James Patterson's advice for NaNoWriMo

A bit more NaNoWriMo advice, but this time from best-selling author James Patterson. Love #2 and #3.

1. Outline. If you already have: gold star; proceed to the next piece of advice. If you didn’t, don’t worry, because it’s never too late to go back and make an outline. An outline isn’t something to be scared of, it’s just a chapter-by-chapter description of the scenes that, lined-up together, make your book. On the count of three, tell me the story that unfolds in your novel. All the way to the last chapter. Now write that down. There’s your outline. Easy, right?
   
2. Lie to yourself. Honesty is a great quality, but we’re writing fiction here, so you’d better get used to a little light lying. Tell yourself you can do this. Tell yourself your book will be great. The world will love it and you’ll be the next J.K. Rowling, J.D. Salinger, Art Spiegelman, or whatever flavor of author you hope to become.
   
3. Get into a writing routine. Think it’s hard to write every day during NaNo? Most professional writers keep this kind of pace all year round. Holidays, birthdays, vacations—you name it, we’re writing. The trick is making writing into a daily habit. Same time. Same place. Same hot beverage of choice. Every. Single. Day. Again. And. Again.
   
4. Don’t do it alone. If you live with somebody, tell them to be unpleasant to you if they see you doing anything else during your writing time. Buy them a water gun. If you live alone, have friends call and check on you. And if you have no friends, you will have no trouble writing a book in 30 days. What else do you have to do? (I’m not knocking friendless people. We’ve all been there.)
   
5. Don’t stress. I don’t mean to undermine the above, but remember this is one month, not your entire writing career. Try hard, learn from it, and if you don’t get to 50,000 words, figure out what you did wrong so you can get there next time.

Last Minute Tips for NaNoWriMo

Here's a handful of last minute tips for NaNoWriMo:

• Don't forget to read my first article: jasonshayer.blogspot.ca/2013/10/nanowrimo-2013-advice.html
  
• Believe in yourself. If you're like me, you'll be plagued by self-doubt throughout November. It's going to be a rough first draft.
  
• Don't get caught in rewriting. If you think of a better way of writing a scene, just write that new scene. Don't go back and edit.
  
• Don't stop reading. I know it'll be difficult to just have to the time to writer your 1667 words a day, but also make sure you take a few minutes to read each day as well.

• It's a marathon, not a sprint. Stick to your word count. If you fall behind, you still have a lot of time to catch up!
  
• Just write. Apply the seat of your pants to a chair and write.
  
• Have fun!

The journey towards 50,000 words begins with but one word...

NaNoWriMo 2013 Advice

"Once more onto the breech!" Okay, so who's with me. 50,000 words in 30 days (or 720 hours, or 43, 200 minutes).

I've done it 5 times in the last 6 years and dragged my sorry carcass across the finish line all 5 times.

Here's some unsolicited advice:

• Go in with a good idea of a synopsis/outline. When you carve out the daily time to write, make sure you know what you're writing about. And don't be afraid to go off on tangents and explore other ideas. But, it always helps to sit down and have a direction to write in.
• Set a goal of pounding out 1800 words a day, a bit more than what is required (1667 words a day). Why?  It always feels better to be ahead.  Not to mention, there will be days when you won't get any writing done, so you need to build up enough of an advance to stop feeling guilty about not writing.  
• Use a spreadsheet with 30 days worth of word counts to track my daily progress.
• Carve out some time, whether it's late at night or early in the morning, or over lunch.
• Get your family/significant others' buy in. Tell them what you're trying to do. I really does help to tell them your word count goal as they can encourage you. Or at least give them a timeframe for when you'll join them for dinner or come to bed!
• Maintain some social presence. You can't bury yourself in your novel. Getting out occasionally will help and might even help if you chat a bit about your work in progress.

Let me know if you have any questions...

You can buddy me over on the NaNoWriMo author page at http://nanowrimo.org/participants/jshayer

Carving out time to write

I'm a father to two young kids, married, and have a full time job. If you recognize the situation, you probably have a good understanding of how difficult it is to carve out the necessary time to write. I've been able to use the odd lunch hour to get some quality time to write, but the evening after work and after getting the kids down prove to be rather unproductive. I do manage to get some writing in, but it's always seems to be distracted writing time.

I'm hoping to kick off some early morning writing sessions, perhaps getting up an hour earlier in the morning than the kids. Also, for the weekends, I want to establish some dedicate some writing time, that way once that time is used up, I turn my attention to all my other responsibilities. Doing it this way I hope to avoid the guilt of not writing on the weekends and getting flack for spending all my free time writing when I should be helping out around the house!

