writing

Welcome to a Work-in-Progress

IMG_4429Nothing stays the same, and over the past few years the purpose of this site has grown and evolved. I decided that it’s about time that the design caught up with the ways in which this site is used by my visitors and with the ways I need to use it now and in the future.

The first thing I’ve done is simplify the tabs. I’ve grouped the material by the needs of my audience. So click on the tab that applies to you and explore. I haven’t deleted any of your favourite links, but if you have a problem finding something, please let me know.

I’ve also turned this first page into a blog where I plan to share great links for teachers and young writers and chat about my own writing, as well.

I’ll appreciate your patience as I work through the challenges of making some necessary changes to the site. As always I wish you all the best with your writing and teaching endeavours.

The photo above shows my collection of writing journals. A couple are still unused, but most of them have bits and pieces of stories, and some a lot more. Do  you write in journals or are you strictly a keyboard writer?

Stretching my legs at NaNo Station 20,000+

It’s time for me to get off the NaNoWriMo train for a while and do some thinking. Until a bout of feeling physically crummy knocked me down for a few days, I was on board writing to quota and enjoying myself. A good thing. My story had holes in it big enough for a Twilight fan club meeting. Another good thing, since it was a first draft. I was writing every day. A great thing. And I was enjoying my characters and the trouble I was getting them into. Also a good thing.

But—

Yup there’s a ‘but.’

I have realized that I’m a purposeful sort of person. And though the writing has been fun, I want to write something with—if I may be so bold to say so—A PLAN! I have reached the point where I have decided that, if I’m going to set aside time to write every night, it should be something about which I have a clear vision. I’ve been writing for fun and it’s been fabulous for getting the creative wheels to turn and to get my commitment to writing every day back again. Now, I desperately want to take that energy and that revived excitement and put it to use—at least my version of use. And thank you NaNoWriMo for some much-needed writer CPR!

I have a project that has been lurking and begging me to get to work for a long time. It plays to two passions of mine–young people and the love of writing. And I’m going to go for it.

My NaNoWriMo daily word count is now ‘counting’ toward something purposeful. Nervous but eager,  I’m getting off one train and getting on another. New direction, new excitement, new challenges—but—that’s why I’m a writer.

Photo via Flickr:http://www.flickr.com/photos/78469770@N00/

How to blindside the internal editor

I worked on my NaNoWriMo novel tonight after a brief hiatus. I didn’t go back over what I’d written before, or even try to start where I’d left off. I knew there was going be a scene later in the story in which my hero and heroine meet up with the hero’s former girlfriend. I really wanted to write that scene and have some fun with my heroine (my POV character)—and so that’s exactly what I did.

I’ve done this a few times in the course of my NaNo novelling. If a scene seems clear to me I write it. Then I go back and fill in the bits in between later. There’s no way my internal critic can get up to high doh about continuity of mood or voice or action or anything else, because I’ve taken her out of the equation with my “I’ll fix it later” mantra.

I’m sure my internal editor will declare serious payback when it comes to pulling the whole thing together into an actual readable story. But that’s fine with me. She can just sit and do her knitting until then. For now, I’m enjoying the ride.

Anyone else play around with your stories like this? I’d love to hear how it works for you.

Success is not measured by word count.

Yesterday, Laura LaRocca, fellow NaNoWriMo participant and writing buddy, wrote on Facebook, “Onano_09_blk_participant_100x100_1_pngn some days, success is not measured by word count.” That’s where I am at the end of the second week of NaNo. I have written over 19,000 words, but am many short of today’s NaNo word count goal. But the word count I have is so many more than I had two weeks ago, and 6,000 more than I wrote in July when I conscientiously wrote every day for a month. I have been successful in other ways, too. The pile of test papers that I have to mark is diminishing, I worked outside in glorious warm sunshine yesterday, my kitchen is clean, and I watched a mushy movie with my husband last evening while my son wrote up a NaNoWriMo storm and had a blast doing it.

This is a day to be proud of my accomplishments—and to also keep writing and recommit to the next 2 weeks. If I can write every day for a month, just think where I can be if I write every day for the rest of my life.

So, how do I keep the incentive going? Why did I write every day in July and then stop?

