NaNoWriMo: How to Win

Being one of the last kids picked for kickball in elementary school still looms large in my psyche, so this notion of winning makes me a little uncomfortable.

I know you won’t be able to get the winner’s badge for your social media feeds if you haven’t written 50,000 words, but I believe that there are more ways to win NaNo than by reaching 50,000 words in November. 

If you’ve written this month, you’ve won. You’ve written more words than you might have otherwise, even if you haven’t met the 50,000 goal. You sat down and you wrote, even while life tried to pull you away.  Maybe you wrote a little every day, maybe you sat down for a few marathon sessions.  Doesn’t matter.  You started to build some BIC (butt in chair) practice. 

If you’ve made time for writing in your life, you’ve won. You’ve started a writing habit.  The habit might be a few hundred words every day or 5,000 words every weekend.  Either way, it’s those habits that make successful writers.  I didn’t take that writing habit into the rest of the year until after my third NaNo win, but each NaNo that came before allowed me to practice until it stuck.

If you’ve met other writers, you’ve won.  Maybe you’ve only met them online, but you’ve become aware of other people, not too different from you, who make time for what matters.  My writing tribe sustains me through NaNo and beyond. Many of them I met with just to write, but our relationships have blossomed into the most beautiful friendships of my life.  They write, so it encourages me to write.  After the first year of NaNo write-ins informally organized in Yellow Springs four years ago, one writer friend and I continued to write once a week.  We’ve continued that practice and invited more writers to share it, throughout the last four years. 

You’ve made some time, maybe a little, maybe a lot, for your dreams.  Perhaps that’s the biggest win of all, creating a little space, a little opening for what you really want to do.  You wanted to write a novel, you made time for it, and whether you’ve hit 8,000 words or 80,000, that space you’ve made can be nourished so that there is room in your life every day, all year long, for what you most want. 

Keep dreaming, keep winning, and keep in touch.  I’ll be cheering for you!

In Praise of Duotrope

My writer friends have been singing the praises of Duotrope for over a year, but I resisted.  I wasn't sending enough work out to make it useful.  It was an unneeded expense ($5 a month), and I can't even remember what other excuses I made.

But as part of my impossible things year, I decided to send my work out more often.  My old index card system of tracking poems as I sent them out seemed a little outdated, so I looked at Duotrope again.  Then my friend Becky told me that when she got work back rejected, she immediately sent it out to two more places.  Rejected again? She sent it to three.

That sounded like a great idea, and a good reason to sign up for this list of over 5,000 markets for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.  So, sign up I did.

And I'm so thankful.  It does make it easier to turn the work right around.  I have a list of favorite markets I'd like to send to, so when a poem that I'm sure is ready for printing gets rejected, I go to my favorites and send it out again, on the same day!

This morning I discovered an even better reason to love Duotrope.  On your home screen, it lists your average acceptance rate (don't know why I just noticed it today).  One rejection can send me reeling in self doubt, that's why the quick turnaround works for me.  But this is pretty sweet, too.  No way to let the negative bias take over when the statistics say this.

The $5 a month is money well spent.  Thanks Becky, thanks Lara and Debra, thanks Duotrope.

www.duotrope.com

No Way Out but Through

It must  be the beginning of week two because all day on this marathon-writing day (since I’m on a plane today for over twenty hours, it seemed a perfect plan), I’ve been battling the persistent idea that this book is stupid. My plot is stupid and slow. I’m not raising the stakes fast enough.  The characters are weak.  My writing sucks.

Ah, week two.  Since the very first time I tried NaNo and gave up during week two, this week has plagued me. That’s part of the reason I wanted to have a marathon write today, to try to kck through to the middle of the novel when it gets fun again.

I should have known that even a marathon writing day wouldn’t be able to combat the week two blues. 

If I hadn’t read Christ Baty’s No Plot, No Problem before my second try at NaNoWriMo, I fear my second try would have gone the same as the first, incomplete.  And I wouldn’t be here with you today. But Baty talks about week two and writing through.  Every year, week two has brought with it a crisis of confidence, a crisis of plot. 

Now, if you’re sailing through week two, great.  Ignore me.  But if you’ve started to tell yourself your idea is stupid.  If you’ve been tempted (and I’ve seen you on Facebook ;-)) to get rid of the beginning of your novel and start again., please take my word for it. It’s not you, it’s week two. 

So how do you get around this.

1. You write anyway.  Don’t delete anything. Don’t start over.  Remember, “The first draft of anything is [poop]

.” Hemingway said it, so it must be true.  Let  your first draft be a draft, a sad, sucky, plot-hole-ridden draft.  As Katrina Kittle says, “You can’t revise what you haven’t written,” and all stories of genius writers to the contrary, everyone revises.

2.  Show up to write-ins, virtual and in-person, and let the energy of the group carry you along.  Ignore the voice in the back of your mind that tells you that you are the only one writing a terrible book.  We’re all writing terrible books. It will take work to make them wonderful, but we’ll do that work--in January, maybe in February, maybe next summer, maybe in three years.  You are not unique in your suckitude, you are just like everyone else, writing an awful first draft.  (See 1 above.)

3.  If rereading your work brings up the desire to edit, stop rereading your work.  You need to shut that editor up.  One way to do that is to refuse to give him (or her) anything to do.

4.  Be kind to yourself.  How many words have you written so far—5,000, 10,000, 15,000.  Pat yourself on the back.  No one needs to know how awful those words are. Besides, people have made millions of dollars off awful writing.  Read the first pages of a blockbuster erotic tale recently made into a movie, and you’ll see what I mean.  You set a goal, you’re working on it, give yourself some love.  Take yourself to a movie, buy yourself a new book, go to Ghostlight Coffee in Dayton and buy a grapefruit-rosemary Italian soda and a Harvest Moon Twinkie and celebrate the fact that you had the courage to start.  That feeds the courage to continue.

5.  Whine on the boards.  Not too much, not to often, but whine a little and see how many other people join in.  Week two is tough.  I’m here to tell you though, that once you make it through week two it starts to feel better.  No, you aren’t suddenly convinced that your writing is brilliant and you should send it straight to the best editor in the business once December 1strolls around.  It isn’t; don’t. But you are convinced that you can finish this first draft. 

There’s lots of other advice out there on how to make it through week two.  Take fifteen minutes, look at the advice, then turn off the internet, set a timer for 45 minutes, and just write. Let your story take you on its ridiculous, lame, merry way. Take the next step, write the next 1,667 words.  Write through the doldrums.  Next week, the wind will pick up to blow you through the last two weeks and to victory.