So, We're Actually Doing That Writing Group Thing...

Some Syndicate Guidelines (A Proposal):

1. Any person may write as much as they want for any given week; however, he or she may only share the target number of pages for a given week (2-3, 5, etc.).

A. These pages could be shared in advance depending on the level of response that the author wants (assuming that more time with the text will lead readers to more insights into the writing)

B. If the writing sample is part of a longer work that we have not read, a short summary of what is going on might be helpful to get an idea of the context of what you're writing.

2. If we only have an hour or so, we should devote at most 20 minutes to a person (assuming we stay at three members).

A. We don't have to go a full 20 minutes with each person—provided the author gets the feedback he or she wants.

B. If the author doesn’t have the feedback that he or she wants after 20 minutes, I would advise moving on. This will probably avoid causing frustration to one or more people. Hopefully it won’t come to that, though.

3. The general structure of the twenty minutes should be as follows:

A. Background of what we are going to read (as the author deems necessary).

B. Discussing the piece of writing.

i. It would be helpful if the author provided us with some guideline as to what he or she expects to hear from us.

ii. If they want criticism, what sort of criticism?

a. Wanting a general impression: is my work interesting, does it flow well, etc.

b. Wanting to address a specific issue: dialogue, punctuation, characterization, or some other mechanic of writing.

c. Some other criticism requested by the author.

4. Last but not Least: the goal of the group is to help people become better writers and to have fun writing.

A. This will not happen by attacking someone’s writing.

i. Attacking someone’s writing is criticizing it without making a suggestion for improvement.

ii. Attacking someone’s writing is criticizing an area unrelated to what the author asked for criticism about (i.e. the name of my character has nothing to do with dialogue).

B. Becoming better writers will not happen without eventually critiquing what we write.

Writing Group

NaNoWriMo is over and has been for 13 days. Since then, my daily writing habits have wavered, coming and going in the face of holiday (which means Christmas, for me) activities. I met with my NaNo-buddy that lives near by, and we started talking about the old days when we felt compelled by the deadline to write and write. We did not write much, having had limited time to catch up on real life with each other. But, in the midst of talking about what we had been up to, the lament about not writing spurred me on to make the suggestion that we have a writing group. Which made me think that my friend and I might need a push in the right direction, namely, we might need an accountability group for writing.

Unlike AA, this group would hold people accountable for doing a behavior rather than not doing a behavior. Namely, I came up with a provisional idea.

The rule of my writing group: write five pages (or a chapter) a week and then let the group read it. Since there are two of us, that means we will be reading each other's work.

The second rule: each person is required to make the best criticism and the best compliment they can about the piece of writing.

Writing, Thinking, Walking

I thoroughly enjoy writing, but I have come to know that writing is hard work in a way that I have previously not known. When I am trying to write for fun and still write something well thought out, and additionally trying to live my life, I can get overwhelmed.

Going back through the archived Writing Excuses podcasts, I stumbled on the suggestion of one of the authors that taking a walk was how he cleared his mind and generated ideas.

This struck me as odd.

I have been making my mind work on the complications of writing my current story, have been thinking about principles of writing and how to do so. But I have not necessarily been allowing my mind to work on writing.

By "allowing my mind to work on writing," I mean that I have not given it downtime in which it can allow ideas to bounce around in a secondary space in my mind. Taking a walk sounded like a good idea.

I did not do it, because the sky grew overcast and flurries started falling, one by one. However, I feel that the free association is something that I could use.

While walking, I do not know if the author carried a pen and a notepad with. In my case, I believe I will. In case any stunning insight strikes.

The point here is that I have thought about how to write and have a sense of what the essential elements of fiction writing are. I have even written and seen these elements come together in some form.

While working on my second project, there is a time to plan and think through what is happening, who people are, and what I am going to do with the plot. There is also a time to let my mind wander in search of unrefined ideas that I can bring in and use.

Without a problem to solve, my mind will not be working on anything--hence the need for structure. But, with characters and a basic plot established, my mind has material to work with.

Part of what I need is time. Another part is variety of activity. Which is what I think the walk was supposed to accomplish.

Anyway, I guess I could better tend to this blog.

Perhaps I will make that one of my projects.

Tell Them What They've Won...

So, I got to validate my "win" on Nanowrimo. And I won my first Nanowrimo!
Aside from having the novel, I do feel a greater degree of comfort in knowing that I can write fiction and do a decent job of it, a job that "would not make someone vomit" to quote Nanowrimo creator Chris Baty. And then some. I think that the prose I have written would actually be salvageable in some form, if I chose to do so.

In the mean time, I am determined to not let the new-found confidence erode. If I keep writing, I should improve? Right?

I don't know. I think of writing in terms of jogging. When I had a healthy (5 miles, 4x/week) exercise routine, I felt brilliant. Never mind the 8-10 minute times I think I was putting up. I was no athlete compared to Olympic runners or even compared to the H.S. track kid I tutored (according to him). But I was doing it.

Persistence may never turn me into a Faulkner, but it will, I am confident, pay off. If I get better at writing and have fun doing it, I win. If I get published, I win bigger. If, by some slim chance, I evidence a degree of mastery, I win bigger still.

In any case, I am glad I participated. That will be enough for now.