In July, I had a group of writerly friends who agreed to a challenge for the month. We each chose our own particular daily writing goal. When we had completed our goal for the day, we sent an email to the rest of the group with the word “done” in the subject line. NaNo makes you accountable to post your progress and lets you see what your writing buddies are doing every day; our “done” challenge worked in a similar way. It was important for us to get our “done” email send by the end of the day, some scrambling to send their emails just before midnight in order to make the deadline.

The idea of “done” came from an article that I read in a writers’ magazine in which an author said she belonged to a writing group who did this. I proposed it as a challenge to our group and everyone agreed it was a great success. And nearly everyone lost the daily writing habit when the month was over.

I’ve already talked to a couple of writer friends about keeping up the NaNo habit after November with our own “done” project and I believe we’ll make it work. We’re a lot of other things, too: moms, wives, knitters, cooks, teachers, TV and nature watchers. But when the writer piece of our personal puzzles is missing, the world just isn’t right. Success for us is sitting at the keyboard every day and fitting that writer piece of the puzzle into our lives. It will be good to be “done.”

Inspiration – Be ready for it!

INSPIRATION: Stimulus to do creative work; something that stimulates the human mind to creative thought or to the making of art. Encarta Dictionary

Things come along every day that inspire, that are great ideas for stories or novels or poems. But creativity needs more than inspiration. What do you need, as the definition says, to make the art? The first step you need to take is to be a working writer. And working writers do more than pound keyboards all day. When you’re out in the world are you open to new sights and sounds? Do you take a moment to look at the sunset or sunrise, or listen to the sounds of your neighborhood—radios, leaf blowers, dogs barking, airplanes, trucks, road construction, a motorcycle a few blocks away. Where else are you going to get the vivid details that will paint the picture that your inspiration suggests?

Do you listen to people? Not just to your own circle of friends and family, but to people on the bus or at work? What are their speech rhythms and patterns like? Do their voices go up at the end of sentences? Perhaps, they use a lot of technical jargon, or catch phrases like ‘you know’ or ‘it’s like’ or ‘so.’ Do they talk about their kids all the time or complain about the boss? All of these details make up the palette from which you create your word pictures—your stories and poems.

At a workshop I was a recently, I heard from a woman who had lots of story ideas. She shared some with us and they were wonderful. She was definitely inspired and had the tools to create wonderful pictures for her listeners. She was also a self-confessed procrastinator. What a shame. She wanted to be a writer so much but had never made her dream come true, because she kept putting it off.

Do you keep saying that you’ll write that story or novel ‘someday’? Make that someday now. Many NaNoWriMo writers have gone through the exercise of finding the time to write a novel in a month. Log your activities, hour by hour, for a week. Find out where you can take the time to get your writing done. Do you need to watch all those TV shows when they’re on? Can you record them and watch them some other time? Having a big chunk of time for writing is wonderful, but it can be very intimidating to fill with constructive work especially if you’re not used to it. Chipping away at a project a little at a time is a great solution and also helps you develop the habit of sitting at the keyboard, or somewhere with pencil and paper, and writing every day.

Make sure you keep reading, too. Immerse yourself in someone else’s writing. Read the words aloud to hear the rhythms and understand how the author keeps the action moving with sentence variety. Expand your vocabulary. Look up words the author uses that you don’t know. When you are writing your story and looking for just the right word, you’ll have it at your fingertips. Vary your reading so that you read in different genres and forms: mystery, sci-fi, literary, romance, poetry, adventure, short stories. When inspiration strikes, you can take your ideas and frame them in the form and style of writing that serves them best.

Lastly, write even when you’re not inspired. Athletes practice when it’s not race day and writers need to write even when there’s no deadline or no real inspiration. Writing “muscles” need to be kept in trim, too. Finding words and putting them together with depth of meaning and in a way that grabs a reader needs to be a daily habit not just an intermittent exercise that you take on when the mood strikes you. Keeping a daily journal is one way to strengthen those muscles and keep them flexed. Another is to play with words whenever you can. Take a page from the novel you are reading, point to three random words on a page, and see what you can make from them. Take a line from a song you like and use that to start a story or a poem. Describe what you see out of your window, or write from a different point of view, such as that of your baseball cap, or your backpack, or your running shoes, or your alarm clock.

