Need Some Motivation

Lagging behind on my NaNoWriMo word count and in need of inspiration/motivation. And, apparently, I feel like sharing so I am plagiarizing NaNo pep talks for my blog this week (It's not really plagiarizing if I state the source, right?).

Here's excerpts from two pep talks that spoke to me. The gist is the same as always: just sit down and write and the rest will fall into place eventually (like in the revising).

Pep Talk from Neil Gaiman:

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more—and that even when they do you’re preoccupied and no fun. You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing. 

Welcome to the club. 

That’s how novels get written. 

You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Entire entire pep talk here:
http://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/neil-gaiman

Pep Talk from Malinda Lo:

Here’s what happens when I sit down to write. First, I turn off my access to the internet by engaging Freedom. (The internet is the number-one killer of writer productivity!) Second, I open Scrivener. (Substitute whatever word-processing program works for you.) Third, I force myself to sit there with my work-in-progress until Freedom says I’m done. (I always set it for at least one hour, and often three.) I don’t allow myself to get up to make endless cups of tea (one will do). I just sit there. That’s all.

How often am I filled with inspiration before I start writing? Pretty much never. Instead, I usually stare at my work-in-progress with a vague sense of doom. I often think to myself: What the hell am I doing in this scene? I don’t understand how to get my characters from Point A to Point B! I really want to check Twitter!

The trick is this: As long as I sit there with my work-in-progress, at some point I will write something, because there’s nothing else to do.

Whatever I write may not be any good, but that doesn’t matter. When you’re writing a first draft—which most of you are doing this month—the most important thing is to keep moving forward. Your first try will be riddled with mistakes, but that’s what revision is for. Right now, you only have to put those ugly, wrong words on the page so you can fix them later.

Read the entire pep talk here:
http://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/malinda-lo

#NaNoWriMo WHAT?

I am in love. I am all starry-eyed. I am wondering, where have you been all my life?! What has me all a-flutter? A little movement in the writing world called NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriWhat?

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month (which is November).  It’s when crazy would-be novelist such as myself set out to write a novel in one month. Or, at least 50,000 unedited words. It’s a way to stifle the inner critic, the mounting excuses, the list of procrastinations, or the myriad of things that get in the way of sitting our butts down in a chair and writing.

The idea of NaNoWriMo started in 1999 when Chris Baty and 20 of his friends set out to write a novel in one month. (What was I doing in 1999? Still dreaming of one-day writing a novel) On the NaNo website, Baty describes that first year:

That first year there were 21 of us, and our July noveling binge had little to do with any ambitions we might have harbored on the literary front. Nor did it reflect any hopes we had about tapping more fully into our creative selves. No, we wanted to write novels for the same dumb reasons twenty-somethings start bands. Because we wanted to make noise. Because we didn’t have anything better to do. And because we thought that, as novelists, we would have an easier time getting dates than we did as non-novelists.

Baty goes on to say that in this process they discovered something they hadn't expected: Novel writing is fun.

Fun was a revelation. Novel writing, we had discovered, was just like watching TV. You get a bunch of friends together, load up on caffeine and junk food, and stare at a glowing screen for a couple hours. And a story spins itself out in front of you.

I think the scene—full of smack-talk and muffin crumbs on our keyboards—would have rightly horrified professional writers. We had taken the cloistered, agonized novel-writing process and transformed it into something that was half literary marathon and half block party.

This sounds like college. I’m in! Seriously. This was made for me!

If the idea of cramming in novel writing in one month college-style – with lots of coffee and junk food and friends – wasn't enough motivation, the deal was sealed when I read that Sara Gruen wrote Water for Elephants during NaNoWriMo. One of my favorite books ever! From NaNoWriMo.org, in 2006:

Then we heard about Sara Gruen. Sara had been one of the first participants to sell her NaNoWriMo manuscript, and had since written another NaNoWriMo novel that had become a bestseller: Water For Elephants. When her new project went out for auction in the fall of ’06, she landed a reported $5.2 million, two-book deal. How did she celebrate? She sat down and wrote another book for NaNoWriMo.

Seriously. Deal sealed.

And, of course, Sara wrote a pep talk directly to me: http://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/sara-gruen Alright, I don’t own horses, but you get the idea….

So this November, I will be banishing all excuses to write 50,000 words. When I am not blogging, answering my phone, responding to emails, liking statuses on Facebook, or tweeting – I will be writing. When I am not sleeping, I will be writing. When I am not cleaning, I will be writing.

I am not doing this alone, there is an entire NaNoWriMo community to support me. I’m excited. I’ll keep you posted. Or, maybe, I’ll just see you in December

If you want to hear some other authors talk about this crazy idea known as NaNoWriMo, check out:

http://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/james-patterson

http://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/john-green