(cross-posted at StoryADay.org)

One of my absolute favourite blogs in the world is WhoDunnKnit by Deadly Knitshade. It is funny, absurdly creative and did I mention funny?

Knitters are fun!

I’m always inspired by the posts because in them I see someone doing what she loves, doing a really professional job, and committing to her art in a way that anyone with a passion would admire.

I’ve been subscribed for a while now, but today I finally read the ‘about’ page on the blog.

Read The Rest At StoryADay.org – and please comment, if you have an answer to the question I end this piece with.

In my last post I talked about the importance of warm-up writing. It’s magic. It gets you past the creaky, just-woken-up feeling in your writing and straight into the part where you remember why you love to do this.

But doesn’t it seem like warm-up writing will steal time from your ‘real’ projects?

Making Time

I’m always saying that no-one should wait until they ‘have’ time or ‘find’ time to write. You need to make time.

As a twist on that, warm-up writing actually grants us me more time to write the good stuff.

Time Crunch

Last year I took part in my first NaNoWriMo. I also had a part-time job and a family to look after. Finding time to write 1667 words every day for 30 days was a challenge.

At first I skipped the warm-up writing because it just seemed like such a waste of time.

Gradually, however, I realized I was still doing my warm-up writing; only I was writing it into the novel. Starting my novel writing every day was painful, stilted, creaky. Only when I got to about 750 did it start to flow.

So I started taking the 20 minutes to write my 750 words on things that didn’t matter.

Then, I would plunge into my novel, fresh and raring to go. Before I knew what had happened I was flying past my daily deadlines.

Of course, I started doing warm-up writing every day (OK, most days. I’m not that smart.)

Used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com.

It’s hard enough to find time to write. Then, when you finally do, you face the paralysis of the blank page/blinking cursor.

The most useful tool I have discovered for getting past that frozen moment of potential is to do some warm-up writing.

Morning Pages And The Truth Point

I first discovered this technique in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way in the form of her morning pages.

Cameron advises you to sit down first thing every morning and write three pages’ worth of nothing in particular, just to see what come out. She lets you get several weeks into the program before asking,

Have you discovered the Truth Point yet?

And I had.

I discovered that somewhere on the second page (if I was writing longhand), my writing went from being awkward to flowing. Try it. After a page or two, you’ll find something to write about or you might just find your descriptions getting more interesting, your turn of phrase more entertaining and natural.

After writing ‘nothing’ for three pages, you’ll be able to plunge into an actual writing project and be at your best on the first line.

750Words.com

Flash forward a decade or two, and the website 750words.com offers an online version of Morning Pages, complete with somewhere to do your writing in case you don’t want to write on your blog or in a notebook that someone might find.

The host of 750words.com credits Cameron with inspiring the site, and says that 750 words is the ‘truth point’ for many people.

I have writing friends who blog first thing in the morning just as a way of warming up. Other people write letters to friends.

Tips For Warm-Up Writing

The only thing I would add is that, like 750words.com, you should be free to protect your warm-up writing. It’s not meant for display. It’s meant as warm-up. If you’re happy posting your warm-up writing to a blog or posting it off toa  friend, great. But protect yourself as much as you need to.

And no sneaking off and reading Twitter or Facebook, or your favourite author, now!

Knitters, crocheters, yarn-fans everywhere, this one is for you:

You’re working on a project. You’re proud that you’ve almost finished but then, the unthinkable happens. You run out of wool!

What to do? You know you’ll never find the right colour or dyelot at your local yarn store, because this project has been on the needles for years.

Ravel It

Try looking for the wool in someone else’s stash, listed on Ravelry (you are a member, aren’t you? Aren’t you?!).

Lots of people have the odd ball of yarn in their stash that they put up for sale or exchange. It’s all in the database, waiting for you to find it.

Go here and enter your yarn name.

Check the  ”will trade or sell” box (this means someone has marked the yarn, in their stash, as something they’re willing to part with)

Scroll further down to make other refinements to your search. (You can even  filter it by country too, to avoid int’l shipping rates)

If you can’t find it on Ravelry, you can also look on ebay, which often has a good yarn stash, but less likelihood that someone will simply swap with you.

“HAPPY NEW YEAR!”

Someone shouted. Colors exploded overhead. She picked up her gun and ran.

