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7 Things I Learned from National Novel Writing Month

November is only a month away, and that means another National Novel Writing Month. For anyone who might not be familiar, Nanowrimo is a yearly online event where amateur and professional writers try to bang out a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, in between carping on the Nanowrimo forums about how they shouldn’t have taken on the unreasonable task of banging out a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. The point of the exercise is to free yourself from the constraints of your “inner editor” and embracing the joys of the berserk and uneven first draft. A lot of beginning authors struggle with trying to be perfect the first time. Nanowrimo combats that with a big word count requirement, an inconvenient deadline, and hordes of other poor saps doing the same thing.

I’ve been participating in Nanowrimo since 2004, and have had a love / hate relationship with it since day one. I briefly earned my bragging rights in 2007 when I landed an interview with Nano for writing 10,000 words in a day, and even got a photo of my smug self on the front page. In the years since then, the “10,000 word day” has become dirt-common, and now people are on to writing 20,000 words in a day while dressed in a chicken suit typing on an Apple II in the middle of Times Square at midnight. On mushrooms. The bar for getting noticed on Nanowrimo has risen somewhat.

Since I’ve been at it for long enough that I consider myself a salty old Nanowrimo veteran, I now have my process down to a science:

  1. Swear that this year I won’t be doing Nanowrimo this year because I have no use for it
  2. Do it anyway
  3. When my friends ask me why I’m doing it again, swear devoutly this will be the last time
  4. Quote Godfather III (“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”), goto 1

The truth is, I participate every year because it’s a lot of fun. There’s something exhilirating about a deadline that doesn’t involve paying the rent or a pissed-off client. It’s nice to shrug off responsibility and just write like a maniac for a few weeks. But beyond the heady rush of plowing through a dreadful first-draft novella in a month, there are actually a few valuable lessons to be learned from Nanowrimo.

1. This is your big chance not to care.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Seth Godin: “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” A lot of writers I know will do anything they can to keep from actually finishing a project. They write a paragraph, then go back and edit. They write a sentence, then go back and edit. They write one word and down Jagermeister until they wake up in a dumpster not knowing their name. They agonize over insignificant plot points. I know one damned soul who’s been typing his character names into Google for the last ten years, making sure that his super-original names aren’t duplicated anywhere on the internet. It’s appallingly easy to dwell in this hapless creative purgatory forever, slouching toward perfection and never getting any closer.

Nanowrimo can help you Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Writing Crap. If you’re going to make the deadline, you won’t have time to fart around. This is your chance to pump yourself up with a do-or-die attitude and learn just how useless a first draft really is.

Granted, this isn’t exactly a spectacular lesson, since it amounts to “I learned from Nanowrimo the basic premise of Nanowrimo,” but still, it bears mentioning. Moving on.

2. Good novels need planning. This is no time to plan.

This is a bit of a sweeping generalization, so I’ll amend it to say that my novels need planning. Some people, apparently, can just bang out a draft that has a strong opening, a clear plot, a taut second act, and a finale that brings together every element into a satisfying payoff. In six years, I’ve never come within spitting distance of doing that, and I suspect these people are some kind of genetic supermen, or possibly reptoids from the planet Smartron V.

Quality takes time, preparation, and hard work. Nanowrimo is more about gleefully building a mountain of chaff and separating the wheat out later on.

3. You’re capable of great things.

One of the big roadblocks so many writers run into is the lack of time. Jobs, kids, social lives, dentist appointments, fatigue, and let’s face it, Top Gear is hardly going to watch itself. Nanowrimo is an opportunity to put aside as many responsibilities as you can, stay up too late, drink too much coffee, and write more than you’ve ever written before. Write dialogue that makes you laugh out loud! Close nagging plot holes at two in the morning by the sallow light of your Macbook! Brag on your word count like it means something! Out of nowhere, add zombies to your novel in the second act, just because you can! Ignore the bleating taunts of your unsupportive peers and family members! Take on something unreasonable and impulsive and by God, finish it. Feel good? Yeah, you know it does.

4. Excuses are eternal.

Every year I participate in Nanowrimo, I see a lot of people give up, both strangers on the forums and people I know personally. The number one excuse is always the same: November is too busy. It’s the holidays. Thanksgiving is coming up. Family is visiting. I’ve got this killer hangnail.

