National Novel Writing Month

Have you been sharpening your pencils and limbering up your typing fingers, maybe doing a few keyboard calisthenics to avoid a nasty sprained phalange? November is National Novel Writing Month, a month supposedly dedicated to creating that novel you've always meant to write but have put off for whatever reason. You know how it is with excuses, it seems I remember a saying about excuses…but I digress.

I’m all for people finding their inner novelist and following their muse. There are no barbed wire fences, no passports, and no border guards along the borders of the Land of Creativity. You don’t need to be vetted or qualified to write. Just pick up preferred writing implement and begin. That’s it, just write.

There does seem to be a certain cultural thing about writing. If you’re a published author there’s an easy experiment you can perform to experience this phenomena first hand. Simply choose a group of individuals and casually mention you’re a novelist. There’ll be a few questions about the profession, maybe even some circumscribe words about buying your book, but eventually you will hear “I’ve thought about writing a book…” It seems to be a constant across the conversational landscape. Whether you’re in a restaurant, at a party, or any other get-together formal and informal, the scenario plays out in the same way. Nobody would respond to Bruce Jenner with a “I’ve always thought about winning a decathlon…” or tell a surgeon “Just last week I was saying how I’d like to do an appendectomy” but mention writing a novel and suddenly everyone’s Steinbeck.

Maybe the root lies in the part stories play in everyone’s life. We grow up with them, starting with story time in kindergarten and maturing into the various book circles and young reader contests that have become a part of the grade school landscape. Stories have a place at our hearths too. If you’re like me, you had uncles, aunts, grandparents, parents, and siblings who spun tales that knitted the family together and formed a shared history. I think it’s this second sort of story, the lived story, which convinces everyone they could be a novelist. I break the family-centric story into two classes: the Guess What Happened and the Family Legend.

The Guess What Happened story is, well, exactly what it sounds like. It’s a retelling of an event, usually focused on how dumb/irritating/difficult some person/task/place was and the way the teller brought it to a satisfactory or unsatisfactory conclusion. In my youth these everyday stories were as utilitarian as melmac, they conveyed emotion and explained day to day realities. They lived in our kitchen, around the dinner table, and in the family car, lifted into the back seat on the warm breeze that came in through the driver’s side wing-glass. Looking back I can’t recall any of them in detail, they came and went, beginning as thoughts and breath and then returning to nothingness.

Family Legends are a different class all together. A legend tells of an extraordinary event (at least within the bounds of family life). There are no legendary tales of the price of gas going up or how many people were at the bank. In my family, legends (at least the ones I remember) usually it had a humorous element. I recall stories of exploding rocks, gunpowder rockets, attic ghosts, mousetraps that caught humans, and a dozen others. These stories ritually appeared at the holidays, repeated by their traditional tellers as a way of reaffirming bonds and confirming rank within the pack. To this day I miss the tales of my grandfather and grandmother and a part of the holiday season for me is the anticipation of hearing my father’s tales of his youth. Whenever I hear one of the family legends it makes me feel settled feeling, at peace.

The point I’m trying to convey is that we all have these types of stories and though some of them can translate into key elements of a novel or a short story there is more to being a novelist than having a seed of an idea. Being a novelist is the hard (and often thankless) work of growing and pruning the seeds of ideas into a topiary that can be appreciated by many. The nuance that is easily understood within our families doesn’t always translate to a larger audience who are bereft of the experiences which are integral parts of who we are. Not everyone is a novelist and that’s okay. NaNoWriMo seems to imply all it takes to create a manuscript is time spent in front of a screen or page of paper, sweat long enough and a novel will pop out. There’s also the implication you should be able to complete your manuscript within a month. I suspect that the time limit turns as many (potentially good) writers away from the art as it inspires to “try harder and focus” but I think the concept needs a little analysis. For the purpose of this thought experiment, I’m assuming the author will be writing a pretty basic (possibly even short) science fiction novel of 100 thousand words.

November has 30 days, at least according to the childhood rhyme, and to accomplish our goal we will need to write approximately 3300 words/day in order to be successful. Thirty days comes to 720 hours, however not all of them are available. We’ll assume a healthy 8 hours of sleep a night, taking away 240 hours off the top and bringing the time left to us down to 480 hours. We also have to take out the 8 hours a day spent making money to pay the bills (since the vast majority of authors also hold down a job to support themselves), that removes another 176 hours bringing our available writing time down to 304 hours. Now, if we break down our 100 thousand words over 304 hours we get a rate of approximately 329 words per hour, not an unmanageable wpm even for a one-finger typist. However, you must also remember that you must keep this rate up for every waking hour of every day of every week in the month. I also didn’t take out meals, bathroom breaks, taking the kids to school, grocery shopping, taking a shower, or generally living a life. Oh yes, and let’s not forget Thanksgiving, that holiday where you’ll share the quality time with your family which inspires you with the materials you’ll use to fuel your writing sessions, that will take a day out of your writing schedule too! You probably have caught onto the fact I don’t think this is a reasonable goal. It’s simply my opinion, though.

