another, working on that alternate scene gave me the idea of what to do with that loose end in the original scene.  This just happened to me this morning and I had a huge break through.

The bottom line: Tango ON!  Don’t get tangled up, or I should say, don’t STAY tangled up.  Get that clay on the page and you can form it into the Statue of David on the rewrite.

It’s hard putting the words down when you don’t know where you’re going.  It’s hard if you’re not in the habit (like I’m not).

It’s harder still when you lose yourself among the trees of creativity when you lost sight of your forest called “why.”

This is the buzzword of today’s culture.  Why.

Why are you doing this?  Seriously?  What caused you to want to write 50,000 words in 30 days?

Can I share three things that I’ve done that kept my lazy butt in that chair over the last 21 days?  Here they are:

1) I compared the feeling that I had at the moment to “skip writing” to the potential feeling I would have of having “given up” on the novel.  I think that motivated me a lot.  I thought, “is getting up an hour or two later going to feel good on December 1 when I’ve spent another month of my life not being a novelist?”

That’s a pretty strong why for me.  I’ve locked my inner novelist up for all my life.  I’ve come to find it better to let him out, because he is me.  I can’t separate myself from what I was created to be.

2) I really put emphasis in the process of writing over the product.  I know that I’m going to try to get this book published.  I know that it’s going to be a whole other thing.  However, I’ve grown to love and desire that sacred time where my fingers become the conduit of the words that make worlds.  I can’t quite describe it.  And I know it’s not for everyone.  But I know I’ve never experienced anything like it.  Do you enjoy getting lost in that “hole in the paper?”  Do you enjoy creating worlds?  Focus on that when it hurts.

3) I thought about the first time I read a story and realized I wanted to write it.  It happened in 4^th grade and I always had that desire, even to this day.  When did that happen for you?  When did you realize you could write?  When did you realize that you took a great joy out of reading a book on the beach than swimming in the ocean?  Think about this and meditate on the idea that you get to create that experience for someone else.

But don’t stop.  If you’re only 500 words in on Day 21, that’s okay.  Remember, there is power in those words.  Keep writing.

Keeping it moving – Part 1: Borrow Conflict

The next several days  going to deal with some techniques on how to keep it moving.

Are you feeling that?  The dragging feeling?  That’s what I felt when there was a lot of people in my story but not as much going on.  Then I remember reading something from a Writer’s Digest article.

Conflict drives a story.

I looked at all the characters in my world and thought for a brief moment about their motivations.  I discovered something.  Every motivation, if examined individually, gave way to the character having his/her own agenda – and that agenda didn’t line up with the plan of the protagonist.

So here is how I kept the story moving:

1) I borrowed conflict from other characters.  It’s not just the hero fighting certain opponents.  It’s conflict from other characters within their own lives that keeps the story moving as well.

2) I borrowed conflict from the setting.  I like the idea that the setting that I have provides constant conflict for the character in my world.  It allows me to explore how the characters react to situations beyond the antagonist.

3) I borrowed conflict from within.  I love seeing how the people in my world fight themselves.  This conflict they produce when in a room alone is sometimes more captivating than the primal storyline against the antagonist.

Conflict is important.  As a reader, I long for that.  As a writer, I long to observe it and bring it to the surface.

Keep it moving with conflict!  Keep writing.