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Keep Writing and I'll see you in December!

Day Three of NaNoWriMo

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.  ~E.L. Doctorow

t is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.  ~Vita Sackville-West

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Day three and I'm about 2000 words behind schedule! The process of churning out material is changing my whiny attitude toward writing already though. There are lots of groups writing together and supporting each other, including the group of solo performers I'm working with. Everyone has a different pace and different goal.
Here is a Pep talk from the NaNoWriMo archives that is especially inspiring for all writers, including those of you who are not participating:

Piers Anthony’s Pep Talk

Dear Writer,
You’re a fool. You know that, don’t you? Because only a fool would try a stunt as crazy as this. You want to write a 50,000 word novel in one month?! Do you have sawdust in your skull? When there are so many other more useful things you could be doing, like cleaning up the house and yard, taking a correspondence course in Chinese, or contributing your time and effort to a charitable cause? Whatever is possessing you?
Consider the first card of the Tarot deck, titled The Fool. There’s this young man traipsing along with a small dog at his heel, toting a bag of his worldly goods on the end of his wooden staff, carrying a flower in his other hand, gazing raptly at the sky—and about to step off a cliff, because he isn’t watching his feet. A fool indeed. Does this feel familiar? It should. You’re doing much the same thing. What made you ever think you could bat out a bad book like that, let alone write anything readable?
So are you going to give up this folly and focus on reality before you step off the cliff? No? Are you sure? Even though you know you are about to confirm the suspicion of your dubious relatives, several acquaintances, and fewer friends that you never are going to amount to anything more than a dank hill of beans? That you’re too damned oink-headed to rise to the level of the very lowest rung of common sense?
Sigh. You’re a lost soul. So there’s no help for it but to join the lowly company of the other aspect of The Fool. Because the fact is, that Fool is a Dreamer, and it is Dreamers who ultimately make life worthwhile for the unimaginative rest of us. Dreamers consider the wider universe. Dreamers build cathedrals, shape fine sculptures, and yes, generate literature. Dreamers are the artists who provide our rapacious species with some faint evidence of nobility.
So maybe you won’t be a successful novelist, or even a good one. At least you are trying. That, would you believe, puts you in a rarefied one percent of our kind. Maybe less than that. You aspire to something better than the normal rat race. You may not accomplish much, but it’s the attitude that counts. As with mutations: 99% of them are bad and don’t survive, but the 1% that are better are responsible for the evolution of species to a more fit state. You know the odds are against you, but who knows? If you don’t try, you’ll never be sure whether you might, just maybe, possibly, have done it. So you do have to make the effort, or be forever condemned in your own bleary eyes.
Actually, 50,000 words isn’t hard. You can write “Damn!” 50,000 times. Oh, you want a readable story! That will be more of a challenge. But you know, it can be done. In my heyday, before my wife’s health declined and I took over meals and chores, I routinely wrote 3,000 words a day, taking two days a week off to answer fan mail, and 60,000 words a month was par. Now I try for 1,500 and hope for 2,000. That will do it. If you write that much each day, minimum, and go over some days, you will have your quota in the month. On the 10th of the month of August, 2008, I started writing my Xanth novel Knot Gneiss, about the challenge of a boulder that turns out to be not stone but a huge petrified knot of reverse wood that terrifies anyone who approaches it. Petrified = terrified, get it? And by the 30th I had 35,000 words. That’s the same pace. If I can do it in my doddering old age—I’m 74—you can do it in your relative youth.
Of course you need ideas. You can garner them from anywhere. I noticed that our daily newspaper comes in a plastic bag that is knotted. The knot’s too tight to undo without a lot of effort, so I just rip it open to get at the goodies inside. It’s a nuisance; I wish they’d leave it loose. But I thought, maybe there’s this cute delivery girl who has a crush on me, and she ties a love-knot to let me know. Not that at my age I’d know what to do with a real live girl, but it’s still a fun fantasy. Okay, there’s an idea. I could use it in my fiction. Maybe even in a Pep Talk. The mundane world has provided me with an opening. It will do the same for you, if you’re alert.
Here’s a secret: fictive text doesn’t necessary flow easily. Most of the time it’s more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress. It may not be pretty at first. Prettiness doesn’t come until later, at the polishing stage, which is outside your month. You just have to get it done by brute force if necessary. So maybe your ongoing story isn’t very original. That’s okay, for this. Just get it done. Originality can be more in the eye of the reader than in any objective assessment.
You can make it from a standing start, even from a foolish daydream when you should have been paying attention to the Pep Talk. You will want to try for a bit more quality, of course, and maybe a spot of realism. Garner an Idea, assemble some Characters, find a suitable place to start, and turn them loose in your imagination. Now go home and start your engines!
Piers

