The wall

It’s funny how things change in a week. NaNoWriMo started exceedingly well. Week two came along and it has became a chore.

The wall, the murky middle, the notorious hardest week of NaNo has arrived. Allow me to re-post tidbits and tips to help us all through. 

The first is from Monday’s NaNoWriMo site. I can’t locate the article to credit the author but I believe it came from the local Salt Lake chapter who advised: back up your work. Right now. If you’re on track with 25,000 words or only a tenth of that, it is too much to loose. Back it up now, back it up every other day hereafter.

Gwen Hicks, also from a NaNoWriMo email offered these points:

--Not every thing you write this month will be good, some  of it even bad. The key is to accept that you may disappoint yourself and not live up to your own standards, but the time to nitpick is after its finished. 

-A sign above Ray Bradbury’s writing office advises: “You must never think at the typewriter. You must feel.”

-Stuck? Start talking to yourself - ad-lib dialog, even record it on a sound recorder

-Trapped in a scene? Do a choose your own adventure with several possible outcome based on a charter’s actions.

My operating procedure has been to set a timer and write for an hour, repeating as many times as I can manage. I record the number of minutes for each hour. If I first devote five minutes to figuring out what needs to happen in a scene, my word count goes way up. Know what you’re to write before you write.

Know when to write (and when not to). My word count goes way down at night when I am tired. Some people fight through it and struggle on. I merely waste time when I should have given up and gone to bed. Know when you are most productive and when you are not, then plan accordingly. 

In different font color, I drop remarks in the middle of my text. Notes to self such as “fix that” or “thesaurus” is my signal where something wasn’t right, or a more precise word is called for. This keeps the internal editor at bay, yet gives him something to go on when I let him out of his cage. It’s quick, easy, and doesn’t in erupt the flow of thought. 

Lastly, Julie Daines on Monday posted tips on this blog that are so good, they bear repeating. They are:

-Let go of perfection.

-Chip away at the story using spare moments of time rather that waiting for a huge chunk of time.

-Keep fingers moving - you need to read what she says about that.

-Be all in - again, Julie says it better than I can summarize here, so follow the link for the complete idea.

It’s half-time. Don’t give up. We’ve still got sixteen days to get our stories to finished. Good luck.

(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)

In Memory of Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, age 91, passed away this morning leaving behind an amazing legacy of writing. One of the articles I read on Yahoo linked to this essay he wrote recently on rejection.

The amazing Blackstone came to town when I was seven, and I saw how he came alive onstage and thought, God, I want to grow up to be like that! And I ran up to help him vanish an elephant. To this day I don't know where the elephant went. One moment it was there, the next—abracadabra—with a wave of the wand it was gone!

In 1929 Buck Rogers came into the world, and on that day in October a single panel of Buck Rogers comic strip hurled me into the future. I never came back.

It was only natural when I was twelve that I decided to become a writer and laid out a huge roll of butcher paper to begin scribbling an endless tale that scrolled right on up to Now, never guessing that the butcher paper would run forever.

Snoopy has written me on many occasions from his miniature typewriter, asking me to explain what happened to me in the great blizzard of rejection slips of 1935. Then there was the snowstorm of rejection slips in '37 and '38 and an even worse winter snowstorm of rejections when I was twenty-one and twenty-two. That almost tells it, doesn't it, that starting when I was fifteen I began to send short stories to magazines like Esquire, and they, very promptly, sent them back two days before they got them! I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn't realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn. Then, during the late forties, I actually began to sell short stories and accomplished some sort of deliverance from snowstorms in my fourth decade. But even today, my latest books of short stories contain at least seven stories that were rejected by every magazine in the United States and also in Sweden! So, dear Snoopy, take heart from this. The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.