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I’m fortunate and very grateful to have been selected as one of the winners of the Journal-World’s NaNoWriMo contest. I’m stunned that I get five hardbound copies of my novel, OverTime. I hadn’t planned to do anything with it other than flip through a printed copy before I put it away.

Probably not to revisit it.

Maybe ever.

That’s what I did with last year’s novel, AfterLife, the prequel to OverTime. I’d even begun thinking about next year’s novel tentatively titled UnderMind or ExtraFine or something like that while I was traveling for work last week. I’ve been plotting more short stories, figuring out what 2010 looks like for me and taking a deep breath.

Now I have to think about editing OverTime. If I’m going to have a hardbound copy on the shelf, I figure, it’d better be the best I can make it. This means that I have to go back over the work I did in November and start cringing with some regularity.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as I think. I know that as I was writing I felt inspired and dropped into The Zone a lot more this year than last. I was working faster, inventing things as I went along that totally surprised me when they came out. I hope that as I begin reading the story I feel like it’s worthwhile because I really don’t want to re-write it.

There will be sections, I’m sure, that will need top-to-bottom re-writing, but those have to be discovered. My process now will be to read and break down the book scene by scene, looking at who’s there, where they are and what the purpose of the scene is. Once I have a map of what I’ve written, I can do what needs to be done.

It’s drawing the map that’s going to consume the rest of December and part of January. Like NaNo, I’ll have to work on it every day in addition to the writing I’ll be doing and I have a deadline of January 15th, 2010, to be done with the map and then the process of revision and re-writing begins. My goal is to have the manuscript completed and ready for the printer.

So there’s more to come as I go through this. If you’re interested in what I’m doing, I’ll answer questions in the comments section and post a couple more times as I finish the map and begin the revision and re-writing process. My thanks again to Shaun Hittle and the folks at LJW for this opportunity.

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I’ve written 58,248 (official) words on OverTime, my second NaNoWriMo novel in as many years. It feels good to’ve won and to be done at the same time.

So now what?

This was the question that plagued me last year and I solved it by buying a domain with my name and committing myself to writing thirteen 6,000-word short stories, one a month, and publishing them on the web. This would force me to keep writing, to get better and at the end of it, I’d have another 78,000 words.

I have four more to go and I’m done with what I’ve been calling The Long Range, which amounts to essentially a novel in 13 seemingly disconnected parts. I’m learning my craft, trying to improve my storytelling skills and this year’s NaNo effort certainly helped with that.

Some quick things I’ve come to understand about my writing:

1 – I have rhythms to my sentences, and they tend to be the same from character to character to narrator. Note: change up the length and types of sentences.

2 – Despite having a reasonably large vocabulary, I found that I was repeating words often to describe actions that were themselves being repeated a lot. The speed of NaNo is the only excuse I have for that. Note: use wider variety of words without having to stop and consult the thesaurus.

3 – There was a throwaway bit that came to me and ended up really surprising me when it did. As I typed it, I didn’t realize it would come back to be an important part of the story, creating tension when I needed it. Note: Don’t discount what the characters will lead you to if you’re paying attention. Don’t force the narrative.

4 – I can write fairly quickly as long as I don’t get distracted. There were a couple of half-hours in the middle of the month when I was struggling with the story that I was able to get 700 – 800 words down quickly. Note: Keep the internet, especially Twitter, turned off when I’m writing.

5 – Finally, I was making a lot of space in my head for more ideas as this one was being explored. A lot of ideas. Some worked into the novel, others I wrote down because they didn’t fit. Note: Keep a spiral notebook and writing instrument handy when typing. Quick bits to remind you later on will inspire you as you learn more.

So I’m setting some goals for my writing for the coming year.

I should note as well that while I was churning out those 58,248 (official) words, I added roughly another 5,000 here blogging about the experience.

I am a successful NoWri, whether I’m published or not. Given all the work I have to do, I don’t see me being published in 2010 but that’s not going to deter me from trying.

Now that I’m done, it’s time for more.

Today I passed the 50,000-word mark, which makes me a NaNoWriMo winner.