Many people, authors among them, promote the idea that cramming through NaNoWriMo makes you a better writer. They’re entitled to their opinion; maybe it does help them. Personally I don’t believe cramming equates to an increase in quality. I doubt that there’s objective evidence or statistics showing people who participate in NaNoWriMo are published more often than those who don’t. To me, NaNoWriMo sounds like a gimmick.

You should write because you love it. That should be your only motivation. Sure, you’ll want to be paid but let me assure you there are far more authors out there who aren’t making a living off their work than are. You must love to write, that’s the primary driver. A writing career isn’t a contest and there’s nothing magic about having a taskmaster standing over you as you type. You must love to write because writing the words down is one tenth of getting a novel published.

Farewell, Dear Friend

Dear Reader,


Last night I killed another pen. Well, “kill” is probably too strong a word – it ran out of ink. Still, as I sat staring at the drained writing instrument, I felt a slight pang of sadness for seeing it go. You see, I’m a writer who doesn’t compose everything on the virtual typewriter of a word processor. Occasionally I go through a period where words and ideas flow best from the tip of a pen.

This is especially true when I’m travelling. For some reason the vacuum of an airport draws ideas from my pen and at ten-thousand feet, while crammed in the window seat, I get pages of text. The same is true of hotel rooms. Something about the feelings of emptiness that come in a place that is meant to look like home but isn’t sparks my creativity. The pen is the vector through which this infection of ideas is transmitted to paper.

So it was with sadness I said goodbye to my Precise V5 fine point. Its blue ink saw the heroes of my latest novel from the doorstep of their homes to the gateway of the untamed wilderness. It was a trusty friend, a reliable antenna to the muse, and I will miss it.

Writers Write

It's taken me quite a while to work up to this blog. Two years ago I had the inspiration but it was unfocused – should I write about my beloved home state of Indiana and expound its virtues or should I write something else? I wanted to start a writer's blog but I didn't want to just write about writing because that seemed both self-serving and too restrictive. In July I penned my first entry, choosing the latter subject as the focus of my blogging based both on what I wanted to write and what didn't seem to be present on the web…but soon after I found myself mired in the doldrums of being unsure what I should say and how. Between those two pointed rocks I sat, pinioned and immobile while the world ambled past. There's something to be said for momentum. It can keep you in motion but it's equally good at keeping you stuck right where you are.

Today I penned a few words for another blog I write and I found myself in a groove. The blog itself (Blue Suede Souls) is about dancing and as I wrote I realized that I'd strayed afield of the subject of dance. I was writing about culture and pop art and generally having fun. Before I knew it I had over a page of text (as MS Word flies) and it'd seemed like nothing. The sentences just flowed from fingertip to keyboard to screen and on to publication. That's when it struck me. The problem was worrying over what I should write instead of just writing.

Back when I was in high school I had a creative writing teacher who handed down an old cliché about writers. He said "writers write – always." I think the point was to get us interested in journaling and keeping the sort of notes that many writers go back to for subjects for their novels and short stories. As I'm reentering my blog concept today I can't help but think on those words and realize the nugget of truth that makes any good cliché. I should write and I must write if I want to be a writer. There are no right subjects, there are no right approaches, there only is writing and not writing.

In my head I can feel the tickle of a good rationalization forming. It goes something like this: Over the last seven months I've found out that the company I work for is pulling up roots here in Indy, spitting its operations up, and sending them to the east and west coasts. This, of course, means practically everyone in the building will be losing their jobs. Starting in December the first people will be without work - merry freaking Christmas. Due to my role in the company (babysitter of the documents) I'm "lucky" and my job will be one of the last to go. I've got until October, 2010 before my job wends its way coastward. So I've been investing my time in fretting over making a paycheck and watching the place slowly dissolve.

That's the rationalization. It's probably a really valid one. It's an emotional time and it's hard to focus. The thing is that rationalization really is just an excuse. I firmly believe where there's an excuse there's something that'll never get done - and I don't want my writing career to be something that doesn't get done.

So, here's to writers writing. Here's to living the cliché. Here's to putting in the hard work that is being a writer - rain, shine, and when you really don't feel like putting pen to paper. Here's to having at it.