> You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike

Sometimes you just have to point out brilliance.

Getting published

I did a panel at the recent Rocky Mountain Fur Con called "From Writer To Author: Getting Published," which went okay. At least, it generated good discussion and I ended up rambling on about character wants and stuff. I thought I'd post my notes here for interested people. It includes a rather long quote from the fangs_fur_fey LJ community, because I'm lazy and didn't want to take the time to say it myself.

The problems most people have with getting published--by a moderated, edited press or journal, as opposed to a "throw whatever online" site--come down to two large areas:

1. Make your writing better
2. Figure out how to submit

So here's my thoughts on those two:

Making your writing better
1. Learn to read with a critical eye.
2. Read a story twice, first to get the feel of the story, the second time to read it critically and pick out what the author is doing and how it contributes to the overall tone of the story.
As an exercise: pick two of your favorite books/stories from the past year. List three things you really liked about each one. This can be anything—a character, a setting, a twist of the story, the way the author uses language, whatever. Now, for each of those things, take some time to figure out why you liked it. Don't just say, “because it was cool.” Try to figure out what the author did that made that particular character, setting, language stand out for you. Look at other books with similar stories, similar characters, and compare. Why does one appeal to you more than another? Take those lessons and apply them to your own writing.
3. Read your work out loud to a friend. Reading out loud forces you to consider every word, to hear them rather than letting your mind skim over them.
4. Join a workshop or form a workshop group. Get critiques from people who are actually interested in critiquing, not in either tearing you down without being helpful or building you up without being critical. Learn how to critique: this will help you look at your own work more critically.

How to submit
1. Do some basic research on the publication. Make sure your submission fits their profile and guidelines.
2. Read what else is being published in the field. Your work is going to be read in that context, so you need to understand the context too. This doesn't mean you have to write something that's exactly like everything else, or completely different from everything else. Ideally, you should be in the ballpark, but distinctive enough to make an editor sit up and notice.
3. Format your submission properly and follow all submission guidelines. When you think your submission is ready, go back and read the guidelines again with a fine-toothed comb to make sure.
4. BE PROFESSIONAL AT ALL TIMES.

On that topic, a comment on author-editor relationships from Phil Brucato, in the fangs_fur_fey LJ community:

As a professional author, an occasional publisher, a writing professor, and an editor for over five years, I think I can answer your question... though my response might not be the answer you want.
Editors receive massive numbers of manuscripts. In order to process even a fraction of them, they (and/or their assistants) must scan copious submissions, applying a number of criteria(*) to see whether or not the submission in question warrants deeper consideration. This is not an elitist power-trip, but an absolute necessity. After all, even editors need to eat and sleep, and there's far more to an editor's job than simply scanning, reviewing and polishing manuscripts!
From my own experience, I can say that barely 15% of submissions get beyond this stage. The majority of submissions are poorly written, grammatically appalling, stylistically unsound, unproofed, badly-printed (if printed at all!), or otherwise violate basic publishing standards. I have no idea whether or not your manuscript fit any of those categories, but the overall rule is usually "If it violates Standard A, B or C, I'm not reading past page 1." Again, this is simple practicality. An editor simply does not have the time to make personal in-depth evaluations of everything s/he receives. There isn't time or energy enough to do so!
Beyond that, an editor must judge submissions by other criteria: whether or not the author(s) meet the promise of their premise; whether or not the project holds that reader's interest; whether or not the proposal fits the plans, needs, identity or limitations of the publishing company; whether or not a similar project is already in the works or on the schedule; whether or not the book is likely to exceed the H-U-G-E costs involved in producing, printing, stocking, shipping, marketing and producing said book; and finally, whether or not the editor enjoys, agrees with or believes in the proposal at all. Any or all of these considerations may derail a book during the reading stage - and believe me, an editor is too busy to keep detailed records about each element of every project that crosses his/her desk, especially at a major publishing house!