Things I learned from NaNoWriMo

Outlining doesn’t have to kill creativity

(In fact, it can free you to be more creative.)

I read a great article about a month before NaNoWriMo ¹ in which a confirmed ‘Pantser’ ² discovered the joys of partial outlining. She realised — and taught me — that you don’t have to outline everything. You get a partial outline down and then, when it starts to feel like a slog, start writing. Which is something Daniel Pinkwater told me he does, in an interview years ago, and he’s pretty successful. But somehow it took me until now to get the message. Plus she went on to say that she feels free to start outlining again, once she reaches a point in her novel when she’s slowing down.

Lightbulb!

So that’s what I did.

It occurred to me that this is exactly what I do with short stories, it’s just that with a short story it is entirely possible to hold all the outline in your head. Usually I have an idea, and a sense of where the story will end, then I start writing. Once I’ve written a few paragraphs I get a sense of what kind of story it’s going to be, the twists will occur along the way and exactly where it’s going. But there is only one plotline; there are only one or two characters that count; and only 1-2,ooo words to cram them into.

With a novel I knew I couldn’t hold everything in my head, and that thought intimidated me. Until my brilliant new friend pointed out that outlines don’t have to be complete, restrictive or done by anyone else’s method.

So I outlined my book, with lots of scenes that I knew would happen at the start and vague ‘this sort of thing happens here’ for the rest of it. Every time I got stuck, or my word count slackened, I would take a day to outline the next section. Inevitably, the next time I sat down I’d be at my day’s wordcount and beyond it, before I’d even been to the cookie jar. ³

Inspiration Comes Second

Sure, you can wander around the world looking for inspiration, but I have found ⁴ that it is only when I start writing that I,

1. Start to write well ⁵;
2. Become inspired;
3. Find story ideas and bits of dialogue leaping out at me from all around.

There were days when sitting down and typing felt like — as they say in Scotland — pulling teeth. But because I was determined not to fall behind in my wordcount, I sat and wrote. Slowly. The first 300 words were torture. It took forever to reach 600. But once I was past about 750 words, things started to fly. If I could just get those first 600 words down, I knew I could reach 1667 ⁶

I came across a great passage in Russell T. Davies’ book about writing for the new Doctor Who series. I’ll quote it again and again because it is true and simple and brilliant. He’s horrifically behind on a deadline. Everyone is waiting for him to deliver pages — the production crew, the cast, everyone — and so he’s panicking and smoking too much and going for long walks, trying to solve the problems he’s written his characters into ⁷

Finally at some ungodly hour, he types,

“…I couldn’t work out how to do it, where to do it, when. All day, gone. Pissed off. Then I sat down to write, with no solution, and … thought of it! Immediately. Obvious. Simple. If  I’d started sooner…ah, the only way to write is to write. For all my banging on about what to do if you’re really stuck on something, there’s nothing dumber than sitting there writing nothing at all.” ⁸

Get Away From The Desk

And once I had my story up and running, going out into the world was an excellent thing. Grocery shopping let me overhear how people talk to each other, or dream up solutions to plot problems. Working lunch duty at my children’s school gave my brain a break from thoughts of my characters. Walking around town gave me illustrations of buildings, cars, posters, people, smells, trees, memories.

It’s all very well trying to pay attention to these things when you’re not working on a project (and if you’re a writer then you do, you must, you can’t help yourself), but they take on a shimmering urgency when you’re deep in a work. So get out into the world.

Ration Your Reading

Of course, the first thing any aspiring writing should be doing is reading, but it has to be the right kind of reading if you’re going to read and still have time to write.

I discovered that I was limiting the amount of links I followed to fascinating articles, even from people I respect and admire. I limited the magazine reading. I scanned Facebook, rather than plunging in. I didn’t check my ‘celebrity Twitter’ list for a month and we all got along fine. I did not read the back of cereal packets, the BBC news site, blogs or forums.

I did read a little on Wikipedia to help me out of a technical jam in my novel, but I resisted clicking on all the links in the article. And I stopped at the end. I did make time to read books by authors I admire and who inspire me to sit down and write. I did watch TV shows written by writers who make me gnaw the furniture with envy at their skill. Anything else, I deemed a waste of Time I Could Be Writing.