Day 1 of NaNoWriMo

The first step towards getting somewhere is deciding you are not going to stay where you are--Anon

So may fail because they don't get started--they don't go. They don't overcome inertia. They don't begin--W. Clement Stone

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth...not going all the way and not starting--Buddha

My blog is going to look a little different for the month of November. I am participating in NaNoWriMo, so rather than prompts, I'll likely post words of encouragement and writing tips to help keep us going.
After posting this, I'll start my novel. Without a freakin' clue of what I'm going to write! But because I rarely have a clue about what I'm going to write, I'm confident that the act of doing will lead somewhere surprising and worthwhile.
It's not too late to sign up!
http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/sign_in 

Here is an email I received today from Lindsey, the program director:


Happy November!
Lindsey here, Program Director for NaNoWriMo. If you saw my tweet today, or have looked at my profile page at all, you already know that I haven’t started my 2011 NaNo-novel yet. And from looking at the Twitter replies to my confession, I see that I am not alone.
I’d like to tell you a little story about not starting, starring me. It’ll only take a moment, and I think it will help us all break the seals on our November novels.
Ahem.
For much of my life, I have suffered from a fairly spectacular case of social anxiety, especially whenever I insert myself into a new situation. Excessive sweating, full-body blushing, steamed up glasses, choking on my own saliva... it’s something to behold.
My parents tried everything to ease the stress of the first day of school, recitals, parties, joining the Brownies, and then the soccer team, and later, the yearbook staff. “Just get in there,” they’d say. “No one is going to eat you!”
None of the psychological tricks they tried really worked. And they always made me go and join and do, much as I may have begged or squealed to skip. And cheers to them for holding firm, because I always had a ball.
As an adult, I still have to make myself try new things, though I frequently wish to stay at home alone doing the same old safe stuff. I ease the awkwardness of my shaky introductions and foggy glasses by smiling a lot and taking my glasses off for the first ten minutes of any new adventure.
What I’ve also learned is that once I am through the door, I'm pretty okay. It’s the initial fear of turning the doorknob and crossing the threshold that activates the fear factory. Once that's done, I’m already feeling more relaxed and able to remember why I was doing the new thing in the first place: because it's fun!


So now you know way more than you need to about my temperament and tendency to sweat excessively. But I share this mildly humiliating information with you because I think the beginning of NaNoWriMo feels like this for a lot of people!
Jumping into 50,000 words can carry with it a certain stab of, “Oh, jeez, I don’t know what I am doing or what’s going to happen!” And with that panicky thought comes the inclination to say, “I’ll do it next time, “ or skip it altogether.
But if you wait until next time, if you stay home on the couch with the cat and don’t make yourself go and join and do, you’re going to miss out on a surprising and satisfying month of creative abandon. You’ll be walking away from the rough draft of your novel.
Like I said, I am still at a zero word count. And I am starting to feel those first telltale symptoms when I think about starting my novel tonight: the clammy hands, the dry mouth, the damp underarms. Yep, I am nervous.
But I also know that writing the first paragraph, the first page, and then the first 1,667 words, is akin to walking through the door, introducing myself, and removing my glasses for a little while until the perspiring subsides.
Starting can be daunting. But as one who struggles with this, I can tell you with confidence that no one is going to eat you. In fact, you’re going to have a tremendous amount of fun. But first, you’ve gotta walk into the room.
I invite you to put your hand on that door with me and push. Let’s write this first page together, and then get on with the party that awaits.
Extending my (slightly sweaty) hand to you,

Lindsey