I’m not saying that people don’t have time obligations, or that the holidays aren’t frantic. Our lives are busy. I get that. But here’s something I’ve seen probably a dozen times: the guy or gal who complains about how inconvenient November in particular is, and announces their intention to write their one-month novel in January. Or May, or June, or whenever. Then, by the time Mythical January finally rolls around, they’ve forgotten all about it. “I want to do this, but November is too busy” has become code for “I never really intended to start in the first place.”

Waiting for the perfect time to write — some magical time of the year when you don’t have a job, a life, and other things to do — will just leave you waiting forever. If you’re going to commit to writing, then why not make a commitment at the worst possible time? Think of how easy the rest of the year will seem by comparison.

5. You’re still on your own.

This is the tough one. One of the big selling points of Nanowrimo is that you’ll be working alongside thousands of other people, all struggling along to make their Great American Writing Dream come true. While this sounds appealing in theory, in reality Nanowrimo is highly unlikely to abrogate the built-in loneliness of the writing process.

For example: a couple of years ago, I announced my intention to give Livejournal another shot, and asked some of my aspiring writer friends to participate with me. Four agreed to participate. Of those, three signed up. Of those, zero updated their word count. Although one announced he was waiting until January and wrote his book then — oh wait, no he didn’t.

I say this without rancor, because it’s extremely common. You have to be in this for yourself. You can get a little support from the forums and the ambient feeling of community that comes with knowing other people are struggling along with you — but it’s a largely useless feeling, like the vague nausea that informs you not to buy sushi off the deli counter at the supermarket. You’re still going to be by yourself, plugging away at the words on the page, frustrated and isolated and wrestling with doubt, because that’s what writing is. Nanowrimo is no antidote, and reaching out to your buddies may end up just another source of frustration.

That said, I’ve been very fortunate to have supportive people cheering me on during Nanowrimo — but those people generally weren’t writers, and they sure as hell weren’t Nano participants. The people who said they’d participate and then didn’t basically vanished for the duration. Because that’s what you do. Tilt your ear to listen for your “writing buddies” and there is only the howling wind of guilt, shame, and sixty hours of Rock Band 3.

So, just don’t worry about it. You’re on your own, and that’s okay, because that’s the way it’s got to be.

6. Your novel might be finished, but you’re not.

A few years back, while I was browsing the Nano forums and basking in the sublime, worthless glow of my own purple bar (the icon you get when you cross 50K), I saw one author breathlessly anticipating the dump trucks of cash they’d now be raking in from their finished first draft. This demigod of writing had banged out a whopping 150,000 words in a month. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair! Only when you actually looked upon his works, ye mighty, it was twenty-six chapters of people eating dinner, with agonizing paragraphs devoted to every meager forkful. No one responded to his post, either because no one had the heart to tell the poor clod how publishing really works on planet Earth, or they just assumed it was sarcasm.

Don’t get me wrong. Successfully thrashing out a novella in thirty days is awesome, and can be a lot of fun. But it isn’t an end. It’s a beginning. If you think your first draft is worthy of publication, there are two primary possibilities at work: you’re some kind of Martian super-genius, or you’re living in deep denial. Most likely, you have a lot of editing ahead, in which you will learn just how frustrating and useless a first draft can really be.

But that’s a December problem, really. Nanowrimo is all about running across a sun-dappled dewy meadow into the loving arms of your crapulent first pass. Enjoy it. Burn in the fire of your love. You’ll be filing for trial separation soon enough.

7. Nanowrimo is only useful for so long.

This is another broad generalization, so again, I will just append “for me.” Some writers might participate in Nanowrimo every year and learn something new and amazing every time. I’m not one of those people. For me, the primary lesson of Nanowrimo — that you can, in fact, finish a draft — holds value the first time. After that, it’s redundant. That’s not to say that Nanowrimo still isn’t fun — it can be a complete blast. But it really is only the first step on the terrifying, winding stair that leads up to actually finishing a book.

Some people will tell you that Nanowrimo isn’t even useful the first time, and that you not only needn’t bother, but shouldn’t. Laura Miller got lots of pageviews around this time last year by declaring that the world doesn’t need more novels or novelists. I’d argue that the world doesn’t need more trollish pop-culture pundits, either, and yet they keep showing up. But screeds like Miller’s actually do serve a valuable purpose: this is exactly the sort of dismissive attitude you have to learn to shrug off.

So if you are doing Nanowrimo this year, I wish you the best of luck. Go nuts. Write crap. Have a good time. We can even be writing buddies if you like. Just don’t talk to me about January.