Review: Reading Like A Writer

Reading Like A Writer, by Francine Prose
8/10, A useful analysis of writing with excerpts from some of the greats

One of the best parts of "Reading Like A Writer" is the examples she brings in from writers she esteems. In a few cases, I was left scratching my head, but most of the writing really is superb. I'm a firm believer in teaching by example, and so, apparently, is Prose. She picks passages from books and shows us what she loves about them, breaking the book into sections as basic as word choice and sentence structure and moving on to more complicated sections like dialogue and gesture.

I found the word choice and sentence structure sections rather slow. I appreciate the wonder of a well-crafted sentence, but I believe you can get by with those painstakingly constructed sentences at key points in your book: the beginning and the end, most notably (I agonized over the last sentence of "Common and Precious" for a week, and in the end, it's still not as good as I would like it), but also at breaks in the story, chapter beginnings and endings, and at key emotional moments. If you agonize over every sentence in your novel, you will take a decade to write it. For some people, that's fine; my writing is not that good, so I have to rely more heavily on story and character.

She writes about constructing paragraphs, which is a useful if somewhat dry section, and then gets into the meat of the book: story, character, and flow, the things that give a book texture and life. Don't get me wrong: you need the foundation to be able to move on the wallpaper and decor. That doesn't make the foundation any less dry. It was the later parts of the book that inspired me to re-examine my own writing, and to want to read some of the authors she excerpted (most notably Gertrude Stein).

This is a melange of an instructional manual for writers and an homage to great writers. The short excerpts give the reader the feeling that they, too, can do this with just a little extra work. After all, it's laid out so clearly here, and in short, digestible bites. That kind of confidence is invaluable for a writer, and is one of the best points of this book. Once you close the last page, it remains with you.

Just What I Needed

We had our local convention this past weekend, and with all the busy-ness and stress that my day job has been affording me this past week or two, it was nice to get a break. Friday I was not in a great mindset, but by the end of the day, I succumbed to the environment of creativity and fun that reminded me that there is more to life. We sold a good number of "Common and Precious" at the con and I signed a few of them--thanks to everyone who bought! A couple people were nice enough to ask what I'm working on next, which is a great compliment. One of my goals for this year is to get a short story or two out there, whether to Amazon Shorts or to another publication. In any case, it was just the perfect time for me to be steeped in another world and remember the importance of these parts of my life.

There are a lot of challenges ahead of us this year ("us" here includes me, my partner, my writing group, and all of you). I think I have a few posts to come about marketing yourself, persistence, and networking, which all go hand in hand and are sometimes thought of derogatorily as "the business of writing." For now, though, I just want to make the observation I have before, which is that although writing happens as a solitary activity, it doesn't require a solitary life.

Are you overwriting the obvious again?

One of the more common mistakes I see in the writing of more experienced amateur writers is the tendency to overwrite. They write more than is needed to get the point across, often inundating the reader with the same information expressed in a few different ways (or in some cases, expressed in the same way). Most of the time, you don't need to tell the reader something three or four times. The reader is usually capable of picking up information with one or two clues, so there's no need to overwrite. All this does is slow down the pace of the story and ...

Yeah, see what I did there? It's not that there's anything particularly wrong with that first paragraph, except that it contains about three too many sentences. Try this one out:

One of the more common mistakes I see in the writing of more experienced amateur writers is the tendency to overwrite. The reader is usually capable of picking up information with one or two clues; anything more is annoying overkill.

Overwriting is not an indication of poor writing skills. It's an indication of insufficient time spent editing. A friend of mine once said that he'd read that every sentence needs to move the story forward. I thought that was a bit excessive at the time, but it's not a bad rule to keep in the back of your head. Are you writing what the reader wants and needs to see next? Or, as Frasier Crane said on Cheers, "Oh, now you're saying that I'm redundant, that I repeat myself, that I say things over and over."

