The Tools You Use to Write a Novel

It's your choice!

This week, we're compiling a resources page for the class blog.  Whereas the posts up until this point have been about the class's methods and assignments, we'd like to create a list of links to various resources to help our readers on their own noveling journeys.

What has been helpful to you when you try to write?  A book on the subject?  A website?  An essay, like Anne Lamott's Shitty First Drafts?  Whatever first comes to mind, let us know what you'd like to see!

- Lauren Burch

Put Down the Red Pen and Pick Up the Pace

“Don’t get it right, get it written.”  James Thurber’s words are sage advice to any novelist struggling through a first draft, stopping every sentence or two to tweak what they’ve just typed.  Yet like a life lesson from a parent that the child doesn’t follow until they’ve already made a mistake, it’s difficult advice for many beginning writers, particularly students, to follow.  We write self-consciously, fighting the urge to revise each letter that we press down on the keyboard, as though an editor is reading over our shoulders, squawking mistakes into our ears like a parrot asking for crackers.

I'll tell you what I'm not doing with my life: Making progress.

Why the sluggish pace toward the finish line?  For some, revise as you write is simply the method that works best for them, a process they have adapted to over the years and one that they can use while still making good progress.  But the rest of us, staring at the computer, averaging about seven words a day, often have no trouble pounding out a term paper in the course of one long, caffeine-fueled night.  We may regret every moment of the process, cursing ourselves for our procrastination and cursing the entire family lineage of the professor who gave the assignment, but nonetheless, we get it done.  What makes a novel such a different beast?

The first draft of a novel is unlike any other work a student will be assigned.  Most creative writing classes don’t focus on reading novels, or teach how to plow through writing them.  As Cathy Day discusses in her article “The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis,” students are taught to write short, standalone texts:

“Why is this so? Simply: the short story is a more manageable form, both for the instructor and the student, and I have been both. For the writer who teaches a full load of courses and is always mindful of balancing “prep” time with writing time, it’s easier to teach short stories than novels, and it’s easier to annotate and critique a work-in-progress that is 10 pages long as opposed to a story that is 300 pages long. It’s advantageous for students, too. Within the limited time frame of a semester, they gain the sense of accomplishment that comes with writing, submitting for discussion, revising, and perhaps even finishing (or publishing!) a short story.”

The classroom setting not only often avoids teaching novels, but can also discourage writing them through the workshop set-up:

“But I am saying that I think a lot of what comes out of creative writing programs are stories that could be or want to be novels, but the academic fiction workshop is not fertile ground for those story seeds. The seeds don’t grow. They are (sometimes) actively and (more likely) passively discouraged from growing. The rhythm of school, the quarter or semester, is conducive to the writing of small things, not big things, and I don’t think we (“we” meaning the thousands of writers currently employed to teach fiction writing in this country) try hard enough to think beyond that rhythm because, for many of us, it’s the only rhythm we know. We need to teach students how to move from “story” to “book,” because the book is (for now, at least) the primary unit of intellectual production.”

For this reason, Cathy Day structured her Advanced Fiction class around the production of the first draft of a novel, assigning novels to the reading list to give her students an idea of how to structure their own, and setting a requirement of 3,333 new words each week.  For some, the words have flown freely from the keyboard.  But others, accustomed to the write, revise, write, revise method employed in most creative writing classes, have found their wheels spinning in the mud, their novels inching forward.

How do we keep ourselves from revising?  No first draft is perfect, and how can we stand to stare at our work, with all its mistakes, and convince ourselves to keep going rather than to work backward?

Don’t reread your work, for a start.  Looking at your first draft, beyond a cursory skim to see where you last left off, is asking to have each little flaw on the pages highlighted in your mind.  For this reason, it’s important to have a detailed storyboard of your work, so that you know where you have been without rereading.  This is also helpful to the process of moving forward because you’ll know where you are going next.  If your writing program features a spell check, turn it off for the time being.  Listen to fast-paced or inspirational music as you write.  If a scene is so unbearably bad that you can’t stand to look at it without revising, start a new one.  If a scene is too boring, either move ahead or force something to happen within the scene, even if you aren’t yet sure how this new, unexpected event will fit into the plot.  And if you show your early work to others, make it clear that you aren’t asking what you should change or what you’ve done wrong.  You simply want to know if they can tell what drives your characters or where the plot is headed.