Who knows? You may be inspired. And when you are, you’ll have all the tools you need to create your work of art. End

Unravel–Rewrite–Now!

NaNo ParticipantThe sleeves on a sweater I made this summer were knit on 4 needles. When I finished knitting the second sleeve, I tried the sweater on and the sleeve just didn’t feel right. I had used needles that were a size too small and not noticed. Fed up, I left the sweater in the knitting bag and walked away. I just didn’t feel like unravelling and reknitting the thing after putting all that work into it the first time.

On Saturday, my NaNoWriMo novel hit the same snag. I happily wrote a scene of great danger and suspense, met my word quota for the day, and closed the laptop. On Sunday, I realized that I had written the wrong scene. Unlike the sweater, where I could put off tearing it down and fixing it as long as I wanted, the novel needed to keep going—right away. I used Chris Baty’s delete method—highlighted the useless chunk of writing and changed the font colour to white so I couldn’t see it anymore. Then I wrote another scene, one that fits the story, and makes the next scene—and the next—possible.

The crazy NaNo deadline kept me from moaning about my wasted writing time and put my focus where it should be—on getting the book finished. Once the new piece was written, the feelings of annoyance at the waste of time and effort on something that was destined for the delete button went away. It felt good to find another solution, to fix what was wrong and, more important, to know I could do it. Back on track, I am now looking forward to clicking out Monday’s instalment.

I’m ready to finally face the sweater, too. Unravel, pick up the stitches, start again. And next time, I won’t wait so long.

Writing–for the long haul

Scarf in progressLike the scarf in the photo, my NaNoWriMo project has a long way to go. When the yarn is used up, the scarf will be finished. When the month is over, the project will be finished.

I can’t bring myself to write “the novel will be finished.” Unlike knitting the scarf, where the dimensions of the final product are well defined, I’m not sure exactly what will result after writing for 30 days with my self-editor on the disabled list. I just hope it’s as colourful and has something resembling a beginning, middle and end.

Producing Thursday’s instalment of words was a real chore. I checked my word count time and again to see if I’d finally hit my magic daily number of 1667 words. It felt like those bleak moments that I have as a teacher when I count the number of papers I have left to mark and the total is only 2 fewer than the last time.

Then the light went on. I’m in this for the long haul. It isn’t about one night’s word output; it’s about an entire 30 days of writing. I still have a pile of time ahead of me to use up. Just like I still have a lot of yarn to use up before the scarf is finished.

My scarf will grow in small increments, stitch by stitch, row by row, until the yarn is gone. And then I’ll knit something else. My NaNoWriMo project will grow word by word in daily instalments until the time is gone. When November is over, I’ll keep on writing because I’m a writer—not  just for a month—but for the long haul.

Risk, Reward, and My Writing Hat

NaNoWriMo Particpant Well, I’ve done it. I’ve joined the over 100,000 NaNoWriMo participants world wide who plan to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Chris Baty, who began NaNoWriMo 10 years ago with a small group of friends, describes the next 30 days like this:  “Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.”

His last statement summarizes what is, for me, the greatest appeal of the project. I earn part of my living by writing, so what I create is calculated to meet my expectations of professionalism. I strive for my copy to be clean of errors and excess verbiage and to serve well the demands of my client or editor. While my NaNoWriMo file is open next month, my expectations are going on holiday. I plan to enjoy some freedom, take risks, surprise myself and my characters–and have fun.

It’s been a while since writing was just fun. I can’t wait to put my built-in, bossy editor on hold and to enjoy the words appearing on my screen, whether they are the perfect words or not at that moment. At least I’ll be writing something just for me.

I’m sure that my output won’t be anywhere near 50,000 words at the end of the month, and I’m not worried about it. What I have done is set aside writing time every day, and that commitment alone means that I am honoring that part of myself that is “the writer.” All the other hats I wear get my time and attention, but my writer hat gets left on the shelf more than the others. And I miss it.

For the month of November, I’ll be wearing my writer hat every day, and on November 30th, I’ll have more words than I started with and a month of remembering what it is like to be a writer. And maybe that means, for the future, that my writer hat will come off the shelf more often. I’d like that.