The Next Thing

I have already started working. For this story--I intend it to be a short story--I will be outlining more, planning more. I want to know who the people are who have arrived on my frozen little world, and why. More importantly, I want to discover from this information what sort of conflict they will experience, and whether it will be of their own making or caused by something else. Anyway, while this completed novel cools, I find myself inspired to keep writing, in the vague hope that practice makes , if not perfect, then better.

The End

Today at around 4:30, if memory serves, I hit 50,020 words and wrote the last sentence of my first draft of "Nine-Pins."

I have realized a while ago that the title of my novel has grown increasingly inadequate, since the image of the game has nothing to do with the novel any longer. I have left it alone, for now, because it is the flag under which I set sail, and I would hate to change colors at the last minute.

I made a 9000 or so word push to the finish today. I felt the need to finish. I had an ending in mind, and the aftermath of that ending made the last 2000-3000 words of the book.

As to whether the experience has been satisfying, I have to answer 'yes.' Learning how to sustain a novel over ninety-one pages and remember to incorporate at least something of who the characters are, who they were, where they are physically (i.e. the setting) and internally, is a dynamic undertaking.

Some of this tale, I tried to plot out in advance. I have to confess I did not look much at that outline after writing the first few days. After the first week, I set the novel outline aside, and hit a second and third week where I had to figure out who these people really are. The mess of a situation that I had thought of for my characters only carried me through the first week.

That week was largely automatic, pre-programmed, and necessary to establish what had happened. When my characters had long dialogues about what they were doing, or long internal monologues about what to do next, I realized that I was discovery writing and that I would have to heavily edit the middle section of my book as a result.

I was listening to the characters, not in some odd way where I actually believed that my characters were real, but in the sense that I was listening to what I had to say about who they were, what they wanted, what they would and would not do.

My friend pointed out that the characters do whatever I want them to do. That, I believe, was the problem that occupied me for the better part of the first two and a half weeks. It helped me immensely to let the characters discuss with each other what they knew, what they thought about that information, and what they planned to do about it. Otherwise, the possibilities were literally endless. I had to decide who these people were.

A large part of that was making them do things, I suppose, but it was a balance between moving the plot and characters in a direction and letting them move around and try to figure out what they were doing.

In any case, some surprises came out of the writing process, but these surprises also fit the book well. Even the ending of the book, where one of the characters is celebrating a birthday caught me off-guard, but fit with the ending I had planned. Because I had devised an idea of where I wanted to end up, my writing did the rest. I found ways to arrive there, even though the ways were not the ways I had originally planned.

I had latitude within a bigger structure to move around and arrive where I needed to.

Yesterday, on the eve of finishing, I realized how I would miss the process of writing, and how I wanted to continue it. Now, after having written over 9000 words today, I think I will step away from the keyboard for a few days.

However, like with practicing a musical instrument, a sport, or any other skilled activity, I do not want to stay away too long for fear of losing touch, getting out of practice. I do not want to return to this current novel right away.

I think moving to something radically different will allow my mind to decompress, to invent different characters.

The dark side of finishing today was the concept of word wars. I did want to race my friends to the finish, but not in an ugly way. We declared a sort of understanding that the competition was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. I have a cool, if scattered, writing group.

Thanks to my two active friends. I would not have finished without a lot of encouragement and advice about what works for them.

I'll be back to this blog on a weekly basis, if anyone is reading it. It helps to think about what I did and am doing while writing.

This is a log of that.

Anyway, signing off. Thanks for reading.

Asking Intelligent Questions

I have read in numerous books about strategies for character behavior.

James Frey suggests making a list of possible behaviors that characters could take when faced with any given dilemma.

Noah Lukeman writes about writing down situations that would set a character up for a "peak" situation or a really negative experience.

The folks at "Writing Excuses" most recently discuss where authors get their ideas, proposing that asking the right questions about fiction.

As a teacher, I teach students strategies for reading, specifically what sort of questions they should be asking about what they are reading. I find that my questions as an experienced reader are fundamentally different than the questions my students ask.

Every author I have encountered who dispenses writing advice says to read voluminously.

I have heard from some NaNoWriMo friends that they do not know how to get their story where they want it to go or that the story has veered off in a direction different from what they expected, perhaps even different from what they had hoped. I am confident they will keep on track.

If I can play diagnostician of my NaNo experience so far, I have had trouble identifying exactly who my characters are. If I knew this more precisely, I would know what was within the characters' range of possible behaviors that they might to. Because I am still discovering who these people I have brought to the page are, I am not sure what they are capable of. Could she run a marathon, could he bring himself to quit his job, and so on.

For some of my characters, I know the answers to these questions.

So, to summarize, there is knowledge about my characters and then there is knowledge about technique.

Technical knowledge is something that can be gleaned from other reading. This is the sort of thing that it is too little too late to do a whole lot about during NaNoWriMo. Chris Batty has suggested watching a T.V. show or movie and taking note of the pacing, dialogue, and plot revelations during the show and seeing if you can apply this to your novel. I suppose this is as concise of a crash course in technique that you can get. Well, that and the earlier posts in this blog.

I am reading Lord of the Flies and Out of the Silent Planet currently during NaNoWriMo. So far my novel has not turned into either of those books, but it is a fascinating exercise to read a novel with the eyes of a novelist, specifically.

Anyway,

I have an hour to go during which I would like to shower and write about 1000 words. We'll see which wins the upper hand.