Of course, avoiding all revision, however minor, is impossible.  We authors are our own worst critics, and we will always feel compelled to fiddle with the words we’ve written.  Revision isn’t a bad thing, even at the start of the writing process, provided it does not become so extensive as to overwhelm any progress in the writing.  It’s fine to alter a word choice here or there, but don’t do it with each sentence of your first draft.  And save the major revisions—reordering scenes, altering settings, introducing or removing characters from a chapter—until your first draft is completed.  It may not be a work of art, but it’s much easier to sculpt a whole block of wood into a thing of beauty than it is to try the same process on a few twigs.

-Lauren Burch

NaNoWriMo: Breaking Through Writer's Block

A blank page: The writer's greatest opportunity and greatest fear.

Christ Baty’s 2006 book No Plot? No Problem! details the inception of NaNoWriMo, as well as tips for planning a novel and making it through a thirty day writing spree.  I read the book in my sophomore year of high school, in preparation for attempting NaNoWriMo for the first time.  While I found No Plot? No Problem! to be full of helpful information, there is one major difference between my noveling experiences and those Baty described:

The part of NaNoWriMo which causes me the most strife is the first seven days.

In Baty’s experience, writers rush through their first week of NaNoWriMo, fueled by their excitement for their projects and the anticipation of the great novel they will produce.  In the latter weeks, the prospective novelists begin to struggle, hampered by worries that the work they’ve produced is poorly written or plotted.  Certainly, once the initial inspiration has faded and reality has sunk in about just how much work a novel entails, it’s easy to become discouraged and distracted, especially considering that the end of November contains both Thanksgiving and the Christmas shopping sales.  Still, the last three weeks of NaNoWriMo are never what I struggle with.

My problem is getting to those last few weeks.

The opening pages of a novel, as any author knows, are the most important.  It’s the beginning that either succeeds or fails in holding the reader’s attention.  The beginning determines whether or not an editor will continue reading your manuscript or set it aside.  The opening pages, when it comes to publishing or establishing a readership, are everything.

Of course, in the actual process of writing a novel, the first few pages, as with everything else, are something that ought to be hammered out in a rough draft, and revised and worried over later.  Intellectually, I know this.  Emotionally, it’s a different story, and it’s a story that gets me stuck in the mud, wheels spinning, in the first week of every NaNoWriMo.  My failed attempts at writing a novel in a month were all projects abandoned in the first week.

Every year I’ll wake up on the first of November intending to go through a process like this:

1.  Write as if possessed by Calliope, hammering out two or three days’ worth of work in one sitting.

2.  Stay ahead of the required daily word count all month, finishing before Thanksgiving.

3.  ???

4.  Profit!

Instead, Day One tends to go something like this:

1.  Write one paragraph, stare blankly at page for half an hour.

2.  Check email.

3.   Revise paragraph, add another.

4.  Collapse on floor, loudly sobbing to anyone in earshot that I have failed and will never be a successful writer.

5.  Watch My Little Pony; claim I need to do something calming and happy before I resume the strenuous writing process.

6.  Finally complete 1667 words; regret every one of them.

This is how every day of week one tends to go, though with less melodramatics each day as the week goes by.  By the second week, I hit my stride.  That is, if I reach the second week.

Luckily, after five years of novel projects, I’ve finally managed a method that allows me to break through the writer’s slump.  And best of all, it works for any week of NaNoWriMo!  The downside is that it’s not easy.

The method?  Force yourself to write.

Don’t accept any excuses from yourself, or, if your will is weak, instruct your roommates/family members/coworkers not to accept excuses from you.  Strap yourself into that chair, Clockwork Orange style.  Snap a rubber band against your wrist every time you find yourself browsing Facebook.  Better yet, delete the shortcuts to the Internet from your desktop while you write.  Hire a friend to smack you with a flyswatter whenever you idle too long.*  Whatever it takes.  Just get it done.

*#amnoveling does not endorse flyswatters as a writing method.  While any measure within reason is acceptable to motivate oneself to write, please use common sense when selecting a method and do not choose one that is potentially harmful to yourself or to others.

“Some help this is,” you may be thinking.  “If I could just sit down and write, I wouldn’t be looking for advice in the first place.”  Yes, this method may be stating the obvious, and yes, it’s work, and it isn’t easy.  But after you force yourself to write page after page, you’ll find the process becomes simpler.  Runners call it breaking through the wall: a point after the pain and fatigue of the exercise ceases to affect them.  I call it breaking through the writer’s block, and it will happen, though you might need to spice up your plot to hold your interest if you’re still lagging after forcing yourself to write.  Can’t possibly write another word of this scene?  Start a new one, even if the old one ends midsentence.  Kill off a character!  Demolish a building!  Who cares if it doesn’t make sense?  NaNoWriMo isn’t for revising, it’s for getting the words out on the page.  There’s plenty of time to go back and connect the dots after the month is over.