I’m excited about meeting the base goal, believe me, but since it’s the second time I’ve done it, it’s not as much a jump up and yell kind of thing as it was last year.

I’m still about 8200 words or so from the actual finish of the novel, and with five days left it’s a pretty sure thing I’ll get there. For those who are struggling to get there, it’s not impossible and you CAN still do it.

If there’s a secret to ‘winning’ NaNoWriMo, it’s that you have to write every day. In order to be a successful writer, one has to write every day no matter what. Practice makes perfect, after all.

So what happens now that I’ve won? What do I do AFTER NaNoWriMo?

That was the question I asked myself last year and it came back to me that I had to keep writing. Every day. In order to do that, I had to set myself goals. Modest goals, to be sure, but goals that were specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. (If you noticed they were SMART goals, points for you.)

NaNoWriMo develops in a budding writer the habit of writing. I’ve had it for a year. If NaNo inspires participants to continue the work they’ve begun in November, then it’s a good thing. The world needs more writers of fiction and non-fiction, or writers who become journalists or screenwriters. The world needs stories that entertain and illuminate, that touch us for whatever reason.

A story that is written down important: even the least of them has some value and is a kind of art. Whether you understand or appreciate it is irrelevant. It exists as the fruit of someone’s exertion to bring it into the world, sometimes half-formed and half-mad and rambling, but it’s there for a reason. The easiest reason is that it had to get out from being trapped in the writer’s head.

NaNo encourages writers to get that big story out their heads in order to make space for the next thing and the thing after that. The best way to make room is to write every day. That’s why I set myself to writing short stories last year in order to explore the sheer number of ideas that came during last year’s run. Specific amounts of words on a monthly schedule that spanned any number of subjects I wanted to explore.

Some of my stories are okay, some need work, but I’m getting better. This year’s NaNo has allowed me to stretch out and really go through a subject in ways that I never considered before I started. The story has gone places I didn’t know it would and a seeming throwaway scene has become a central theme to the novel.

Writing every day has trained me to be able to do this. All I have to do now is keep practicing, keep writing, and I’ll get better.

Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning of my novel:

Penny came into the living room dressed in a red t-shirt and sweats, wearing moccasins that clicked on the hardwood of the hall. “Munin?” The amnesiac was looking out the huge bay window. He seemed to be looking not at the waist high green tallgrass, but beyond that at a horizon only he could see. He didn’t acknowledge her presence.

“Munin? You okay? Remembering something?”

He disengaged whatever thought he was in the middle of and looked at his knees. He said something.

“What?”

“No,” Munin said. “Nothing.”

“Ah.” She walked past him back into the kitchen. “I’m gonna have a drink. You want one?” She opened the cabinet and pulled out a bottle of gin, a bottle of tonic and then grabbed a lemon off the counter. “I make a pretty good gin and tonic.” She grabbed the smallest serrated knife out of the block and twirled it, waiting for him to respond.

Munin stood then and looked back at her from the living room. The way the light came in from the bay window, he was silhouetted against the glow. “I’m sure that you should probably heed your friend’s advice and put me out.”

“What?”

“I heard you arguing with someone,” Munin said. “A man in your bedroom.” He was so still, it was almost as though he weren’t really there at all. “He’s right: I should go.”

“No,” Penny said and dropped the knife on the counter. The kitchen table was really a bar extending from the sink’s counter out ninety degrees. She came around the bar, and stood next to the recliner Munin had vacated.
He still didn’t move. “You don’t understand. You really heard him?”

“Of course.”

She could see his features now, and Penny was stunned by how beautiful he was, especially framed as he was by the day’s late light. “You have no idea how strange that is,” she said. “He’s a ghost.”

Munin’s brow furrowed but he didn’t speak.

“That’s the ghost of my dead mentor,” Penny said. “I’ve been --- I don’t know, I suppose ‘haunted is the word --- by him since just after his death. I can’t believe you heard him!”

Munin stepped back then, a frown now complete on his face with his mouth downturned. “That’s odd,” he said.

“Yeah!” Penny was coming closer to him. “Yeah!”

“No. That’s ---“ Munin said. “That’s insane. There are no such things as ghosts.”

