NaNoWriMo Chapter Four: Keeping the Faith

Here it is, the last week of NaNoWriMo. That went by fast didn’t it? If you’ve been keeping pace—or at least continuing to write, even if you’ve fallen behind—you probably have a lovely pile of pages of by now, and are perhaps barreling towards a completed first draft of your novel. The daily task of writing seems more daunting in the abstract than it does once you’ve made a habit of it, doesn’t it? Once it’s in your daily routine, it seems as though the words accumulate like so much snow falling outside your window.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Nano-ers, if your goal is to get your book published someday, the road ahead of you is long. You likely have years—perhaps many—ahead of you before you’re going to see your book in print (by traditional means anyway). I know this journey, and so I hope to end my little NaNoWrite series with some words of wisdom to keep you company on the difficult, but ever so worthwhile, road ahead.

Understand What You’re Up Against

I’ve written numerous times about a conversation I had with the writer Polly Devlin when I was twenty-five. She and I had become friendly through my work at Random House, and after at last confessing my writerly ambitions to her and noting that I was have trouble making progress on my novel, she enumerated the many challenges my life posed to accomplishing this goal. “You live in one of the busiest, most distracting cities in the world, you’re working full time in a stressful job, and you are absolutely terrified, I can see it. Well, let me tell you my dear,” she continued, “that fear isn’t going anywhere, so make peace with it. And of course you need the job. What time do you go to bed at night?” Around midnight, I told her. And what time did I wake up? Eight or so, just enough time to dress and get to work on time. Well, could I go to bed an hour earlier, get up in the morning to write? Somehow, this had never occurred to me, I’d always been an avowed night owl. “Let me tell you what will happen if you don’t. You will sitting here in ten years, wondering where the time went, novel still unfinished.” She said this with kindness but also with the certainty of an accomplished older woman who had no time for any excuse I might offer her.  Reader, I got up at 6:30 the very next morning. We may all dream of some isolated garret in which we can write in peace, but this is not the world we live in. You probably have a day job, friends, perhaps children, a life full of obligations. Find a way to carve out some time in your real life rather than fantasizing about more time magically appearing. It may not be as much time as you’d wish to spend on your writing, perhaps it’s only a half an hour a day, but if it’s regular, it’s enough.    

Enjoy Your Apprenticeship

Gifted writer and wise advice-giver Cheryl Strayed said something I loved during the most recent Dear Sugar podcast. She was asked what advice she’d give to her twenty-eight year old self. She recalled being obsessed with the idea of getting published while she was still in her twenties. She now knows, of course, that she had a ways to go; her first novel Torch would not be published until 2007, making Strayed nearly forty when it came out. She told the audience that she would tell her twenty-eight year old self to chill out, that had many years of being an apprentice to the craft left. In many ways, we writers stay apprentices of the craft all our lives: and this is a beautiful thing. Something my mentor, Pat Geary, told my senior seminar class (a group of bright eyed twenty-one year olds) has always stuck with me. She told us we should feel lucky to be writers, because it was something—barring loss of mental faculties—that we could do forever. Reading and writing are truly lifelong passions: unlike athletes or dancers, you don’t age out of your chance to make it as a writer. And perhaps the view from the road is a bit better after you have some success, but make no mistake, it is the same road.

Find Your People   

You may have noticed that in my both of my above points I reference conversations with mentors—a crucial element of you writing team, especially when you’re young and all this writing business feels so life and death. Writing can be lonely, and though you must indeed learn to enjoy your own company as a writer, the group of people you surround yourself with is crucial. Finding a mentor, fellow writers to share work with, the right agent, the right editor—these are the people who will bring your best work to fruition. Just as importantly, you have to know how to separate yourself from the people who are not helpful to you. Not every friend who is also a writer, for instance, will make the ideal reader for you. Not every professor is made to be a mentor, and not every agent is the right one to represent you. Be choosy with this group, because much depends on them. Finding people you can share your unfinished work with, and trust that they’ll help you improve upon it, is as rare as finding true love.