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Half-Witted, Stuck-Up, Scruffy-Looking Book Hoarder

TwistAPlotSome people’s reading histories have formidable pedigrees. For example, I have a close friend whose favorite book of all time is Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Another speaks highly of Stephen Jay Gould. Dig through my literary history, and you’ll find nuggets of Melville and Dostoevsky buried under broad strata of Dragonlance.

My earliest reading memories from grade school are dominated by Big Little Books, a squalid literary form rightfully lampooned by James Lileks as a “joyless synthesis” of books and comics. I owned both the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four titles in the Big Little Book series, and re-read both many times. Humorously, the Spider-Man edition I owned had a printing error in which two chapters of the book repeated themselves verbatim, which my young self took as some kind of intentional time-warp that I accepted as canon.

After that came the seminal Choose Your Own Adventure books, and their ill-fated and disreputable cousins, TwistAPlot. Golden Sword of Dragonwalk was my favorite, even though its narrative payoff in both swords and dragons turned out to be woefully lacking. My second favorite was Time Raider, which I only recently learned was written by the God Emperor of Goosebumps himself, R.L. Stine. Time Raider’s central conceit, as I recall, was a time machine that had a lever that read PAST and FUTURE and buttons with increments of tens, hundreds or thousands of years in either direction. Talk about user friendly. I distinctly remember writing the page numbers of these time increments on the back cover, so I could relive the thrill of the same brief story arcs over and over again. Like a lot of kids, I had a really high tolerance for reptition.

As adolescence approached, my reading tastes emerged into the ghetto of movie novelizations, leavened with the occasional sci-fi classic like Dune or the Foundation trilogy. I’d love to tell you that I’ve read Lord of the Rings a dozen times, but I haven’t. Mostly, I read the parts about Gollum and skimmed the vast swaths of history and geographical detail until finally getting serious about it circa 2002. On the other hand, I probably read Dragonlance Legends a dozen times in my eighth-grade year alone (a series I abandoned without remorse when Raistlin Majere’s kid came galumphing along like a spell-slinging Cousin Oliver). But I probably read the novelization to Terminator more than either of those works, because the author went into fetishistic detail about the guns involved and there was an amazing scene where Reese shared a slice of stolen pizza with a stray dog. Oh my god, you guys.

In my defense, there was a reason I read so many movie novelizations. I grew up in a time when cable was mostly a wasteland of crappy B-movies, punctuated with the occasional major motion picture. I once saw a stand-up comic joke about cable in the early Eighties being “Krull and Beastmaster five hundred times apiece,” but that’s not actually a joke. That’s how it really was. My parents didn’t own a VCR until probably 1993, and as a lazy kid with a small allowance and an undying thirst for Star Wars figures, I didn’t have the disposable income to see a lot of movies in the theater. So, to relive my favorite cinema experiences over and over again, I re-read the Star Wars novels like a junkie, little suspecting that there would come a time when there would be such an unholy glut of Star Wars in the popular culture that I’d lose interest in absorbing it. But I digress. The point is, my dog-eared, much-abused copy of the Star Wars novelization, ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, was probably my favorite book in the world for several years following 1977.

High school brought an obsession with the blue-collar horror sensibilities of Stephen King, still the most influential author in my personal lexicon. I used to lug the unwieldy hardback of It to class with me and read it during study hall, to the revulsion of my classmates, who couldn’t believe I would read such a gargantuan doorstop on purpose. (This brings to mind an anecdote from a close friend who, while sitting in a small-town diner reading a paperback, was approached by some patrons whom she thought asked “what are you reading?” What they’d actually asked was “what are you reading for?” Good times.) People often seem surprised when I tell them I nearly flunked out of high school. It wasn’t because I wasn’t bright enough; I was just far more interested in the antics of Pennywise the Clown than my actual studies. This persisted well into college, where I picked up The Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick on top of the books I was already reading for my classes; at that point, even my professors treated me as if I’d lost my mind.

Still, despite years of relatively voracious reading, I have huge gaps in what are generally considered the genre classics. I never got any further into Herbert’s work than Children of Dune, for example, nor have I ever finished Asimov’s Robot series. I could rarely do more than skim Arthur C. Clarke’s work, as hard sci-fi makes my eyes glaze over almost instantly. I’ve read exactly one Heinlein novel in its entirety (Stranger in a Strange Land), and didn’t get much out of it beyond a B+ book report. Even though I speak very highly of Ray Bradbury’s work on the craft of writing, I’ve never successfully made it through the Martian Chronicles (although I did watch the TV miniseries, and I’m genuinely sorry about that).