People Can Be Surprisingly Supportive

Tell people you’re writing a novel and they ⁹ get really excited for you. I have friends and family who were checking in and demanding to read the book when it’s finished. And I have to say I did not expect my wonderful husband to be so enthused about the project. It inevitably meant more work for him, as he gave me time away from the kids, took care of extra loads of dishes and laundry, tidied while I wrote. But he was genuinely excited about the project and didn’t seem to resent the extra work at all. (Actually I suspect he might have been glad to have me out from under his feet some of the time. He’s terribly organized). That’s not to say he wasn’t relieved when I took back some of the household duties at the end of November. But my point is, people can surprise you with their supportiveness if you’re doing something that makes your eyes light up.

There’s tons more that I learned, (I’ve made some notes for next time) but I’m stopping now. To get back to the novel.

Shouldn’t you be writing, too?

I crossed the finish line (50,000 words) of National Novel Writer’s Month after a marathon 5K word day on the Sunday before NaNo actually finished.

In the two weeks since then I’ve added less than 5K words to the novel, which is not finish. I left it in the midst of what I hope will be the climax, because I got stuck. Up until that point I had been free to write my characters into tricky situations with the thought that I’d deal with the solutions later. Turns out: dealing with the solutions takes time and thinking. That’s one lesson for next year’s NaNo. Here are some more notes.

• Keep the wordcount a little ahead of the game to allow for the creative slow-down towards the end of the month. Maybe tweak the wordcount targets, to allow for more words in the middle two weeks and fewer in the last week.
• Don’t get too far ahead because I’ll get lazy/ burned out.
• Do outline.
• Get main character interacting with other characters sooner.
• “Make your bastards loveable and your heroes weak” (RTDavies)
• Do take time during the challenge to outline the next section, flesh out character sketches. It’ll make the next writing block go faster.
• Do consider warm-up writing in the morning even if it’s not novel-text. Don’t spend more than 30-45 mins on it.
• Do have other commitments during the month. Preferably most days. At the same time.

OK, it’s here: the final push. Eight days to go. Eight days and 16,300 words to go before I can declare myself a ‘winner’.

I was so pleased with myself — having so much fun — last Thursday. I had written well all month so far, in the face of some adversity. I was hooked. This was it. This was what I was destined to do: write silly novels about adventures and mystery in a parallell world.

Then Friday rolled around. I took A to a doctor’s check-up, came home and tidied up the dishes, but by then it was time for lunch duty. After lunch duty I wrote a few hundred words but realized I had to tidy up the house a bit and do some laundry and I really ought to rake the leaves that all fell down at once two days before. The boys came out and jumped around in the leaves too, which made it far too much fun and there was no way I could force them inside and sit them down in front of something electronic so that I could write. No way. Then, when it started to rain and the boys were in baths, I realised I still had to make a snack to bring for the Ladies Christmas Ornament Basket Bingo night I had somewhat tentatively added to my schedule for that night. Plus I had stayed up past midnight the night before and I was tired. Waah!

The Ladies’ Christmas Ornament Basket Bingo turned out to be a lot more fun than I would have expected – especially when a small faction decamped to Molly Maguires at the end of the night. I ended up chauffeuring some of them home. Me! But there was another late night and no more writing done.

On Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed and took A to his First Penance retreat at the church (it was a couple of hours of people talking and some candle-lighting and crafts, which kept the kids enthralled, along with a video of a guy telling a story about his kid which made all the grownups cry). Then home, lunch, an afternoon of sloth and an evening slumped in front of Doctor Who (Ah, DT how I love thee, but Russel T Davies didn’t half turn you into a wuss at the end, there).

I was starting to feel the pressure of two days with no significant word count by yesterday afternoon. Kevin very graciously suggested that I take the after-dinner portion of the day to plough ahead, so I cheerfully made said dinner (steak pie and chips, brussel sprouts and beans, thank you very much — molto bene!) and then scurried off and left the cleaning-up-and-boy-wrangling to him.

4000 words later, at 9PM, I emerged, blinking and victorious. OK, a few paltry hundred of those words were written over the previous days, but the bulk was last night. Woo-hoo.