In fact, overwriting is a good thing in drafts. It's not bad to have the same sentiment expressed several different ways. Then, while editing, you pick the one that works the best in terms of pacing and language, and get rid of the rest. But don't be afraid to edit. If you feel you have to mention something several times for emphasis, space it out. Let the feeling build through the story rather than being slammed home all in one paragraph.

It's not a bad flaw to find, and I guarantee you, everyone does it. Be diligent while editing, and it won't be an issue.

"On Writing"

In our fiction workshop, one of our readings this week is a chapter from Stephen King's "On Writing." When I first read that book, a long time ago, I was impressed by how clear and helpful it was. The more I meet other writers, the more I find that people share that opinion. It doesn't matter whether they're genre writers, or graduate students, or biographers. Everyone seems to appreciate it.

I think it's pretty cool that someone whose books are so often derided as simply popular bestsellers could write a book that so many people find helpful in their writing career. Many people who wouldn't look twice at one of his novels nonetheless hold up "On Writing" as a great aid to their writing.

In this section, King talks about assembling the basic tools of writing. One of the things he stresses in talking about vocabulary is that you shouldn't force it. In other words, don't try to pretty it up by searching for a fancier word. Chances are the one you first thought of is the best one for the job. He says, let your vocabulary stretch on its own, as you read. The more naturally your words flow, the more natural they'll read to the reader. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't edit, but that's another story...)

Dry Spells

Sometimes you just hit one of those times when nothing is calling to be written. I had three days off after Christmas, and I spent them running errands and watching TV. I have several stories waiting to be written, but I haven't been thinking about any of them. So when I sit down to write them, nothing flows.

I think the occasional dry spell is not too bad for you as long as you don't put yourself in the mindset that you have to be writing. It's a bit irritating to have all this time and not be using it, but it's also good to relax and take a break once in a while. I've actually been enjoying the time off from work and from writing, so I think it's been good. And the stories are percolating, it's just been a busy month and I haven't had a real chance to think about them.

What I'm going to do tonight is pull up a couple stories and just force myself to get back into the flow of them, now that my free time is almost over. After all, when I get busy again, I'm going to need some distractions, right?

Setup, Buildup, Payoff

The "rule of three" is a pretty well-known one. I ran across this article today, talking about it broadly and then in a marketing context. Some of their examples are pretty entertaining (the Laura Kightlinger and Jon Stewart quotes); the whole article is worth reading. The interesting thing, I think, is that the rule applies on so many scales, from sentences all the way up to story structure.

Obviously, you don't want this in all your sentences, but there are places where it fits well. You can use the three-part sentence just for flow:

"Jamie's new car had power steering, a sun roof, and a V-6 engine that got her from her house to the office in ten minutes flat."

You can use the first two elements to set up something that you pay off with the third:

"Every day before he left for work, John brushed his teeth, ate a Pop-Tart, and wondered why he did the first two things in that order."

Notice how right the flow feels. Try adding one element, or taking one away:

"Jamie's new car had power steering and a V-6 engine that got her from her house to the office in ten minutes flat."

"Every day before he left for work, John brushed his teeth, ate a Pop-Tart, put on his shirt, and wondered why he did the first three things in that order."

At a higher level of story structure, the same patterns work, although they're harder to see. You'll recall old fairy tales in which there are often three brothers, or three sisters, or three tasks (yes, I know the five Chinese brothers story, and the importance of seven as well). The evil queen tries three times to kill Snow White. Red Riding Hood asks the wolf three questions ("Are we gonna sit here all day talkin' about how big I'm gettin'?!"). And if you get into screenwriting, you'll know that all screenplays (well, most) have three acts. As I heard it once: "In act one, you chase your character up a tree. In act two, you throw rocks at him. In act three, he figures out how to get down."

There's something about a sequence of three that we find flows well and makes a story work. Just something to keep in mind as you're doing your writing, outlining, and editing.