NaNoWriMo Chapter Three: Finding Momentum

Here we are Nano-ers (Nanophites? Nanophiles?), the third week of November. It went by fast, didn’t it? How is it going out there? Are you keeping up with your word count? Getting sleep? Staying healthy? Are your friends and family still speaking to you? I hope so. I’ve been thinking about you. We’ve loved hearing from you over on the Girl Friday Twitter (just a reminder that it’s not too late to join our awesome contest for a chance to win a free edit with GFP, details here).

If you’re still in it now, you’re serious. The lightweights dropped out after one week of trying to write over a thousand words a day, but not you, you came to win, you mean business. Even so, dear reader, you might be feeling like you could use a little wind in your sails, right? I mean, the days are getting really short, and work is really busy, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner. And it turns out that fifty thousand words is a lot of words (never mind the thirty thousand or so more you’ll probably write to finish out your first draft, you can worry about those in December). But this is what it’s all about, my friend, getting a whole bunch of words on the page and then weeding out a lot of those and replacing them with others until you have 80,000 good ones. Give or take. Maybe you made it through the past two weeks on sheer adrenaline, but that can’t last. What you need is momentum, something you can ride all the way to the shore. So how do you keep it up?

Let it Go. Let yourself write bad sentences, bad paragraphs, bad pages. Revel in the filth of your own worst writing! No one needs to see this (or should see it, really) until you’ve spent many months polishing what you joyfully, blithely spit out onto the pages today. Writing with abandon, rather than with precision, is the whole fun of working on a first draft, so let it fly! 

Don’t Edit. I repeat do not edit. Editing is a wonderful and necessary skill to have as a writer, but it is separate from writing: and the former can stifle the later in a heartbeat. Tell your inner editor to take a seat for now, you’ll see her sometime early next year, and boy will you need her. When I’m editing a draft of my work, I always print it out. I find it easier to get some space from it this way, and it’s a little trick to tell my brain, “Okay, Editrix, you’re up!” But she’s off the clock during first draft time, she’s at the bar drinking martinis with the copyeditor and the cover designer, and I don’t want to disturb her. She’s really sassy when she drinks.

Be Kind. Now is the time for encouraging self-talk. The voices of doubt can get loud at this point, trying to keep you from every finishing a draft. Maybe you read the first paragraph of this post, and thought, “Oh no! I’m behind on Nano! I’m not the real thing. I’ve let myself down, I’ve let everyone down!” But take heart! There is still time. And if you end up with 40K instead of 50K (or 30K for that matter), you still win as long as you keeping going. The world is going to tell you no plenty of times with your writing, you’ll learn that soon enough if you haven’t already. Use this time to practice telling yourself yes.

NaNoWriMo Chapter Two: Building Good Habits

What do you need to make it as a writer? Talent? Ambition? Discipline? An enormous trust fund that allows you to quit your day job?

Sure, you need those things (okay, not the last one, but it couldn’t hurt). But whether your version of “making it” is getting through your 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo this year, getting a six-figure book deal, or anything in between, you definitely need good habits, because without them, none of the rest of these things will matter.

What I love about NaNoWriMo is that its very concept dispenses with any precious notions of what it means to write a book. NaNo does not concern itself with airy-fairy visions of the muse alighting on your shoulder and inspiring greatness; the only goal is to reach the word count. Technically this means that you could write the sentence “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” five thousand times in a row and complete the NaNoWriMo challenge, though we all know that doesn’t end well for the author. (On a related note, if you ever find yourself saying, “You know, if only I could get somewhere really isolated and quiet where I didn’t have any other responsibilities, I could definitely get my novel done,” you should probably watch The Shining.)

We can safely assume that most NaNoWriMo participants are not taking a sabbatical from their jobs to write their drafts. They are also, presumably, still eating, sleeping, and attending to their children, pets, and anyone else whose survival depends on them. But for a month, they are making time in their everyday lives to write. And a month is long enough to build some really good habits. No one is suggesting that you keep up the pace of 50K per month, but think of November as boot camp for the rest of your writing life. You’re doing something to break yourself in that will bolster you for years to come.