I'm trying to figure out the best way to get this done and I know it's different for everyone. I've been regularly hitting a 500 word a day target, so with the dedicated time, I'd like to push this a bit hard, perhaps up to 1,000 words. And of course, a simple word target isn't the only part of writing writers need to focus on. There's plotting and characters and research to focus on, as just the tip of the iceberg as there's much more like writing up a synopsis and log lines...

Does anyone have any other advice to share in terms of carving our time to write? How much time do you dedicate in a week to write?

Butcher's Scene and Sequel

The scene and sequel concept is nothing new in fiction and is a great way to ensure structure in your story and to keep it moving. Jim Butcher has refined the process and provided a working frame to set up the scene and sequel structure.

Distilled from these notes: http://www.rkathey.com/94/jim-butcher-on-writing

SCENES
- follow a sub-pattern of stimulus-response: action-response
- where the action happens, where the conflict occurs, and where the consequences begin.

Point of View (PoV) – You tell the scene from the point of view of the person with the most to lose
Character’s Goal – What is the goal of the PoV character? The audience needs to know the goal. The goal is active, immediate, and important.
Conflict – What's stopping the character from reaching their goal? The antagonist should be the conflicting force as much as possible. You should be investing the antagonist's time.
Setback – There are four ways to end a scene: Will the protagonist succeed?
   Yes – BORING!
   Yes/But – Success but there are consequences.
    No – Fails and must get a new goal. Great for showing determination but often leads to hard plot stops.
   No and Furthermore – Not only does the character not succeed but there are new plot complications that arise as the result of the failure. Save this for critical points in the story.

SEQUELS
- happen after scenes
- show the character’s reaction in the following order.
   + Emotion – “Oh my God I’ve been in a car crash!”. Emotion is what you feel first after a traumatic event.
   + Reason
      - Logic – “Am I bleeding?” where the character activates his/her brain to evaluate the immediate situation.
      - Review – “Am I late?” A review of the things that got them to the point of the trauma and the immediate effect of it.
      - Anticipation – “What’s going to happen next? Will the car explode?” Anticipation is the character trying to figure out what might happen next.
   + Choice – What the character decides to do after the event.

The above reactions lead to a new goal and next scene.

Ty Templeton's Plotting panel from Fan Expo 2013

Ty Templeton's "How to plot a story in under and hour"



My notes: 
- Every story ever told has an order:
     1) What is normal
     2) What has changed the normal
     3) What result from that change Plot

- A character discovers that they want something and put effort into bringing it about. A character has to matter to an audience

- Create the concept of a story around the basic description of the character, an ironic twist helps for example, an alcoholic firefighter or a cowardly firefighter, which instantly suggests a story

- Your character is the _blank_ _blank_ in _blank_. For example, Batman is the greatest detective in the world or Robin Hood is the greatest archer in England.

- "Be a sadist to your characters, we learn nothing about your characters if they're happy" - Vonnegut

- Your character earns their goal by deserving what they get by accumulating karma throughout the story

- Halfway through the story, the thing they desire becomes less important than something else

- Unexpected reward or loss, that thing they don't see coming - for example, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy sets out looking for the Ark, but find the love of Marion, the movie ends with the ark being stored away while Indy has Marion

- What is your character not expecting? loss or gain?

- A character's success or failure has to be because of what he/she is

- A character must succeed with a cost, a price; they may get what they set out to get in the begining, but they lose that new something, so there's a struggle, a choice

- Set pieces that stick to a reader's imagination, these set pieces matters where they are, the environment has to play an integral part to the story and character

- The environment also tells a story, it becomes the character, it tells you who the character is

- What's the story's theme? What's the lesson learned? Go back and inject that theme into the story.

Check out http://comicbookbootcamp.com for more information on Ty Templeton and his upcoming comic book bootcamp classes.

Distractions and focusing on your daily writing goal

Distractions. You know what I mean. Writing is difficult enough and you add in distractions, it all seems to slip away.

You set aside some time to write and you start and a few minutes into it, your mind starts to drift and eager to pick up on any distraction, like email, facebook, twitter, laundry, dishes, clipping your finger nails.

Reading Cory Doctorow's 2009 article, locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html, provided some great insight and ways to tackle that distraction.

Here are my notes:

Short, regular work schedule
- set an obtainable goal and meet it
- focus on nothing else for that 20 minutes
- you can always find a block of 20 minutes in a day
- but, do it every day
- try to think in advance about sensory detail to include in the next day's writing to start you going the next time you sit down to write

Leave yourself a rough edge
- stop writing after you hit your daily word-goal, even if you're in the middle of a sentence.

Kill your word-processor
- fancy wordprocessors can be a distraction on their own
- to take advantage of that 20 minutes, just use a text editor

Okay, I've stepped away from my writing long enough now that I should let this distraction go and get back to writing!