Writing for an audience

I'm reading Neal Pollack now (review forthcoming, eventually), because I got his book used for $4 and he's part of that McSweeney's crowd that I always thought were pretty good writers but never managed to capture my interest. Turns out this is no exception. Pollack writes from the point of view of a fictional persona who is an amalgam of every overprivileged, ego-driven white male writer, but he does it so well that unless you know the writers he's lampooning, he just comes off as, well, an overprivileged, ego-driven white male writer who has done so much drugs and alcohol that he is delusional.

The point of this post, I guess, is to go back and revisit something I'd written before about writing to your audience. Pollack has a particular audience in mind here: people who read the New Yorker and Harper's and who follow Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and who enjoy that style of writing, but find it a bit overblown. His parodies are interesting, but I'm left feeling like I've just read the punch line to a joke I didn't know. (Aside: there are several punch lines that have become divorced from their jokes, the most famous being "Twenty bucks, same as in town!" which it took me a little while to uncover on Google because I always wanted to know what the joke was. There's also "Wrecked 'em? It damn near killed 'em!" which was a big hit in my college days and is only funny if you say the first part fast enough to make it sound like one word. From these punch lines, it is possible to dimly intuit the joke, as opposed to the one I first read in King Kaufman's column a couple years ago: "Know it? Hell, lady, I wrote it!" All of these are funnier without their jokes than Neal Pollack's short pieces.)

Asides aside, I wouldn't suggest that Pollack take his brilliant skewering of writers I've never read and open it up to the mainstream. He's got his audience; it just doesn't include me. That's the risk you take when you tailor your writing that finely, and I'm well aware that were "NP" to pick up "Common and Precious," he would likely discard it within a couple chapters ("this book has a 'plot'...how common! how precious! ha ha! neal pollack provides his own amusement where none else can be found!" Yes, I picture him talking about himself in the third person. Yes, that's probably just from his first name being phonetically the same as the allegedly third-person-talking Neil Gaiman.). So I guess we'll continue to revolve in our separate spheres, him with his "book deals" and his fancy friends, and me with my blog, my small press, and all of you.

Doesn't seem fair to him, does it? ;)

Writing and the Holidays

The holidays for me, growing up, were always very much downtime. Sometimes we'd travel to one place or another to see relatives, but for the most part, they were a few days off with a nice family ceremony somewhere in the middle. So I always look forward to the holidays as a time when I can get some writing done in longer stretches than a few hours here and there.

I guess I've become a little more social in my middle age, because this December has just been non-stop. I think this week will slow down a little, and then when the actual holiday kicks in, there may be more time to catch up on some of the writing I've meant to get done.

I really do think the holidays are a rich vein of material for writing, beyond all the schmaltzy stuff that ends up in the theaters around this time of year. The concentrated interaction and stress makes for some great stories. Characters! That's what it's all about, right?

So, does anyone else look forward to the holidays as a time to power through some writing? Or is that when you take a break from it?

The Answer

From my Inspiration panel, from a friend's LJ where a lot of people seem to be asking about inspiration and motivation, from my writer's workshops and all, the most common question aspiring writers seem to ask is "How do you motivate yourself to write?" There are variations on this: "How do you find the time?" or "How do you find the energy?" or "I always have shopping/chores/friends/meals/classes/movies/ninjas taking up all my time, so I can't set aside time to write. What do you suggest?"

I know that everyone wants a magic bullet. They want me to say, "Oh, I learned this ancient Navajo trick of focusing my mind on writing that allows me to be amazingly productive. I learned it from Stephen King's book "On Writing." It's at the beginning of Chapter 3. Just recite those lines whenever you want to write and your mind will be clear and the words will come." Or something.

The answer is simple, but it's not easy. You have to get into the practice of writing. It's as simple as that. Develop it as a habit. Your body and mind form habits easily. The more you do something, the more you will expect to be doing it. But at the beginning, you have to force yourself in order to acquire the habit. So I'll tell you what every other writer will tell you: make time to write.