So here we are, eight days from the end and, as planned I’m sitting at the foot of Mount Climax, looking up, nervously. Today, I have to take my characters and get them all in place for the final push. I have to gather them at the foot of the mountain and place ravenous dinosaurs behind them (not literally. No dinos in this book, sorry A.). Then I have to light a forest fire behind the dinosaurs. My characters must have nowhere to go but up – and quickly. I might hover a rescue helicopter (or maybe giant eagles. Giant eagles?! Honestly, Professor, was that the best you could do?!) over the summit, but it’ll be in the clouds, so they can’t see it. As they get closer they might hear it, but then the storm clouds must roll in so that they don’t know if it’ll even be there when they reach the summit or whether they’ll be stuck there waiting for the ravenous, scalded and pissed-off predators to arrive and devour them.

Sounds like fun. See you on the other side.

Well, here we are at the half-way point of NaNoWriMo and I’m still writing.

I’m slightly under a day behind on the word count targets and that’s only because a, I spent the day being sociable yesterday b, I’ve been fighting off strep/tonsillitis and c, I spent some time on Friday not writing by trying to untangle all the threads I have been spinning.

PROGRESS REPORT

In Week One the challenge was just sitting down and churning out that many words each day (must write an average of 1667 a day to meet the 50K word goal by Nov 30). I would write for three quarters of an hour and feel really proud of myself and then I’d check my wordcount and find out I’d written 358 words. Almost without fail. Getting to 600 words was torture. Then, somewhere around 750 words, things would start to flow and I would start to fly — and then I’d usually find I’d run out of time. A session later in the day pushed me well past my goal most days.

I am careful not to overshoot by too much because I know myself. If I ever sat down and wrote 5,000 words in one day I would feel so damn pleased with myself that I probably wouldn’t write anything meaningful for days afterwards (“Ah, I have a buffer. 358 words today will be fine!”)

In Week Two, which is apparently when a lot of people lose enthusiasm and drop out, I really started to feel like maybe I could do this. My characters and plot lines were coming together, I was starting to see how they interacted and what was going to happen to them. I was starting to find sitting down to write much easier, now that my mental muscles were warmed up.

DEALING WITH DEMONS

This is now, officially Week Three. I’m not sure what other NaNo-ers say about it, but I’m kind of wishing now that I had boosted my wordcount a bit in the past two weeks. I sense that things are going to go a little slower now. I’ve spend the past two weeks starting stories, setting my characters in motion, letting them roll along and explore their world. Now I need to start intertwining their stories. I have to make sure that timelines make sense. I have to get everyone to where they need to be, at the right times, knowing what they are supposed to know NOW and not a moment sooner or later.  Hmmm.

The demons I wrestled with in the earlier weeks were more of the ‘aargh, this isn’t perfect, the pace is faltering, this could be better’ type. I subdued them with a quick “Yeah, you know what? Tell me about it after the first draft is done” to the solar plexus. They were pretty easily vanquished.

This week I suspect I’m going to be wrestling a different demon and I’m going to have to find a similar move. How do i defeat the ‘you’re getting it all wrong. This is  a big mess AND you’re running out of time!” Demon?

Watch this space!

I was making some writing notes this morning and reflecting on heroes and what qualities they should have. I’m not sure the two characters in this story are quite on the same page…

“I’ve found him at last: the perfect man.”
“What, him?”
“Absolutely! OK, he’s a little short, but what a body! And he looks really young for his age.”
“I’ll give him that.”
“He’s quiet, and I’ll bet he’s a great listener.”
“Just because he’s not talking, doesn’t mean he’s listening…”
“Oh, hark at you, old married woman. You’re just jealous. I mean, look at those muscles; the way his veins bulge out – that there is a man in peak physical condition. I’d love to run my hands over those biceps!”
“And how were you planning on getting close enough to do that?”
“I have my ways. Don’t give me that look, I do! And speaking of looks, look at those eyes. Such a penetrating gaze.”
“Looks kind of cold, to me. And not just his eyes, actually. Apparently it’s not true, what they say about big feet…”
“Tsk! You are so shallow!”
“Gail?”
“Yes?”
“You know you can never have him, right?”
“I know. But maybe I’ll find my hero for real one day, eh?”
“One that’s not made of marble?”
“Maybe. Oh well. Let’s go and see if they have any postcards of him in the gift shop. Arivaderci, my David!”