But whatever changes occur in your story, the important thing is to get the story down.  Writing a novel isn’t easy, but if you can make yourself continue, it’s never impossible.

See you at the finish line!

-Lauren Burch

NaNoWriMo in the Classroom

Before I was the Advanced Fiction TA, I was an Advanced Fiction student.  I walked into my first class with Cathy Day last fall and was as stunned as this year’s students when I was told one of the requirements would be completing a 50,000 word novel over the course of the semester.  On the first day, that knowledge isn’t just overwhelming, it’s insane.  50,000 words for one class—and that’s just the novel; there were other assignments—on top of the workload for all the other subjects?

I whined in the privacy of my dorm room.  I complained.  I rolled my eyes and flopped on my bed and wailed that there was no way any of us, let alone me, could complete this assignment.  And then the initial few weeks of class passed and, in a process similar to what I imagine this year’s students went through, I sucked it up, started planning, and by the end of the semester, had my first completed novel preserved in a Word document on my laptop.  Granted, it’s one of those “first novels” that authors lock up in a drawer somewhere and never expose to the light of day, but it’s an achievement nonetheless.

There is one difference, however, between my writing process and the one that this year’s students are using.  The 2011 Advanced Fiction class has been writing 3333 words a week since the semester began.  My class participated in National Writing Month of November, pounding out 1667 words a day and wiping out the total required word count in 30 days.

As thirty days slip by, so do the writers' minds.

 Some of us, anyway.  Cathy acknowledged that her students may have schedules that conflicted with writing a novel in a month, so the class was given the option of starting in October or November.  Because I’m a stickler for the rules, a former NaNoWriMo participant—won once, and my other attempts are not up for discussion—and the sort who works best with a deadline looming over my head like the Sword of Damocles, I opted to begin in November.  I succeeded, along with all of the October participants and some of the November starters.  But not all of the students who followed the official NaNoWriMo schedule completed their novels, and they didn’t feel it was fair that their classmates weren’t held to the same schedule.  So this year, Cathy dropped NaNoWriMo in the classroom and replaced it with 3333 words a week.

I can’t say the one method is objectively better than the other.  Certainly, a weekly word count through the semester allows students more time to think about the progression of their plots and help them decide what they want to happen next.  It gives them more freedom to explore their characters and settings as they write, and if they find that the novel they had in mind turns out to be as interesting to them as watching road tar set, then they have more time to come up with another storyline.

But I can’t help but miss the frantic energy of the NaNoWriMo class.  I’d sit down in the classroom, throw on my headphones, turn on the Inception soundtrack—there is no song in the world that makes me write faster than “Mombasa”—and hammer on my keyboard for an hour and fifteen minutes.  Any pause in my typing or music would alert me to the sound of a dozen others around me writing as feverishly as I was, and that, combined with my fiercely competitive nature, gave me the inspiration I needed to go on.  The highlight of my days that November was logging onto the NaNoWriMo site and plugging in my word count, watching my progress bar inch closer and closer to 50,000.

This year’s writing sessions don’t have that intensity.  It’s not that the students are lacking in creativity and drive.  And it isn’t that they’re failing to reach their required goals.  But the word count is so spread out in comparison to last year that of course the classroom writings won’t have the same sense of urgency.  It’s not a bad thing.  It’s just not the flavor I’m accustomed to.

And as for me, it turns out the more time I have to think and plan beyond the initial character and plotting sessions, the more time I have to become bored with my ideas.  In a sort of college horror story that only the English majors would find frightening, at the end of September I realized I no longer had any interest in the original novel and had to start from scratch. But even with a new storyline and characters planned out, I’m still stuck in neutral.  I’ve decided to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year, once more banging out my novel over the course of a month.

Every year at the end of October, the debates about NaNoWriMo start.  Is it a good thing?  Is it a bad thing?  Does it provide badly needed structure or does it give participants unrealistic expectations?  After going through NaNoWriMo with last year’s class and experiencing the entirely different structure of this year’s, I don’t think these questions are so black and white.  I can’t work without a countdown hovering behind me, smacking me in the head with a calendar.  But if some other students had to follow my schedule, they’d crash and burn before Thanksgiving Break.

That, I believe, is the real lesson I’ve learned from experiencing NaNoWriMo in the classroom.  No two writers run on the same internal clock, or have the exact same amount of time to set aside.  It’s not a question of whether a method is good or bad, just how well it works for the participants.  Some people can write a novel in a month; others require a full semester.  As long it produces a story, what does it matter how the story was created?

Though in an entirely subjective sense, I must admit I prefer the NaNo method.  We get progress bars, after all.  How cool is that?

-Lauren Burch