Tag Archives: getting ideas

Is It Too Soon to Think About NaNoWriMo?

29 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Ann, Experiences, Inspiration

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Last week, Mike talked about NaNoWriMo and getting started now in your planning. Since every writer has a different process, I thought I’d throw in my thoughts, too.

I started doing NaNoWriMo in 2002, and continued on steadily until about 2007, “winning” each year and setting new challenges. Over the next couple of years following, I tried it and stalled out, and then eventually decided that NaNoWriMo wasn’t a good practice for me anymore and I haven’t even attempted for the last three years.

Being a chronic overachiever, I wanted to do more than just 50,000 words; I wanted to write a whole novel–usually in the 80-100k range for me. In my second winning year I achieved 50,000 words in about 10 days, and finished the novel at 100k words in 22 days. It was a rush, and a lot of fun and I’m glad I did it, because it taught me what I could do when I put my mind to it. (Even if I never touched it again.)

During Novembers, I always went in with a plan–some kind of outline. Unlike Mike, I didn’t start thinking too hard about it several months ahead (I was working on other novels the rest of the year). I like to write while the fire is hot–if I’m feeling passionate enough about a story that I can write 50k in a month, then if I start planning it in May, it’s going to be written long before November rolls around. I’m fickle and when I’m invested in a story, I turn out the first draft quickly. Any story I started planning now, well, honestly, I would probably be bored of by the time November rolled around, and I’d start on a new idea instead.

That said, the years I faltered, I didn’t have much of a plan, and I’m certain that’s one of the reasons I didn’t complete. (Another reason was burn-out, and that’s what fed into lack of planning.)

So, I agree with Mike in that a plan is going to make your trip through November easier. I usually started digging into my planning and research in September or October, and inevitably during November, I would make changes to my outline as I ran into issues or had new ideas. But I had something going in, and that’s important. My outlines ran anywhere from 2 pages to 20 pages, and some stories worked well that way and others didn’t.

As we get nearer, I’ll talk about varying story-survival techniques that have (and haven’t) worked for me, and maybe you’ll find something that sparks an idea for you.

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So the question, of course, is do I plan on doing NaNoWrimo this year? Truthfully, I haven’t decided. I don’t have any burning stories that scream “write me in November” at the moment. If I do between now and then, I may dive in. If I don’t then I’ll cheer on Mike and the rest of you from the sidelines.

Never Too Soon For NaNo!

25 Friday May 2012

Posted by in Experiences, Inspiration, Mike

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National Novel Writing Month hits this November (just as it does every year). Are you going to write a novel for it?

“But Mike, that’s still five months away. It’s way too early to think about it for now.”

If you’re really considering writing a novel (and more power to you if you pull it off), you probably know by now that it’s not something most can just sit down and do on a whim. Think about the novels you read and the time investment you must put into them (even if you’re a fast reader). Now think about how much harder it is to compose than to consume.

Short stories are relatively easy to read and significantly easier to write. Yes, you probably need to do a bit of research and planning for a short story, but when you consider that most are a sixth to a tenth as long as the average novel you can get an appreciation for the added complexity of novel writing.

So why am I suddenly talking about NaNo here at the end of May?

Well, as you might have guessed, I’m considering throwing my hat into the novel-writing challenge again this year. Unlike my first foray into NaNoWriMo in 2009, where I went into the challenge with minimal preparation–I wasn’t even exactly sure of where I wanted to set the story until I was already writing it!–if I’m going to do a massive writing project this November I want to be really ready for it.

Yes, I completed the challenge in 2009 and wrote my 50,000 words, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a success. I’ve not looked at those words since. They weren’t a complete waste, though, as I generated some ideas for other stories out of them. For this year, I’d like to get a stronger result.

If you feel the same way and you’re considering doing NaNoWriMo this or any year, it behooves you to put in the work before you put in November’s work, whether it a be a month or five months. Writing a novel isn’t something most people can just up and do in a month on a lark.

I’m sure Ann and I will talk more about NaNoWriMo before, during, and after November, but let this column be a reminder that it’s going to be here sooner than you anticipate. Start preparing for it now and you’ll undoubtedly find it easier to succeed in November. That’s my plan, anyway!

All that said, I need to practice what I preach and get myself ready for November, and I’ll be sharing my experiences in the process with you as I go.

Right now, this is what I think I need to have ready before November 1st. This list is subject to grow over time:

  • Research (mostly 17th-19th century France)
  • Outline (I’ve never been any good at this, but it will help)

That’s not a very helpful list, is it? Well, I’ll keep revising it and, as I said, expanding it.