Okay, you're nodding, but you're not listening. Make Time To Write.

You know best how you can accomplish this. If writing is important to you, you will figure out how to squeeze time out of your day. Maybe you'll set aside an hour a day, or an hour and a half a day. Maybe you'd rather do a four hour block once a week. Maybe you can work it out twice a week. However you work it, make sure that you can observe that time, come what may. Because if you skip it just once, it'll become easier to skip it next time, and before you know it, you're saying, "what's the point, I'm not getting anything done," and you look up at the calendar and it's been six months since you wrote.

Once you get into the habit of writing, you can become more loose with your schedule--you can fit your writing into your day, rather than fitting your day around your writing. But to start with, to get writing ingrained into your routine, be rigid with it.

You will hear this same advice over and over and over again. The other part of it is: if writing is important to you, you will make time to do it. The converse, the part that people don't want to hear, is that if you aren't making time to do it, then it isn't important to you. "But," they say, "it is important, it's just that I have all this other stuff/I can't think of anything to write." Look, it's okay. You make your decisions based on what's important to you, not what should be or what you want to be. If writing is important to you, you'll do it. If it's making you terribly unhappy not to be writing, look at the things you can give up to make time for writing. Would giving any of them up make you more unhappy? Is there just one you could give up?

It sounds silly, and trite, but the line from one of my favorite movies is a great one here: "A writer writes."

Connecting To Your Readers

The whole reason we read fiction is to find a connection to something else. It may be that we want to imagine a new world, that we want to live someone else's adventures, that we want to escape our life for a short time, that we want to find out how someone might handle a certain kind of conflict, but in order to do any of those things, the story has to connect to us in some way. The characters have to be human and going through things that we can at least imagine ourselves going through, or else the story doesn't grab us.

(Yes, there's a lot about world-building and description and realistic characters. Those are all for other postings. Bear with me, here.)

We were watching "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" with Mark's parents. It's a great Thanksgiving movie. It also engages us because anyone who's traveled has probably encountered one of the litany of problems that befall Neal Page (Steve Martin): late for his flight, flight delayed, trapped next to irritating passenger, flight re-routed, hotels booked solid, robbed, train broken down, annoying bus passengers, and so on. We know how he feels: he just wants to get home. What makes the story good is that although we can sympathize, Neal's plight is taken to the next level, exaggerated for dramatic effect. But the base connection is there.

What makes the story great is the underlying message of looking past someone's flaws to find the real person inside, which is a lesson Neal not only learns about Del (John Candy), but also about himself. He's not aware of his flaws in the beginning of the movie--he thinks he's a pretty good person. By the end, he's not only seen that Del is a good guy and a friend, he's also seen his own flaws, but understands that he's a good person underneath as well. There's connection there, too, but it's on a subtler level. We've all known someone who made a bad first impression, and maybe second and third. We've all done things from time to time that weren't in tune with our better nature. This movie tells us that that's okay, as long as we learn from it and gain a little patience and understanding.

This goes back to what I've said a couple times about writing from life. Take little snippets from your own life. Chances are, at least something about that experience is universal. Expand on it, exaggerate it, but don't lose that universality. That's where people will engage with your writing. That's where you'll make your connection.

Your Inspiration Store

As I mentioned, I was on a panel this weekend about Keeping Your Motivation and Inspiration. For writers, that is. A bunch of ideas came out of it, so I thought I'd list those and just let you guys chime in in the comments.

* If you're not writing because you feel like the writing is being forced, don't worry about it--force it out. The important thing is to get it down.

* Stuck on one project? Write something else, even if it's a silly little thing that you don't think will be worth your time.

* Break up your immense novel project into manageable chunks. Set small deadlines and meet them.

* Do research (warning: use sparingly; you can waste years doing research and not writing).

* Read something by a writer you admire. Picture what of their work you can copy.

