Category: writing process (Page 14 of 14)

NaNo 2014: Week #2 Recap

November 15, 2014 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

Didn’t reach my word count goals for this week. It’s been particularly difficult to get “in the flow” so my writing has been in stops and starts and I can only punch out a few hundred words a day. I hate to blame my adorable five-month old daughter, The Noodle, but she’s not a great napper, so I can only get 30 minutes of uninterrupted writing time when she naps (and she either naps twice or three times a day, maybe).

The trouble is that sometimes those 30 minutes have to be devoted to grading papers and lesson planning.

So my progress this week has not been great. However, I’ve managed to do some more outlining, so at least I have a better idea of how I want the second half of the novel to go.

One of my ideas: Merlin must rely on Morgana to help him fight the big bad because he’s lost his powers. I’ll see how it goes…

NaNo 2014: Week #1 Recap

November 10, 2014 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

In order to finish the rough draft of my novel by December 30, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve done NaNo in the past (I won the challenge in 2009 and wrote a fabulously bad novel), so this experience is not new to me. But what *is* new this year is that I’m using NaNo as a way to complete the rough draft of a novel I plan to publish. So the pressure is on to write 50,000 words this month, more so than in past years of NaNo.

My first week has not been spectacular. I’ve found it hard to write after a long day at work, or the baby has demanded my attention for most of the day and I can only write for the 45 minutes she manages to nap. Or I’ve had to grade papers (day job = teacher).

I’m up to 7,806 words, which is almost double what I had written for the novel before November 1st (current total word count for the novel: 15,750). So in a sense, NaNo has already helped me increase my productivity. So that’s good.

But I’m also finding out that I am not a fast writer. I have moments where I get going and the words come faster, but for the most part, I just do not come up with ideas, words, lines of dialogue, descriptions, or plot developments fast enough.

This past weekend I tried a new strategy to see if I could get my word count up: Using the “Writercopter” (Courtesy of Hillary Rettig)

And so far, it has been helpful. I am not a writer who outlines her story (i.e.: a “planner,” as many in the NaNo community call it), but I do sketch out the basic structure of my story by figuring out what should happen in each chapter (and this is all very sketchy and rough; ex.: “Ch. 8, Merlin uses some kind of spell to find the Nomad [she is wandering on a distant planet]; she uses the whetstone to sharpen her sword and defeat the spirit creature that has stalked her”). So the Writercopter method works for me because I can skip from chapter to chapter whenever the mood strikes me, or I get an inspiration for a particular part of the story. Yesterday, when I was struggling with Chapter 6, I skipped ahead to Chapter 7 and then even did a little bit with Chapter 12.

Unfortunately, even this method hasn’t increased my word count by all that much. My new goal is 2,000 words per day. This should get me over the 50,000 hump. But so far today, I’ve written 46 words (and I just wrote them two minutes ago so I could claim to have written something before posting this blog).

The only thing that gives me comfort at this point is that my average per day is 780 words — which is more than the 350 George R.R. Martin supposedly writes each day.

Pottermore and Me

October 22, 2014 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

At first I felt guilty about joining Pottermore and wasting precious hours not writing. This was two days ago. But now, on my third day of “life with Pottermore” I am feeling slightly less guilty. Still guilty, but less so.

Yes, Pottermore is still a massive time-suck that is completely useless (WHY am I obsessed with dueling?! WHY?! I suck at it!), but it’s also helpful for my writing in two ways. One, it’s strangely inspirational. J.K. Rowling, who started off as just a random nobody who spent her off hours writing a novel about a boy wizard, is now one of the most successful authors in history. I can guarantee that I’ll never be as famous or as widely read as J.K. Rowling, but her success story is inspirational nevertheless. I’m not sure why that is — why Rowling and not, say George R.R. Martin? I have no answer for why I find Rowling an inspiration and not Martin, but I do. Perhaps it’s her accessibility. Not the kind of accessibility that lets me know what she had for lunch or which football team she’s rooting for, but accessibility when it comes to her writing life. And that’s exactly what Pottermore is; it’s accessibility. It allows fans to get access to her writing process and the way her imagination works. I love reading about how authors work, how they get ideas. I love seeing what methods they use, and I love to use some of their methods for my own work. It keeps my mind stimulated and makes the act of writing seem fresh. So Pottermore *is* helpful in that sense; I’m getting a glimpse into the mind of the Harry Potter author and seeing how she created her stories and her world.

It’s also helpful as part of my “stimuli” theory. When I’m writing a fantasy story, I need fantasy-based stimuli to keep my imagination buzzing. By using the interactive experience of Pottermore, by exploring the world of Harry Potter, I am able to generate ideas for my own fictional world. The swish of a cat’s tail in the darkness of Privet Drive is enough to get my mind racing with story possibilities. The rows upon rows of dusty boxes at Olivander’s stimulate my senses — the smell of the dust; the crinkle of the parched boxes; the pale, hazy light from the storefront window that streaks across the old wizard as he searches the endless stacks. The images and graphics and icons — they all work like little electrical shocks, reanimating my creativity and propelling me to open Scrivener so I can get back to my own novel.

So yes, I should probably spend less time on Pottermore and more time actually writing. But there is a place for Pottermore in my writing life; I just need to make sure I don’t get stuck there.

Warming up to write

October 13, 2014 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

I have a problem. I know I should write everyday — and I am happier when I do — but I can’t simply sit down for 30 minutes or an hour and start writing. I need a “warm-up.” Basically, I need a (lengthy) period of time before I actually put words to paper in which I let my mind wander and my imagination imagine. I need to visualize things, play around with story ideas, and just basically get lost in my own head for awhile before I can start writing. And this presents a problem because my warm-up time often exceeds the actual time I have to get my writing for the day done.

Since my little one arrived (she’s four months old), I don’t have hours to devote to warming-up and then writing. I have maybe a half-hour, maybe an hour total, but that’s not enough time to rev up my imagination and get through my daily word count (which at this point is 600 words a day, IF I want to make my deadline of December 30).

Does anyone else need a “warm-up” time before she can actually sit down and start writing? Or am I alone in my sorrows?

One thing I’ve found helpful — since I don’t have enough time to do my “warm-ups” — is to basically immerse myself in stimuli all day long that keep my imagination flowing. For example, my current novel is a retelling of Arthurian legends (basically, Merlin trying to save the world, but in the present day), so I listen to Celtic-sounding music all day, read books and watch T.V. that are fantasy-based, and try to only read and look at things that put my imagination into the world of King Arthur, the Middle Ages, dragons and monsters, magic, etc. etc. So far my total immersion plan has been going pretty well. I feel like what I’m doing is “feeding” my imagination all day long so that when I do finally get a few minutes to sit down and write, my imagination is “full” and I can get to the business of writing without wasting time.

The difficulty, however, is when I can’t do total immersion. At the moment, I am completely stalled with the novel because I haven’t been able to immerse myself in stimuli. So as a result, I haven’t written in over a week and I’m not feeling the “heat” of the story anymore. I need an emergency dose of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, two doses of my Sandman comics, and a flip through the new Brandon Sanderson book I just downloaded (The Way of Kings). If nothing else, I need to start listening to my old Clannad albums (Legend for the win!).