Are you anticipating NaNoWrimo?  How far in advance do you want to start your planning?

Start Again?

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Advice, Ann, Inspiration

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We as storytellers often get very attached to our words and ideas. We write something, and even if we’re willing to revise it, we still won’t change it that much. If we’ve written words, we want to fix those words. If we have written a character or a plot point, we try to shape those over and over again, to get the right image.

What if you started over completely?

Author Jodi Meadows mentioned recently that she had wholesale “deleted” the first draft of the third book in her series. Why? She had made so many changes to the first and second books after they were edited and revised for publication that the third book would require an intense amount of revision just to fit with the other two books. Instead, she decided to start over.

Are words sacred? Sometimes it feels like it, especially when we’re carving out time to tell our stories and just starting. Every hundred and thousand words feel like they were written in blood. But the truth is, they weren’t. Storytellers are creative people, and although it might not always feel like it, our creativity is endless. However, that creativity can be stifled, and it can be stifled by our own stories when we stubbornly hold on to a story that isn’t quite right.

A while back I realized many of my stories had the themes or plots or other elements in common. The stories themselves probably wouldn’t be recognizable as “same” to someone else (unless they were really analyzing them), but I saw those similarities. I realized–no, not that I had a limited amount of stories in my head and I was completely unoriginal–but that there are themes, plots, and other elements that I will hammer out over and over. Why? Near as I can tell, it’s because there is this formless, unspeakable idea in my mind, and I keep writing it over and over again in different ways until I finally hit upon it in a way that will satisfy my subconscious and my muse. Then I will theoretically move on to something else.

(It might also be that you’re attracted to a certain theme or story type. The advice still holds true.)

Are you stuck on a story that just doesn’t seem quite “right?” Try approaching it in a completely different manner. Change characters, settings, or story arcs, and see what happens. (If you’re feeling really brave, you could even change your medium.) You aren’t wasting words. You’re exploring ideas. You might not keep one or the other, or you might keep both. What you discover in your multiple versions might help another, or they might be completely distinct to one another. You might even find yourself able to take a story, such as Jodi did, and restart it from the beginning–same world, same characters–and turn it into something new.

Be brave. Every time you challenge yourself, you improve yourself as a storyteller and you are not wasting your words.

Watch Your Television

13 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Advice, Ann, Experiences

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I have a love/hate relationship with the television. I don’t tend to watch broadcast television (I haven’t had cable in about a decade), but I do turn my Netflix subscription on and off, and when it’s on, I spend a lot of time with it. I also have a tendency to re-watch the many DVDs we own. This last weekend, I binged on a marathon to catch up with all the shows my friends have been gleeing about for the last few months.

But why do I dislike the television? (1) I feel like it spends time dragging me passively into their stories instead of considering my own. (2) It’s an easy way for me to waste several hours buried in another reality.

Isn’t that the same as reading? I’d never tell someone not to read a book.

When reading, we are engaged, but it’s not entirely passive as we have to make an effort (however small) to consume it. On the other hand, with the television, it’s easy to just shut your brain off and zone into the glowing screen. Engagement is a matter of choice.

I have many highly creative friends who watch television. It’s clearly not sucking out their creative potential. Why should it sap mine? As I watched television this weekend, I got an idea for a story that I’ve been stuck on for a while. I spent more time thinking about that story this weekend than I have in weeks. This isn’t the first time that’s happened, either. During some of my most prolific parts of my life, I avidly watched DVDs every day. It certainly didn’t slow me down. Most of the time when I’m watching television now, I’m knitting or spinning and I’m looking for something to engage in with the rest of my active mind.

So I’m going to revise my thoughts. The television isn’t the killer of all things creative. The television is just a place where I’ve been known to go when I’m avoiding thinking. But carefully picking shows, and watching with interest, makes watching a television show or a movie as inspiring a story as reading–it’s a form of taking in stories. The trick for me is not to let it become a slack-jawed passive activity and just to watch it for the sake of it being on or something to stare blankly at while avoiding doing something else.

As it seems with most things, if approached mindfully, I don’t think the television is quite the evil time-sucker as I believed it was for many years.

So, go forth and watch television. But be attentive, and turn it off when it’s no longer entertainment, but a passive activity.

Little Stories

02 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by in Advice, Inspiration, Mike

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Humans love to tell and hear stories, and every one of us has several of our own to tell. Facebook, Twitter, the evening news, anecdotes we tell at parties–we fill our lives with little stories.