* Read something by a writer you despise (or just go online and find some bad fiction). Picture how you would do the story better.

* Read something bad by a writer you admire. Picture how they would have done it better.

* Read something you wrote five years ago. Resist the urge to cringe. Think about how you would do it better now.

* Go to a panel on Keeping Your Inspiration and Motivation. Ha ha. No, seriously--go to a convention or workshop or other gathering. Meeting and talking to other writers is a great way to get motivated.

* Read blogs on writing. (I just tossed that last one in myself.)

Short Stories vs. Novels

The question came up over the weekend about writing short stories versus writing novels. Lots of beginning writers try to dive into a novel first time out, and get discouraged because of the scope of the project. For some of them, it might be easier to work on short stories. You get the positive reinforcement of finishing a project quickly, and restricting the scope of your writing makes it seem more manageable.

But the drawback of short stories is that they are short. If you are interested in long character arcs, societal change, or other big ideas, you may not be able to work in anything less than novel form (though to be honest, most writers end up doing both at one time or another--one of the English language's most famous novelists, Charles Dickens, is perhaps best known for his short story/novella, "A Christmas Carol"). In that case, you should be looking at breaking up your novel into manageable pieces. Write an outline. Write a chapter. Set milestones that are nearer than "finish the novel."

Another thing I think is more important with novels than with short stories is to write a first draft without letting your inner editor get in the way. Because you have so much more to write, it's important to get it all down. With a short story, the process of editing is smaller and more contained, and you can let your editor interfere a little as you're doing your writing. With your novel, you're going to throw out whole sections anyway. Don't bother correcting your grammar or word use when drafting. Don't let yourself get hung up on research. If you know there's a thing you want to include, but you don't know the name, just write [later] in your text. I use square brackets for in-manuscript notes because I never use them for punctuation in a manuscript. Then I can just go back and search on "[" and "]" and find all the notes I meant to fill in later. The important thing, again, is to get the draft down.

Then you can worry about getting motivated for the editing. :)

Where To Get Inspiration

One of the opportunities afforded by this convention is the chance to talk to people and hear their stories. This is why you need to carry around your little notebook: because if you're ever stuck for a character motivation or a character type, the best place to refer is real life. That doesn't mean you have to lift a story whole cloth exactly as it was told, but you can take elements of it. There are usually a couple key elements to a good story that make you think, "wow, someone really did that." Use that with your own characters. One of my problems is that I try to make my characters too realistic, when a few elements of outlandishness are usually helpful in making someone memorable. And outlandishness is usually a characteristic of a good story, one people will go out of their way to tell you.

Also, think about that when telling stories of your own. What makes the stories from your past interesting? Do you have any stories that were *almost* a disaster? How would things have gone if they had turned into disasters? What odd behavior did you see in the people around you--like that ticket agent who was clearly having a bad day when she harassed you about the minor issue with your itinerary, or the girl at the Starbucks who took three tries to get your order right, and told you that she just wasn't processing English correctly that day?

All of these elements are real. Write them down, remember them, refer to them, use them. I often take small occurrences that stuck in my mind from life and use them as textural details in my stories--and you can take the small occurrences that form the basis of other people's stories and use them as well. The more sources you can draw from, the more textured and real your stories will feel.

Shared Creativity

I'm at a convention right now, in chilly Chicago. One of the best things about these conventions is how inspiring they are. I always come home bursting with ideas and plans. Of course, very few of those ever get done, but there are a couple stories ("Common and Precious" among them) that got kick-started by discussions at these conventions.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have conventions in the genre they choose to write in, though I think a "general fiction" convention would be a fun idea. But that's an aspect of community that I don't think I've really touched on before. We know how helpful a workshop can be to developing your technique and polishing your prose, but be sure to take time just to kick ideas around. Talk about that weird dream you had that had the germ of a good story idea in it, or the news story that you thought might have an interesting twist. I find that in my day job or in my writing, I work better when I have someone to bounce ideas off of. (Our screenwriting workshop actually has been doing very little actual workshopping recently, but even in our socializing, we throw around interesting ideas and I think at least one has sparked a screenplay.)