I never cared for Narnia. I couldn’t stomach Harry Potter. I recently gave up on George Martin’s magnum opus because I realized that after five books in fifteen years, I just don’t care anymore. (Having the outrageous cheek to criticize Martin probably deserves its own blog post at some point.) I’ve never read the original Grimm’s fairy tales. I have, however, read the Sword of Shannara series. Probably two or three times. I liked the original Hitchhiker’s Guide, but found the third volume in the series kind of flat and pointless. And so on. My favorite authors tend to be slightly more out of the way: James Morrow, A.A. Attanasio, Glen Cook, Matthew Stover, Robert Sheckley, Robert Anton Wilson (whom I recently found out a lot of nerds seem to despise, which I find dismaying).

Splinter of the Mind's EyeSure, these are just my personal tastes, but sometimes they feel like a thousand tiny heresies eroding whatever eventual credibility I might have as a writer, or even a reader. A lot of my favorite authors tend to be obscure, but it’s not even dime-store hipster snobbery at work; I genuinely wish those guys were immensely popular, and it bothers me that they’re not. Having obscure tastes is more irritating than anything. Who likes blathering about their favorite book and getting a blank stare in return? And where do I get off criticizing Douglas Adams, anyway?

So the lesson here is probably that when it comes to matters of sci-fi and fantasy, my opinion is probably not to be trusted. Still, I’m trying. I’m currently plowing my way through Steven Erikson’s Malazan series, for example, and have picked up Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and Iain Bank’s Culture series and Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, in the hopes of getting on board with the current genre darlings. I’m not sure that will lead to productive conversations with my book-reading friends at the end, but at least I’ll be able to recommend something that’s in print.

Speaking of which, I wonder if I still have my copy of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye somewhere…

So tell me, reader. What are your genre gaps? Any trashy series that you unabashedly love? Any classics you unreservedly hate? I’d like to know.

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Zen in the Art of Bradbury, Or, Buck Rogers Needs Blood to Survive

Whenever someone brings up the subject of Westerns (which is pretty much never), I tell them that my favorite three Westerns are Tombstone, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven. I love them not only for their inherent awesomeness, but because collectively, they cover all the Western narrative bases. Where Tombstone is a straightforward, rollicking adventure, Unforgiven offers a bleak, raw deconstruction of our assumptions about the traditional Western hero. I find Josey Wales occupies a nice space in between, rounding out the trinity with a balance of grit, verve, and snappy quotes about rock candy.

I have a similar trio of books on writing. My bookshelf fairly groans with books about writing. I love reading about craft. I love reading about how other writers work; their inspiration, their frustration, their process. Of all of these, three stand out as my personal trinity of essential works: Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, for its dry and unsympathetic mechanical advice; Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, for its mix of practical craft advice and fond sentiment; and Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, for its infectious and totally unselfconscious passion.

Most writers, I suspect, have a handful of quotes or passages that sum up how they feel about their writing — something that inspires or haunts, possibly even mocks from time to time, like that obnoxious voice that wakes you up in the middle of the night after you’ve just killed twelve hours with a Two and a Half Men marathon and asks, hey, how that novel’s coming?

I have a heap of such passages, hoarded away in my consciousness like stacks of old newspapers in a shut-in’s hovel, but Bradbury’s words tend to haunt me like no other. His book opens with what I consider one of the most concise and cutting essays on a writer’s self-doubt ever written:

Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it. How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth-grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?

Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What’s the cure?…

Part of the answer, of course, is in the fact that I was so madly in love with Buck Rogers. I could not see my love, my hero, my life, destroyed… It was like having your best all-round greatest-loving-buddy, pal, center-of-life drown or get shotgun killed. Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals. Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him. So I breathed in his mouth and lo! he sat up and talked and said, what?

Yell. Jump. Play. Outrun those sons of bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.

Bradbury is talking about writing, of course, as much as he is Buck Rogers. Few writers make it through life without a generous helping of friends and family who are ready to inform them that they’re wasting their time. That no one reads, that writing doesn’t pay, that writing isn’t an honest trade or even a respectable hobby. If you’re really lucky, they might smugly quote Ghostbusters at you: “Print is dead.” Surely no one can argue with Egon, the fictional mad genius who once tried to drill a hole in his head, which would have worked if no one had stopped him.