Penny stopped. “I know it’s a lot to take in, but maybe you’re a medium of some kind and you can help me get rid of him.”

Munin whipped away from her and walked down the hallway toward Penny’s bedroom. “Wait!” She ran to catch up to him.

When Penny got to the bedroom, Munin was there standing exactly where Chuck had been. He looked at the floor, around his bare feet, then up at the ceiling, squinting and then putting a hand up to shade his eyes against something that Penny couldn’t see.

She watched him stare upward and tried to see what he was seeing. “What is it?”

“A disturbance,” Munin said absent of any inflection. “A great disturbance.” He turned his attention back to the floor. He crouched down and ran a hand over the carpet. “Yes.”

“You can see something?”

Munin looked up at her and nodded. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Patterns. Noise. Snow. Ripples. I can’t tell you for sure. It’s something.”

“Any memories to go with it?”

Munin stood again, looking at the floor then slowly upward to the point on the ceiling directly above him. He shivered, frowned again, shook his head and looked very tired. “May I,” he said then stopped. He turned to look behind him. “Did you see something just then?”

“No,” Penny said.

“I am very tired suddenly. May I shower and then sleep in the back room?” Munin turned in a small circle, coming back to a point where he could look straight at Penny. “I won’t be any difficulty. I won’t ask any more of you,” he said though she could barely hear him. “I won’t.”

Copyright 2009 By Jason Arnett.

The comic book writer/novelist/internet curmudgeon Warren Ellis says that half of all writing is staring off into the distance and thinking what comes next. When I’ve been staring off into the distance lately I get the ideas for more stories that are better than the one I’m writing. I’ve learned from past experience that when I stop one thing in favor of starting something else, I will never go back to the first thing. There are dozens of half-finished stories, hundreds of pages with six or seven scribbled lines on them.

I’ve made little progress since last I posted on my NaNoWriMo book. I’m only at 35,000 words or so and I had hopes of being a lot farther ahead than I am. I’m frustrated with where the story is going because it’s not working out the way I wanted it to. I need to stir the old brain juices a little and get to writing, so this is just to jostle my thoughts a bit.

I got distracted by watching AMC’s The Prisoner remake the last three nights and didn’t get a lot of evening writing done. Too bad because the nicest thing I can say about the series was that it had so much potential that went unrealized. I guess I could have spent the time better, but I’m in the middle section lull of the NaNo process that kills a lot of novels: my story is crap and I’m not a good enough writer to make it better.

Then I realize something. That’s the point! If I can power through as I detailed in another post, then I’m going to be a better writer. If I give up, I’ve got another half-done story and I’m like millions of others. Sometimes separating myself from the work I’m doing allows me to reset the thoughts I need in order to go back to work. So this is the pep talk I’m giving myself here in public view.

It doesn’t matter that I’d rather be writing any of the dozen or so other stories that I have in mind, I need to finish this one. I obligated yourself to complete it and that’s all I have to do, finish. Don’t worry about the quality; that comes with editing. Right now it’s just about getting to the end, putting events one after the other in a line of some kind and making it to the last page.

I wish I had worked out more of what happens in the middle of my story, but I didn’t. I have some notes that I don’t think are good, but if I just follow them, I’ll get to the end. There’s nothing that says I can’t change it later.

Right. That’s what I needed. Now I get it. Now I know what I need to do to get going again.

Halfway there.

I hit the 25,000-word mark sometime last Tuesday, and yesterday I made it over 31,000. In case you’re just joining us, the idea of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days, which I did last year in about 25 days. My goal this year was to write about 2000 words a day and get a 60,000-word novel written in 30 days. I’m a little ahead, which is a good thing.

I wrote like crazy on Thursday morning last week in order to go out with some friends who had stopped through town and who I don’t see enough of. I made my daily goal and a little more so I was feeling pretty good when I went out. Friday I didn’t write quite half my daily goal, and Saturday morning wasn’t much more productive, so I lost a full day’s lead my daily writing. Sunday, Halfway Day to WriMos, I made up a little ground and I’m only about a half a day behind my daily goal.