Writing Starters – Final Instalment

day 7 photo31-35 Just one prompt today and that’s for NaNoWriMo writers like me who don’t have a plot yet.

 A sure-fire plot plan exists in the steps of the hero’s journey. Documented by scholars such as Joseph Campbell, this pattern has been worked into stories across cultures and millennia. I wrote a fantasy for middle readers several years ago, and when I looked back, I found I had unconsciously followed the pattern almost perfectly. It’s been used in movies as diverse as Star Wars, The Lion King and The Princess Diaries.

Two great books on the subject and how the pattern applies to writing today are: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler and The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth by James N. Frey. Here’s the journey as Vogler describes it. Take your heroes and heroines on the same journey and see what happens.

The Hero’s Journey Outline

The Hero’s Journey is a pattern of narrative identified by the American scholar Joseph Campbell that appears in drama, storytelling, myth, religious ritual, and psychological development.  It describes the typical adventure of the archetype known as The Hero, the person who goes out and achieves great deeds on behalf of the group, tribe, or civilization.

Its stages are:

1.        THE ORDINARY WORLD.  The hero, uneasy, uncomfortable or unaware, is introduced sympathetically so the audience can identify with the situation or dilemma.  The hero is shown against a background of environment, heredity, and personal history.  Some kind of polarity in the hero’s life is pulling in different directions and causing stress.

2.        THE CALL TO ADVENTURE.  Something shakes up the situation, either from external pressures or from something rising up from deep within, so the hero must face the beginnings of change.

3.        REFUSAL OF THE CALL.  The hero feels the fear of the unknown and tries to turn away from the adventure, however briefly.  Alternately, another character may express the uncertainty and danger ahead.

4.        MEETING WITH THE MENTOR.  The hero comes across a seasoned traveler of the worlds who gives him or her training, equipment, or advice that will help on the journey.  Or the hero reaches within to a source of courage and wisdom.

5.        CROSSING THE THRESHOLD.  At the end of Act One, the hero commits to leaving the Ordinary World and entering a new region or condition with unfamiliar rules and values. 

6.        TESTS, ALLIES AND ENEMIES.  The hero is tested and sorts out allegiances in the Special World.

7.        APPROACH.  The hero and newfound allies prepare for the major challenge in the Special world.

8.        THE ORDEAL.  Near the middle of the story, the hero enters a central space in the Special World and confronts death or faces his or her greatest fear.  Out of the moment of death comes a new life.

9.        THE REWARD.  The hero takes possession of the treasure won by facing death.  There may be celebration, but there is also danger of losing the treasure again.

10.      THE ROAD BACK.  About three-fourths of the way through the story, the hero is driven to complete the adventure, leaving the Special World to be sure the treasure is brought home.  Often a chase scene signals the urgency and danger of the mission.

11.     THE RESURRECTION.  At the climax, the hero is severely tested once more on the threshold of home.  He or she is purified by a last sacrifice, another moment of death and rebirth, but on a higher and more complete level.  By the hero’s action, the polarities that were in conflict at the beginning are finally resolved.

12.       RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR.  The hero returns home or continues the journey, bearing some element of the treasure that has the power to transform the world as the hero has been transformed.

Writing Starters Instalment #5

NaNoWriMo is getting closer. Here are 5 more ideas to get the creative juices flowing.

21. Write a first paragraph in which your characters comes into physical contact with someone or something.

22. Think about secrets. Make sure your character has some and imagine the kind of person he or she would trust with those secrets. How could that other person gain that trust? Why might that person betray that trust and tell the secret to someone else?

23. If you have an antique or flea market nearby, look for old postcards and read the messages on the back. Here’s one I found. What story can you imagine lies behind the message? “I suppose you are still in Plaster Rock.  Heard that Frank 1st has left you.  I guess he must be a wanderer.”

24. Brainstorm around the words: flame, table, cover, mask, hollow.

25. Send  your characters on an adventure to a “land far, far away.”  Look through some old issues of National Geographic and imagine how your character would cope in a yurt, or in a market in Marrakesh or in a tent on the side of a mountain?

“If [my characters] were real, they’d hate me by the end of the book.”  Clive Cussler.

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