I didn’t blog much about how it was going during November because I was trying to be diligent about working on the novel. If you want to get a feel for the zeitgeist, though, check out Doyce Testerman’s blog.

Having a gang of fellow travelers helped me stay in motion more than I realized it could, and the Internet made them available 24/7 when I needed another prod. I’m glad to have fallen in with the right crowd on Twitter who offer up conversation and enthusiasm 140 characters at a time, especially @karenquah (who also did some blogging about NaNo), @Scribblerati (who built a whole website where writers can hang out), @uppington (for having done it before and showing us what to do next), @WriteAdvantage (who talks about editing and reminds me I know something about this), @catepolacek, @TamaraNKitties, @KeriStevens, @CraigCottingham, @count_01, @merrileefaber, @jennspiller, @silverwriter, @vdemetros, @hdgrogan, @jessrosenbooks, @marybrebner, @boudreaufreret, @AlannaCoca, @jhtatroe, and @BCB_.

Oy vey, and Scott, who remains untempted by Twitter (but did you know half my Facebook peeps think you’re my brother—which means I get to read your novel, right?).

And thanks to my unflagging townie writing peeps, especially Phil, Deni, and Amy. I am reading for brainstorming any time, any place, as long as we can eat croissants there.

At some point, from some position, I'll be able to see a path through this thing

I did it. The story is there. The pacing is a disaster; one of the scenes I wrote twice because I changed my mind about where it should appear, a third of the characters don’t have names, and around the 20th I quit updating my outline. I always have to go back and write in more so you know things like the hero has brown hair, or the conversation took place in a subway car . . . but . . . but . . . the main and most of the minor pieces are there.

Used to be I thought 500 words in a day was good; 800 words was terrific. During NaNo I had to average 1,667, and during Thanksgiving break I logged 3,500 a couple days to make the deadline. It was hard; it took me all day, some days, and I remember at least six days of hitting my target and thinking, “I have no idea what I’m going to write tomorrow.”

But I got in there and banged out my thousand every day, and this is what will be the long-lasting effect for me. However I feel about this draft in a month or two, I now feel like 800 words is EASY. Something about this has been demystified, my lung capacity has been built up, and my non-NaNo routine will no longer feel like a stretch. NaNo was a month of training at altitude, and now I’m back on the plains with all that extra hemoglobin.

My general philosophy about getting better as a writer is that it must include writing a lot. NaNo was a lot, and it was great. At 50,142 words I left my protagonists with a gun pointed at them. I’ll wrap that up some time in the next day or two; I’ll clean up the kitchen, catch up on the mail, and watch some TV. I’ll get my head out of Daniel and Reggie’s world and feel mighty less trepidation about the next one.

When people ask what books influenced me, they’re usually expecting a list that could double for some Great Books High Literature syllabus, especially if they know my father was an English professor.

In fact, my exposure in that genre is pretty sketchy, but it wasn’t because I wasn’t reading. For one stretch of middle school, I read a book a day (thank goodness for libraries). The school librarian recommended books. The school librarian’s mother was our next-door neighbor, and she loaned me romances that she’d saved from her youth (I thought they were too mushy). One of the grad students in the English department always asked what I’d been reading (and always listened to my answer). Another loaned me his childhood favorites (the adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy).

But it wasn’t all books that I read.

A prosaic post for the middle of NaNo. Disclaimer, not in small print in case you are currently in the throes: I am not a doctor. Sometimes headaches can be the sign of something serious.

First pass at a cure:
500 mg of vitamin C
16 oz of water (2 cups or about 250 mL)
8 oz of something with caffeine in it

The theory is that most headaches are caused by dehydration or by coming off a caffeine high.

In psychoanalysis, resistance is what the patient does when things start working—once they get close to the problem issue, patients engage methods to maintain the status quo. Resistance, thy name is Ann Marie Gamble.

When I decided to do NaNoWriMo, I decided to work on an idea that I hadn’t done much prep work for. I’m not only writing this story from the beginning, but starting from scratch developing characters and plot. It’s been interesting to see all the parts unroll in a concentrated time frame.

I’m an editor in my day job, and I do a lot of wrestling with the issue of ignoring the Inner Editor—at this house, she’s paying the mortgage, so we don’t want her to go on permanent leave. Here are some concrete tricks and a bit of theorizing that I’ve used to help get in a creative groove.

Think a bit about what brings out your censorious side. What conditions does your critic like? These may be times of day, a room of your house, topics? Is critique a part of your job, part of a particular activity? At this level of combat, do your writing in the opposite of these conditions. If you do editing work in Word, write in Word Perfect. Edit at a desk? Write at a table, or on the sofa, or in a hammock. Until you get good at talking to your Inner Editor, though, just practice avoidance.

In a previous post, I talked about discovering a character’s goal, motivation, and conflict as part of the work I do to write. In addition to motivation, I spend some time on their personality more generally: goals are something like “the perfect gift for Mother” and personality is whether this would be adventure or stress for the character, whether they’d be willing to shoplift or learn a craft.

Some writers (and I am one) read real psychology to assist in this endeavor of constructing a “person” who doesn’t read like a jerry-rigged collection of traits that will come in handy given the plot. What I need in my tool box is a system so that I can think of a fictional character in a cohesive, consistent way. Not just whether she’s a cat person but why. Psychology, of course, is an entire field of study, not a handmaiden to novelists, and perhaps doubly annoying to an expert will be this next statement: for a novelist, it doesn’t matter if any of these theories hold true.

How do I get there?

Before you bury yourself in the available hundreds of how-to books, take another moment to ask what your problem is—some books are very nuts-and-bolts, step-by-step instructions, and others are more philosophical. As a critic, here’s my definition of a good book about writing: when you’re done reading it, you feel like writing something (rather than, say, going to Tolstoy’s tomb and burning your manuscript). There are more out there that I’ve heard good things about (tell us your favorites in the comments!); the below are what I’ve read so far.

All he wants is to finish a novel.

I’m batting ideas about for something to work on for National Novel Writing Month, which has been an interesting chance for me to see my method in action—it’s been a while since I started a new project, and I’ve learned a lot about things like plotting and characterization since the last time I started from scratch with something.

On the character side, most writers ask a variation of “What do they want?” What is it that this character is struggling to get over the course of the story? PC-ness of a kind rules the romance writer’s answer to this question: “they want to find true love” is insufficient. (Who would want to write an entire novel about this person, let alone read it?) Like in real life, work on yourself first, buddy, and then dates will come.

This writing thing. Dreaming stuff up, getting it down, putting it together into something remotely coherent for the nonresidents of my brain. There is a stage of discipline in art, of making yourself forgo some fun stuff in order to sit in a chair (again) and type, of forming words and sentences and paragraphs. But there’s also some inchoate mass that has to have room—not beige or square please—and time to swirl and coalesce, break apart and broil and recoalesce into those ideas to which will be applied structure, cause and effect, and grammar.