The convention, by the way, is going pretty well so far! My publisher inadvertantly left behind all the copies of my book to sell, but hey, I'm getting inspired, and that's worth the trip right there. :)

The Best Writing Aid There Is

Forget your Strunk & White, forget your laptop and your online thesaurus, forget your outlines and coffee and sharpened pencils and Mozart. For my money, there is nothing that helps your writing more than a good night's sleep.

You have only to look at the rambling review I wrote yesterday after three hours of sleep on a red-eye flight to have a concrete example of this. There was no way I was going to be able to focus on writing anything more substantive than a journal entry at that point. Lack of sleep kills your ability to concentrate on what you're doing. (Flight to Chicago was great, by the way, and we had a fun time walking around the city yesterday. Lots of history, lots of architecture, lots of people-watching. I think there's a whole post in the use of history as a tool for writers; maybe later this month.)

The day after a red-eye is an extreme example. The same things happen, in smaller relief, when I just don't get enough sleep. I get more annoyed when I can't come up with the right word, which happens more often because I'm not rested. I get more restless, more prone to seeking out distractions (currently I am wondering why I installed NetCribbage on my computer--foul time-wasting fiend! at least I didn't register, so I'm only allowed to play for ten minutes at a time, which is a nice break and not a full-on diversion), and less able to hold the narrative in my head.

Most people know this, and yet if you asked people what they do to prepare to sit down and write, most of them wouldn't say, "Get a good night of sleep the night before." If you're tired, sure, you have to go ahead and write anyway, but if you, like me, have a few days a week where you specifically focus on writing, try to go to bed half an hour earlier the night before those days.

Trust me, I know how busy one can get and how unimportant half an hour of sleep seems when you have to worry about a million other different things. But also trust me: you'll feel the difference when you sit down to write.

...If Only You Could Live In Your Novel

It struck me recently that owning a home is kind of like writing a novel. You might ask someone to give your precious possession a look over, to make some minor improvements to the pacing (or, say, to run a gas line to the backyard). Well, when they give it back, they say, "hey, did you know that your plot has a major discontinuity in it?" (or, say, that your hot water heater is leaking). And of course, as anyone knows, even a minor fix to a novel (or a house) inevitably ends in more than one trip to the reference shelf (or Home Depot), taking two or three (or ten) times the time (and money) you'd originally thought it would.

Both are complicated structures with a lot of dependent parts. The good thing about the novel is that its parts don't degrade over time if you don't touch them. However, like a house, all the parts are subject to individual taste and perception; it is nearly impossible to view either of them objectively at anything other than the most fundamental level (it has four walls and a roof/the language is technically proficient).

I wasn't sure this post was going to have a point when it started. I just thought it was an amusing analogy. But I think it does have a point, and that is that whether it's your house or your novel, you have to ultimately trust your judgment. You can bring in people who are experts in the big things, the foundation it's all built on, but when it comes to whether it's finished, that should be your decision. You're the one who has to live with it. You could tinker with it endlessly--trust me, you will never run out of things to fix. But at some point you have to say, "Enough."

Learning how to do that is one of the most difficult parts of being a writer. I would say it's the most difficult part of being a homeowner, but I have a mortgage. And, now, a new hot water heater.

Take Your Time

It's funny. As I get older, I have noticed that I'm more willing to take time to get places. I've started walking from our house to downtown Mountain View, and am more willing to take long weekend road trips rather than flying to nearby destinations like L.A. or Vegas (though I do like to fly--I like airports, don't mind the TSA, and love the enforced downtime of air travel, which allows me to catch up on reading and writing, unlike road travel, where I'm either driving or feeling I have to keep the driver engaged). I was thinking about that the other day, and I think it's linked to a conscious effort to slow down and look around. And that relates to writing in that it's important to see not only the places you choose to be, but the places you have to go through to get there. Interesting things happen at junctions and intersections where different areas meet: the train station on the way to the downtown, where commuters mingle with residents and shoppers/diners; the town that straddles the commercial highway CA 101 and the agricultural areas all around it; the exit from the busy I-5 artery to the sleepy farms outside it.

