A near victory

NaNoWriMo lumbers along for me. I had an out of town trip scheduled this past weekend, so I fell behind in my word count. This was expected, so not upsetting. I have Friday off from work in observance of Veterans' Day, and I may join some other NaNoers in the crazy challenge to try and get 11,111 words done on 11/11/11.

Can I do it? I'm scared to find out!

My real excitement for the weekend came from our drive. It's a long, boring 8-9 hour drive when we go back home to visit friends and family, and occasionally we listen to audiobooks. In general, I'm not a fan of the format because I can't pay that close of attention when people are speaking to me and I can't see them or take notes. I'm an extremely visual person, so things don't sink in when I have to just sit and listen. My mind wanders and I don't retain the story well.

My husband, however, is a fan. He has the opposite problem where books are concerned. He has a hard time sitting and reading a book because he can't engage with the material. Then he gets bored and nods off to sleep, or reads the same sentence fifteen times without actually gaining anything from it.

Yesterday we were both bored with our music selections and I offered up the audiobook option. After perusing through a bunch of choices, The Hunger Games popped up. I didn't think the hubs would go for it, but when I mentioned it he surprised me by saying he'd like to give it a try. My enthusiasm for the series and the upcoming movie is rubbing off on him, but he admitted he would never sit and read it despite the fact that he believes it's awesome.

We ended up not getting to listen to it because I needed a WiFi signal to download the large file and by the time we stopped for gas and found WiFi there were only a few hours left to drive. I still consider it a victory that I have him intrigued enough that he's willing to listen, so we may end up borrowing or buying it to listen to over the holidays. I think I would enjoy an audiobook of something I've already read because then I won't feel as pressured to pay such close attention.

Do you like audiobooks? Have you ever been so excited about a book that you got a person interested in it that would not normally have liked it?

NaNoWriMo, Round 2

November is officially upon us, boys and girls! I can hardly believe it. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and this is the second year in a row that I will be participating. Although last year I procrastinated for much of the month and finished in a down-to-the-wire sprint, I'm hoping to be a bit more on top of things this time around.

I highly doubt that I will be posting regularly around here over the next 30 days, but I hope to give updates on my progress as I suffer through this crazy endeavor. I'm going for my first steampunk story, which I'm very excited about (even if I don't know exactly where the story is going yet). The plan is to try and front load my word count as much as possible so I don't wind up spending my entire Thanksgiving break holed up in my room glued to my laptop. My goal is 2,000 words a day. Fingers crossed!

Any other NaNo participants out there? Want to be my writing buddy? Or maybe chat with me on the NaNo forums? Then check out my NaNoWriMo profile page! I'll also be tweeting my misery (@loganturner) and getting in on those excellent @NaNoWordSprints motivational writing sprints.

Basically, don't worry if you don't hear much from me this month. It means I'm holed up being creative...or crying in a corner at my failures. Either way, it's bound to be interesting.

Writing Wednesday - The Struggle to Revise

 
As mid-October rapidly approaches, I am starting to get inundated with reminders about the upcoming National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Message boards are lighting up with new posts, my writing studio is advertising prep classes to generate ideas, and Twitter is full of folks practicing their daily word counts.

I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time last year and made it - barely. I finished with a pitiful draft of a half-cocked idea and perhaps only a handful of scenes that would actually work. When I faced the prospect of trying to revise this messy, disorganized pile of words, I got so overwhelmed that I simply turned my back on it and started to write something else.

Once again, I got stuck with nowhere to take my plot and only a vague concept of where I wanted this story to go. But never fear! To the rescue is the month of November, swooping in to occupy my mind on a new story, new characters, and no fear of revisions!

It's an escape tactic, you see. I always struggle with revisions. Despite an entire shelf of helpful writing books and tools, many pages of helpful critique notes, and a laptop loaded with the handy Scrivener program to help me sift through the story without getting lost, I can't ever manage to get over my fear of revising.

What if I start making changes and the entire thing shifts into something new? What if I start making changes and I hate the whole project? What if I lose the essence of the characters?

The issue is staring me directly in the face. I need to focus on the heart of my story and not drown myself in self-doubt. I often think of the arts as an exercise in false confidence. When I was a theater student, sometimes to get over your fears you had to "fake it 'til you make it" so to speak. If I allowed my doubts to get the best of me, I'd never succeed, and sometimes I just had to take a leap of faith and trust that I had the goods to get it done.

In the fall of my senior year in college, I took on the role of Puck in our production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. As most people know, Puck closes the show with a monologue delivered to the audience. It's a beautiful speech, and an endearing moment between the audience and the character. It's also a very important and powerful moment, which was not lost on me.

Despite months of rehearsals, weeks of performances, and thousands of recitations, every night I turned to my castmate, Zack, and asked him how the speech started. It didn't matter how many times I'd done the speech myself. I knew Zack knew the speech, and as we huddled in the dark backstage, waiting to go out for the final scene, I could never think of the first few words. "If we shadows have offended," he'd whisper, and I'd nod and start mumbling under my breath, "if we shadows have offended if we shadows have offended," right up to the moment I took a step onstage.

It wasn't that I didn't know the speech. I did. Backwards and forwards. But as the exhaustion of the production started to set in, and I waited in the wings for my entrance, the weight of the delivery of that speech started to bear down on me. I would get so worked up about the magnitude of the task that I forgot that I actually had the skills to bring it home. Until the moment I stepped on stage and had no choice but to get through it, the speech became greater than me and not the other way around.