I write for an hour a day, a not terribly unmanageable or impressive amount really. The hard thing is the “every day” part of the equation. That’s the part that gets the words on the page and that carries me through the crappy days and into the one where the muses do decide to show up. It’s the part that keeps the story fresh in my mind so that dialogue comes to me while I’m walking my dog, characters reveal themselves as I’m in the shower (not literally, thank god), and plot twists occur to me just as I’m falling asleep.

For years I’ve been writing in the mornings before I go to work. I do this so I don’t have to decide to write. I’m just on autopilot: coffee, breakfast, some fiancée and dog snuggling, and then butt in chair for one hour. I’m not some kind of madwoman who just likes getting up early, but over the years I’ve come to enjoy this little habit around which my life revolves. The first thing I do every day is something that is mine. The earlier hours are the easiest to control. Once you are on e-mail and out in the world in those post-8:00 a.m. hours, anyone can make a demand for your time and attention.

Maybe mornings won’t work for you—perhaps it’s your lunch hour or the hours before bed that will serve you best. Whatever you do, find something that will stick. You may be able to get through November on sheer adrenaline (and coffee and bourbon), but when the calendar turns to December, your habits are what will keep you going.

Don’t forget to enter GFP’s NaNo Contest! Details here.

NaNoWriMo Chapter One: Getting Motivated

Even though I’ve never officially participated, I’m a fan of NaNoWriMo because it celebrates something I love: writers supporting each other and building community.  

Writing is a lonely journey as it mostly involves being by oneself, butt in chair, typing away. One of the best arguments for workshops—either in an MFA program or otherwise—is that they can be a great place to pick up mentors and writing buddies. Beta readers and writing groups have their perils but a sense of connection is important to seeing you through the many years you’ll likely be working on your book before anyone in the professional realm (agents, editors) gets involved. Having a second (perhaps third and fourth) pair of eyes on your work is crucial, but moreover, you need the support, the shoulder to cry on during the difficult moments of writing your book, and the perhaps even more challenging process of trying to get published.

In celebration of NaNo this month, I’m going to be sharing my thoughts on four of the pillars of my writing life: getting motivated, building habits, finding momentum, and keeping the faith. I hope to inspire you and make you feel less alone: which is, incidentally, what I believe all good writing does.

I’ll start with a simple question: why bother writing?

No really, why? There are a million things you could do that would be more immediately gratifying than sitting in your chair making things up, including but not limited to: hanging out with your friends, exercising, sleeping, cuddling your dog, catching up on Empire, or reading a book that some other hard working soul has already written. Here is a harsh truth for you: no one will care if you don’t write today. Unless you are currently under contract, it is unlikely anyone will even notice. I say this not to be harsh—I’m on your side—but this is the bargain.

Your reason for writing doesn’t have to be eloquent or noble, it’s okay if you never even tell anyone else what it is. It just has to be deeply meaningful to you or it won’t see you though the hours and weeks and years between the beginning of your writing journey, and that magical transformative moment when someone else—publishing professionals, readers—will actually care whether or not you write today. And even then, you will need to care ten times as much, because even if you become a bestselling, prize-winning author, everyone’s life will go on if you never write another word, I promise you.

I should say here too that your reason needn’t have anything to do with commercial success, recognition, or even readers. Perhaps you want to write because it helps you sort out your thoughts, or to record your memories for future generations. These are fine reasons, so long as you feel inspired by them. Writing has excellent side benefits, after all: it can make you more empathetic and thoughtful, and in our overstimulated beeping buzzing world, it can carve out space for those two rare treasures: quiet and solitude.

Know why you write. Answer the question, and hold onto that answer in the days to come, days that will test you with the world’s indifference. Think of this as your personal mission statement, the few crucial words to carry you through as you make your way to the 50K mark.