Like Bradbury, we must judge these people idiots if we are to survive — or, to be a bit more charitable, acknowledge that they might mean well, but that their well-intentioned advice must be ruthlessly discarded as the insidious toxin it is. People can be smart, brilliant, and loving, and still give you advice that will lead you down a miserable path. To Bradbury, this was literally a matter of life and death, summed up succinctly in a single, unrelenting maxim: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you… not to write, for many of us, is to die. “

There are many days when I envy Bradbury, not for his talent or his success, but for figuring this out so early in his life. Simply put, my own personal Buck Rogers lay dead for a long time; a withered corpse who would wheeze to brief life a few times a year, only to be felled by the first unkind word or gnawing self-doubt that floated my way. It took decades to gather the mojo necessary to rouse him back to vibrant life and keep him there. Some days he still teeters, like a marionette whose strings are half-cut, and I have to nurture him back to health with some quality time at the keyboard.

And that’s the thing, of course: Buck Rogers can’t make it on his own. Neglected too long, he’ll just wither away again, a harrowed revenant wandering the bleak hills until he drops dead unloved on some blasted Lovecraftian heath. When it comes to our creative selves, love is not enough. We have to keep them fed. Buck Rogers needs blood to survive.

Which brings me to the other Bradbury quote I like to keep close to my heart. It’s a short quote about the necessity of writing, frequently and regularly. Like so ideas in Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury frames it in a breathless imperative:

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

While I’m familiar with the delirium Bradbury describes here, I’ve become skilled at ignoring the madness that boils up when the writing urge goes unattended. It’s all too easy to let the insanity dwell there, like a buzzing mosquito in the back of my brain — constantly annoying, but too small to really hurt. There’s probably some sort of belabored, hoary metaphor about malaria I could make here, but I think I’ve done enough damage for one day. Fighting that laziness is vital to keeping Buck Rogers plodding along.

I’ll have a lot more to say about Zen in the Art of Writing in the future, I’m sure — his chapter on “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” is partially responsible for the name of this blog, after all — but that’s a story for another time. Suffice it to say, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, I pick up Bradbury’s little white book and let his wild, unrestrained glee infect me like a joyous malady. Hard-nosed advice and stern essays on craft are all well and good, but sometimes you just need to remember why you love your shambling, undead Buck Rogers.

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Full Circle

Over a decade ago, I began a very personal blogging project. This was circa 1997, when blogging was still a relatively new thing and the Internet wasn’t spawning a thousand new blogs a second (or whatever we’re up to now). I was inspired to start it by an Asian girl who went by the name of Chunk. Chunk overshared the minutiae of her life in the lengthy, intimate way that’s since been largely overshadowed by tweets and Facebook status updates. She had no thesis, no purpose, no agenda; just the charming self-absorption of someone youthful and articulate, trying to lend insight and meaning to the drab circumstances of everyday life.

When I started that project, I was pretty certain no one would care — I was and am, after all, not a cute Asian girl, despite all my best efforts — but to my surprise, people did. People emailed. People commented. For a short time, people would occasionally recognize me on the street, which freaks me out even in retrospect. That would never happen now, amidst the din of a billion cleverly-produced Youtube videos, but back then, this was all relatively novel. I never attained the Internet fame of, say, Jennicam (how’s that for a hoary old reference?), but I did all right.

Chunk’s site is long gone, as is mine; I took it down some time ago and am grateful for its absence and obscurity. I’m not even going to mention its name (although you could probably find it quite easily with a little effort), because it’s a thing whose time has come and gone. Sure, nothing is ever truly lost on the internet, but I like to think I’ve come pretty close. Mostly, I’m afraid that if I read it again, my eyes would roll back so far in my head that I’d get detached retinas.

Stick with me a little longer through my vague nostalgia, this is going somewhere.

Recently an old friend of mine asked me about that project, and told me it had inspired her to start her own introspective journey — although hers has more practical value, in that she’s trying to motivate herself to write regularly and mine was a highly dubious search for personal profundity, taking the red pill and seeing how deep my own navel went. I find it curious and gratifying to inspire someone at all, much less thirteen-plus years after the fact. It’s good to know that my defunct old self-absorbed blog served a purpose after all, albeit posthumously.

Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of saying that I decided it was time to start a new blog. My old site, dimfuture.net, has been suffering from an identity crisis since about 2001, and it’s hard for me to even think about giving that old jalopy another overhaul. I decided it was time for a fresh space, dedicated to one subject: the art and craft of writing.

So here we are. The world may not need another writing blog, but it’s getting one anyway. If I manage to entertain, then I’ll consider the whole thing worthwhile. If I somehow manage to inspire, then that’s a big heap of delicious gravy on top.

I’m still not a cute Asian girl, though, for which I am truly sorry.