Perhaps it's just from writing Aya's Journal and trying to imagine a Bronze Age civilization that had to walk everywhere, or ride horses long distances. It's certainly interesting to stop and think about how unimaginable a 16-mile commute would have been just a hundred years ago, and what changed in our society as a result. It can also help you look forward to the future: look at all the spaces in between the interesting destinations, ready to be filled with people if only there were an easy way to get there. If we developed safe teleportation, do you think people would still live in cities, when you could wake up in a mountain home in Idaho, walk out your front door, and be at your job in Manhattan? We're already seeing how the Internet has changed and enabled communities by breaking down geological barriers. But you have to understand those barriers before you can really appreciate what it would mean to remove them.

Walking also gives me the chance to think about stories I'm working on (though I don't always). I have said for a while that the most important part of writing takes place when you're not at your computer, when the ideas and characters can run around loose in your head and spin the story. When you know the story, the words come much more easily. I've had some of my best story breakthroughs while just walking or sitting, thinking about the story or about something else altogether (I must credit my partner for another recent story breakthrough--he was reading a WIP and made a comment about what the story was about that crystallized the ending I'd been having trouble with).

Try it this week. Walk to the store, the restaurant, around the block. Take your time.

NaBloMo

November, many of you may be aware, is National Novel-Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Every year, someone asks if I'm going to participate in it. I think it's a great idea, but I've never done it and likely never will.

One of the things stopping people from writing is a lack of urgency or pressure. Another is the daunting scope of the task once you actually sit down to try to write a novel. I mean, a whole novel. That ranges from 50,000 to upwards of 200,000 words--but let's stick with 50,000, the NaNoWriMo goal. The average sentence runs eight to ten words. So we're talking between five and six thousand sentences. Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine, tried to address his e-mail overload by putting a five-sentence limit on his replies to e-mail. Let's take that as an average, for lack of any better number. So a novel is like answering a thousand e-mails. And you want to do this in a month, on top of answering the thousand e-mails you already have to answer?

Well, NaNoWriMo gives you a deadline (November 30), and breaks the daunting task down into manageable stages (2,000 words a day--that's not so bad, only 40 e-mails, right?). I know a number of people who've been successful at getting the novels done. There is a National Novel Editing Month as well (in March; National Novel Finishing Month is , which is less popular because editing, while just as critical as writing, is less well-defined. NaNoEdMo asks for fifty hours of editing in a month, which is a nice goal, but fifty hours of editing doesn't have the tangible word-count goal that fifty thousand words does. (And then there's National Novel Finishing Month, which doesn't appear to have any goal other than to keep people writing on the novels they started for NaNoWriMo.)

At any rate: NaNoWriMo is a success because it helps people acquire the structure they need in order to finish a novel. I'm all for it. But I've already written a novel, and in fact just finished another one (the topic of another post). And really, I have enough projects on my plate that I don't need to start another novel. Also, it seems like you could pick a better month, one that doesn't include Thanksgiving (when I'm sure very little writing gets done).

However, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I'm declaring November my National Blogging Month (NaBloMo?). I am going to attempt to post to this blog every day in November (okay, so I missed November 1, but I did post on October 31 and since I thought that post was on the first, I'm counting it. It's my NaBloMo, I'm making the rules.). It's going to be challenging, since I have not only Thanksgiving but our annual convention in Chicago to attend, but I'm going to give it a whirl. Your support is appreciated! And it's not too late to get in on the fun--join NaBloMo along with me! Let's flood the internet with our babble!