This is how I feel when I write. As I'm entrenched in the task of getting the story down on the page, I'm ecstatic. It's when I have to step back and examine what I'm doing that I go from "let me get this cool idea down on paper" to "OHMIGOD I'm writing A WHOLE BOOK!" In order to try and combat this, I've tried just focusing on scenes, but that also doesn't seem to help. My next step is to try putting together an outline to keep me aware that this is just many small parts that add up to one greater idea, and that it doesn't all have to be tackled at once.

Anyone else have this kind of revisers' block? How do you prevent yourself from getting overwhelmed?

Writing Wednesday (1)

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Welcome to Writing Wednesday, my new weekly feature where I discuss my works in progress, project ideas, editing struggles, or anything else related to the world of writing. Feel free to grab my button and post your own thoughts on writing!  Leave a link to your post in the comments and I'll stop by.

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Okay, so I have a confession to make.  Since completing NaNoWriMo in November, I haven't touched my manuscript. I haven't even had the heart to go back and read it. That big ugly beast is scaring me. I'm afraid that if I read it I will realize that I need to give up on my dreams and resign myself to life as a non-author.

Here's the thing that's brilliant about National Novel Writing Month: I wrote a whole novel in 30 days. That's exciting. I realized that my brain is capable of putting words into sentences that eventually turn into a story that has a beginning, middle and end. I learned that the story may have all the requisite components, but that it may also be terrifically boring.

Here's the sucky thing about NaNoWriMo: I wrote a whole novel in 30 days. By the end of the experiment, I had some cool characters and a setting that worked okay, but a story that is so awful I had a hard time explaining it to others. "Um, there's a girl who has this magical pet cougar. Not like MILF cougar but like panther cougar. And her dad goes missing and he turns out to be part of this secret political club that the king wants to suppress and since the king can read minds he totally figures this stuff out, right? So it turns out that the king can control everyone's mind except for the girl's, so he wants to make her his wife so they can be this power couple and rule the world, but he's all creepy and pervy and besides the girl is in love with her former mentor who along with her sister is kidnapped by the king too, and the king uses them to manipulate the girl into agreeing to the marriage but before he attacks her and tries to consummate the marriage the cougar saves the day and kills the king but she dies. Then the girl decides that since she went through with the marriage she's the queen now and should probably do good stuff for her people."

I may or may not have written a book along those lines.

Still, the point of NaNoWriMo is not to write a good book, it's to write a book. Any book. It's an exercise in getting over the fear of having to complete an entire novel. It forced me to write quickly and without thinking. I just typed, and if an idea came to me, I explored it. The genius part was that it worked.

I'm not really one for big plot ideas. I have lots of ideas about characters and settings, but when it comes to the action, I usually draw a blank. It's a big reason why I hadn't written a novel before November. Imagine my surprise when I find out that even with no forethought, I actually can fabricate a story from beginning to end. I can make the characters do stuff. It may not be very exciting or interesting stuff, but eventually they will have to do something.

What makes this particularly funny is that I despise books lacking in action. It's one of the reasons I've never been a big fan of literary fiction - too much character study with little action. Zzzzzzzzzzz. What I love to read are stories with complications and trials and missteps and lots of forward motion. When I sit down to write, I get carried away in who and where my characters are instead of what they're doing. Bad Logan.

I've been jotting down some notes for my next project, but so far no story is coming to me. Hopefully an idea will come before I have to write a whole new crappy book. Trust me, no one wants to see the sequel where the girl and her cougar start the riveting process of drafting legislation or opening a peanut factory.

Where do you find inspiration for your plot ideas? Do you find it easier to develop characters or the story?

NaNoWriMo withdrawal

I love a good challenge.  There is nothing that gets my blood pumping faster than trying to accomplish a seemingly insurmountable task.  Or just a plain difficult task.  Or even a fairly simple task.  In fact, if I'm being completely honest, I just love that feeling of self-satisfaction of setting my mind to do something, and then doing it.

This year was the first year I had ever participated in NaNoWriMo, and it did not start off so well.  By Thanksgiving, I had barely dented my word count, and I was starting to get quite down on myself for not being able to finish.  It seemed hopeless.  I wanted to quit.  I decided that before I could throw in the towel, however, I had better give it my all.  I spent nearly the entirety of Thanksgiving weekend locked in my bedroom, chained to my computer, forcing myself to continue typing.  And eventually, miraculously, I got to 50,000 words.

I won!  I could barely believe it.  My wrists hurt, my back creaked, and my eyes felt like sandpaper, but I did it.  I was so excited I wanted to announce it to the world, as if I had just birthed a child.  Nothing could match the sensation of achieving what had seemed so impossible just a few days before.

Now that the long, hard-fought battle is over, I find myself feeling a little morose and empty.  The excitement has worn down, most people have already heard the news, and now I'm stuck with this beast of a novel that may or may not pan out to anything.  The manuscript and I are locked in an awkward silence at the moment, each of us unwilling to reach across the divide and try to move forward.  We liked things back when they were exciting and rushed and new.  Now, we're shuffling our feet and clearing our throats and wondering if we were just caught up in the moment or if we truly have something special.

I'm feeling that loss of the challenge, as well.  Do I take up NaNoFiMo?  I could write an alternate ending.  Or perhaps Plot Whisperer's International Plot Writing Month? Or how about Story Siren's 2011 Debut Author Challenge?  I keep searching for new things to keep me busy.  Maybe I should just keep challenging myself until I am all challenged out.

There are lots of good things coming up just in time for the new year.  I will update here with the new challenges I accept!  Until then, I'll continue my standoff with the novel.