Sports commentators know this; they fill dead airtime between the action with little tidbits about players’ lives. The coverage of the Olympics (which happen again later this year!) does this quite well, and you can bet I’ll be doing at least one article about Stories in Sports while London hosts the Games.

But even better than sports commentators at telling little stories are children. In fact, they excel at it, when allowed. Children at play spontaneously create little stories in many of their undirected activities (and some of them even do so in their directed activities!). Play with a child and let her drive the interaction. Eventually, she’ll almost certainly begin a little narrative and assign you a role; sometimes you might even be told what your role is supposed to be, but don’t count on it! You might never know the story she’s telling herself, of which you are a part, but you can be assured that there is, in fact, a story being told.

As with many parts of society that people reject, we can learn a lot from children in this regard. When we’re kids, society encourages us to tell stories. To use our imaginations. Unfortunately, this means society views storytelling and imagination as child’s play, and as we grow older we tend to give up creating stories and only tell those that actually happen to us.

Society makes us dull.

To Hell with that, I say! Telling stories is what we do, and those stories needn’t always be merely shared experiences.

If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly interested in telling imaginary stories. In that case, it’s time to embrace the ways we used to tell stories.

Little stories.

Look around. There are lots of opportunities to get back into the practice of telling ourselves little stories. Those little stories will help us when we want to tell bigger ones. They’re practice for us, but they’re more than that; they are also inspirations. Some of those little stories we tell ourselves will eventually grow into the bigger ones we wish to share with other; some will become just parts of those bigger ones.

Most of your little stories won’t go anywhere, but you should write them down nonetheless–even if you don’t share them. Even if they only stay in your journal or your 750 Words account, don’t worry about it. These stories still serve an important purpose. They are practice.

But how do you practice these little stories?

People watching is an excellent way. The stories you create about those you watch can be as fanciful or plausible as you like. It doesn’t matter. Just tell a little story, no more than a sentence or two. “That woman with all the tattoos? A professor of applied mathematics.” “The bald old man? Vampire hunter.” “That collection of teenagers? Theater troupe.”

Games lacking a built-in narrative (like chess) can also supply you an opportunity to tell simple, little stories, as can those with only a minimal narrative (like The Settlers of Catan). Although telling those stories to yourself are fun, it’s even more fun if your opponent(s) join in with you.

There are lots of opportunities to find little stories in our lives. It’s just a matter of us embracing those opportunities.

The Myth of Multitasking

14 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Advice, Ann

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Multitasking is one of those buzzwords that came out in the last couple of decades–what it means is that you can switch from one task to another with minimal gear-shifting (and understand that there’s always some gear-shifting). Some people shift quickly, others don’t.

I’m not going to talk about multitasking between your stories. I’m going to talk about what happens when we hit a block on our stories.

What do you do? Check your email or RSS feed? Load up Solitaire or Plants vs. Zombies? Twitter? Frenetically switch between windows and documents, unable to add more than a word to any at a time?

Stop. Take a breath. Take several. Only look at your story. If that’s too painful, close your eyes or stare into space. Pick up a pen and paper and start brain-noodling or making lists. But don’t immediately do something else. Chances are you’re avoiding the problem rather than “taking a minute to think about it.”

So don’t do anything else for 5-10 minutes and see what happens. Sometimes you really do just need to walk away from the story and let it sit in your subconscious. Sometimes, a meditative task will help. But when you go to do that, ask yourself and answer honestly, “Do I really need to ‘think about it’ or am I just avoiding the issue?”

It’s easy to get distracted at home or on your computer. (I’m telling you, GoogleDocs is both a blessing and a curse for me.) If you suffer from frequent window-shuffling, try taking a notebook and pen out somewhere for an hour where your only options are going to be to write or stare into your coffee cup and try to train yourself to push through the issue, rather than immediately decide to go do something else–no matter how innocuous it might seem.

Themes, an Introduction

07 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Ann, Theory

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For the longest time, I hated themes, messages, and symbolism in stories. They gave me memories of a junior high English teacher who insisted on taking a perfectly good story about boys going barbarian on each other on a deserted island and making it have deeper, symbolic meanings about the nature of humanity. Being quite fond of island adventure stories (I read Island of the Blue Dolphins about a hundred times. Heck, even that Babysitter’s Club story where they get stranded on an island for three days…), I was turned off. Honestly, I’m not even sure I finished the book.