This is important because I want to make sure that I’m building on the habits I’ve been nurturing since completing NaNo last year. I try very hard to write every day but I have been lousy about meeting daily goals. It’s okay at this point because I’m not dependent on my writing to pay the bills, it’s still a hobby. Rather, this NaNo was meant to get me in the habit of meeting my goals every day or as often as possible so that when I set a goal of writing a 6,000-word short story I can finish in two weeks or less if I just say I’m going to write 500 words a day.

It sounds easier than it really is. I allow myself to become distracted (like I’m not going to watch The Prisoner tonight on AMC even though I REALLY want to) and then I just don’t write. When a couple of days go by and all I’ve done is Twitter and Facebook some things, I feel awful and then I open the neglected file and try to figure out where I left off and how to get back in the groove.

The answer, I always tell myself, is to write every damn day, even if only for ten or fifteen minutes. It’s important, it’s like exercise.

Ugh.

If I want to get better, and if I believe Malcolm Gladwell’s theories, then I have to do this every day. If I don’t then I’m not really a writer and I want to be a writer. I will be a writer. Maybe not a big, household name like John Grisham, but I’d be okay with being Michael Moorcock or Neil Gaiman famous.

So this year I haven’t neglected my life as much as I did last year. The writing is better and more consistent and I’m making room in my head for more ideas that keep coming unbidden to mind as I clear the space by writing this novel. I’ve made it halfway so far, and I’ve got another 40 or 50,000 words already vying for attention in the coming year. I have to stay focused on the immediate goal: 60,000 words by midnight November 30th. It’s only another fifteen days at 2,000 words a day. I can do it.

There’s a quote attributed to Leonard Bernstein cited on promotional materials for NaNoWriMo:

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

That really sums up what NaNoWriMo is all about. We come in and we think we know what we want to write. When we hit a snag and our plot fails us, we have several options:

1. Give up.
2. Write through it.
3. Get together with other WriMos and bounce some ideas around.

Option 1 isn’t really an option for anyone who’s decided they’re participating in National Novel Writing Month. If one has determined that those 50,000 words will be written, well, then get writing. Sometimes option 2 is the best. Remember we’re not overly concerned with quality; rather, WriMos are trying to only get the story out of their heads and onto the page.

(Well, that’s not strictly true. We DO worry about quality here in Lawrence. I can’t speak for everyone because I’m only in one group and I know what we talk about the rest of the year. That’s why we say that December is for editing. But I digress.)

Option 3 has a couple of sub-options to it. There are the NaNo message boards, of which there’s one for our hometown. There are the write-ins where our Municipal Liaisons support, cajoling and sometimes teasing to get us back on track. It’s all about the writing. All of us from last year who are participating this year have benefited from one of the MLs telling us to just keep swimming. Whether it’s just an ‘attaboy’ or seeing where we fall in the Top Ten list for daily word counts, there’s a tremendous amount of support.

I’m about 4000 words ahead of my pace last year, and I’m pretty happy with how my little novel is turning out. It’s not great literature, mind you, but it’s pretty okay. With a little work (and a hammer and shovel and a whole lot of cement) it’s probably something I could release on my website next year. That’s due to the generous nature of everyone in the Lawrence group. I’m not afraid to write what I want to, knowing that I can share it with others in the group who would read it and offer a real critique when I’m ready.

Knowing that the support is there, that I can get some genuine feedback that will make the work better is what’s helping me meet my daily goal of at least 2000 words. I knew that increasing my overall goal from 50,000 to 60,000 was ambitious for me and that at times it would be a struggle, but I have faith that my group will help me through if I just ask them. It takes guts to write the book, to be sure. It takes a lot more guts to share it and make it better.

Seven days of writing have produced 15,000+ words for this year’s NaNoWriMo story. Some of the words are good, fewer very good, and the vast majority are just okay. It’s easy to string letters together to form words, then sentences and finally paragraphs that express an idea. What’s difficult is meeting one’s high personal standards for good writing.

Despite the very subjective nature of the word ‘good’, a writer’s standards are different than those of the average reader (if such a person really exists any more). The writers whose words I think of as good may not be the same as yours, and even if we agree that a writer is good we are likely to differ on our reasons for thinking a work is ‘good’.