That feeling persisted in college, when I decided not to pursue an English degree, even though that seemed to make the most “sense” for my future novelist career plans, and went off into art history instead. Don’t get me wrong, art history is also full of deeper meanings and symbolism, but for some reason, not only could I stomach it, I could get into it. (And, if I had it to do again, I’d still have majored in art history over English, but for different reasons.)

Sometime after college, I began to understand and embrace themes in stories and I realized my junior high English teacher was kind of right. Not in the heavy-handed way I remember his approach, but rather that themes do exist in stories (and so does symbolism and messages, but those are different posts, and I maintain that in that case, the blue shag rug was just a rug). Sometimes it’s purposeful; sometimes it’s accidental. When handled with a deft hand, I believe themes make stories better.

Yes, I said it.

So how do we use themes in ways that don’t scar 13-year-olds forever? Think of themes as a framework to help mold the direction of your plot and your characters; you can even think of them as your thesis, in a way.

If your story is about love, and perhaps the power of love or love conquers all, then the actions of the characters and the plot will support that theme. If your theme is the brutality of humanity under harsh circumstances (or maybe how civilized young men go nuts when left unsupervised on an island), then what happens, how your characters respond to it, and the outcomes, will be in support of that theme.

So think about your story. What is the overarching theme? Write it down in one sentence, or if you’re not sure, then write down a few ideas. Then start listing out your characters’ motivations, actions, obstacles, outcomes, and everything else, and see how it supports the theme(s). Are there events that don’t support your theme? Can you rework them so they do? Or, perhaps, when you look at them that way, you might realize they’re just a filler or that you have a subtheme to build upon.

You can also do this in reverse if you don’t know what your themes are. Start with your lists, see what they have in common, and see if you can work out an overarching theme. If it won’t give you traumatic flashbacks, you could even take one of your favorite books and see if you can diagram out a theme from it.

We think of themes as something you find in literary stories, but they can exist (and usually do) in almost any story, regardless of their genre. Fantasy, mystery, science fiction, romance, and action all have themes in them, too.

If you’d like, tell us what you came up with in the comments. And I apologize to all the English teachers out there. I don’t actually think you’re evil.

The Virtue of Being Bored

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Ann, Inspiration

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Why do we get our ideas in the shower?

Those of us in American culture take pride in being busy. Really busy. We have to fill every moment with something “productive”–checking our smartphones at the bus stop, taking part in a ton of organizations, working late, jotting down a few hundred words for the day, or a thousand other ways we cram something into every second so we’re not caught doing nothing and can continue to check things off our to-do lists. We feel a strange, sometimes distressing, pride when we can say, “Oh, I don’t have time for that kind of stuff; I’m way too busy.”

And when we’re not “busy?” We collapse in front of the TV or something else mindless to get swept away in.

I recently read about a study on how children who are over-scheduled–those whose every moment of their day is packed with clubs and activities and school and homework–come out with stunted imaginations. They’ve never been bored. They’ve always had their activities provided for them, rather than thinking about how to entertain themselves.

Since the imagination is also critical for storytelling (and other creating) adults, I’ve been wondering just how much of this relates to adults who are always busy and over-occupied. Some people manage to carve out writing time, only to be disappointed in the results because they only think about their story when they sit at their chair to make their daily word count. When you’re dealing with something that is completely in your head, thinking about it is a key factor in creating it.

Let’s return to my original question–why do we get ideas in the shower? I believe it’s because that’s one of the only times we slow down. We can’t have our smartphones with us in the shower (yet). We can’t be checking our email or doing business. We’re doing something monotonous that we’ve done every day for tens of years. Those are precious, guilt-free moments of nothingness that let the brain noise quiet just long enough to let our imaginations play. There are other moments like this, like when our brains stop just enough for us to fall asleep.

Today, I give you permission to under-occupy your brain and think about your story.

Take a walk. Sit on the couch with a warm beverage. Take a long bath. Stare out the window while you ride the bus.  If you can’t stand the lack of background noise, turn on some music. Don’t turn on the TV, an audio book, or talk radio. Don’t dink around on your phone, update Facebook, play Angry Birds, or check your RSS reader. Let your mind wander. Don’t try to force yourself on to the story, but when something mundane demands its way in, acknowledge and then dismiss it. This will probably happen a lot at first. Have paper and pen nearby if you like, but this isn’t carving out writing time, this is carving out thinking time.

Chances are, you’re going to feel restless, edgy, and–dare I say it–bored, if you’re one of those particularly busy-busy sorts (guilty!). You might even feel lazy. But keep at it, and see what happens when you give yourself permission to do nothing but think.

See where your mind goes. See where your story goes.