I am not a published writer. I haven’t submitted any of my stories to any house or magazine, online or brick & mortar, for consideration. For all intents and purposes, I’m writing into the void. I have a friend who criticizes me for participating in NaNo. He says quality is more important that quantity. I smile and nod and wish I could tell him that he’s missing the point of the exercise.

For me, NaNoWriMo is about getting the idea that’s been scratching the inside of my skull for some time out onto the page. There are others in the local group that meets once a month the rest of the year that had no clue what they were going to write as little as three days before we started. It’s not about quality at all, though we strive for that as personal goals. Good is about coherence and quantity in November for us WriMos. It’s not about the quality of the words.

Or is it? This year, I’ve been backtracking and ‘editing’ a little as I go along. I didn’t do that last year. One passage I wrote around Tuesday evening was so challenging to me that I gave up on the quality of the words and just started typing in order to get the idea out. The idea was seeing sound as color against a black and white wire frame background. I don’t know where that idea came from, but it was essential that I get it typed up and fixed in the narrative so I could go back and revisit after the novel was done. I couldn’t leave the words alone like that, I had to make sure they were ‘good’ enough to tell me what they really wanted to say later.

What I took away from NaNo last year was the habit of writing every day. I had so many ideas from writing a bunch of comic book scripts that I could explore, but somehow I’d tapped an undercurrent of new ideas that then rose to the surface. I began writing short stories, and in June of 2009 I put them on a website with my name on them. Some of those stories have garnered me a couple of casual fans who have told me they enjoy the work.

This year, NaNoWriMo is about creating a work that I can go back and make better with some editing. It’s about writing well enough the first time that when I go back I can get over the initial cringe and make the words ‘good’.

At least good enough to put on my website and see what others think of them.

Hi, I'm Jason.

I'm working on writing a 50,000+ word novel completely in 30 days as part of NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. November is what everyone who's not playing along calls the month. Those in the know call it 'NaNo' and those who participate are 'WriMos'. (I think of myself as a NoWri {pronounced nah-wry}, but that's just me. I'm a little different.)

I've always had some artistic intent in my life. I've been an artist (I can sketch passably well, even won a half-tuition scholarship to KU), a musician (the best band I ever played in opened for STICK one very icy New Year's Night at the Bottleneck) and even tried my hand at making comic books (one of which garnered me a couple of nice reviews).

I never really understood color and my sense of design was too personal, so my art was pretty half-hearted most of the time. I really wanted to be a rockstar, but the kind of music I wanted to play wasn't popular during the grunge/alt movement of the early to mid-90s and then there were the disparate personalities.

I learned it was impossible to break into comics as a writer, so I went back to a real drawing board and worked hard on trying to tell stories I wanted to tell. A respected professional in comics who had become a friend told me matter-of-factly that I had great ideas but that I was hurting my stories by drawing them. He told me to find a collaborator. There was a lot of mistrust at the time about writers seeking artists who wanted to share in revenues after publication. Artists genuinely believe they must be paid up front for work, and they should. I couldn't do that, though.

Frustrated, I looked for other ways to get the ideas in my head OUT.

I'd tried writing fiction any number of times before, but had always stumbled and never completed anything. I couldn't make the words do what I wanted them to, which was to emulate Robert Heinlein. I despaired.

Then I heard about NaNoWriMo in mid-November 2007, too late to play along. I liked the idea of a challenge, of seeing if I could do the work and write a novel of only 50,000 words. It sounds like a lot (looks like a lot, too, written out like that), and it is. However, it's not an amount that one can't reach. I'd have to try, really TRY, to make it.

So I planned. I remembered some sage advice that "a writer must be a reader" and I read about NaNo, about the rules, about the participants. I read books I had been meaning to read and started reading fewer comics. I began to pay attention to how words were used, the construction of sentences and then how all those lines of letters were placed into paragraphs to tell a story. I knew I could not only participate in NaNoWriMo, I knew I could win. I knew I could write 50,000+ words. I even had a plot that I had meant to turn into a comic book and had never scripted. I kneaded it into a story.

Last year was the first year I tried. I won. Then I wondered what to do next.

I had the bug, I had to write MORE.