A Rebuttal

I've read a few articles like this since the beginning of November: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-gresko/national-novel-writing-mo_b_781313.html

If you don't want to read the article, I'll sum up: A number of people find no value in National Novel Writing Month because at the end of the month, people are not left with a quality product. If your aim is to write crap, why do it?

It's not untrue, but it's a shallow way of thinking about the real goal (at least to me).

1) Practice makes perfect

Go on. Draw it.

Even if you know you're not going to sketch a masterpiece, you  might sit in a park and draw that squirrel over there anyway. Sometimes we do things because we like to. Even if (like me) you want to be a professional writer, any chunk of time I designate for writing is good practice for later, and I might end up with something that turns out well.

2) Mad Skills
By the time I heard about NaNoWriMo for the first time, I loved writing, but I had never gotten to the end of a novel. I'd started and thrown away dozens. NaNoWriMo claimed that not only had a few people written 50,000 words in one month, but thousands of people did it every year. As as challenge to myself, I jumped in, convinced it wasn't possible since every idea I'd ever had fizzled after no more than 20,000 words.

"Silence your inner editor," the website said. That made me as uneasy as the wordcount. After finishing the first chapter of a novel, one of my favorite parts was going back and touching it up. But then I kept working on the first chapter and never progressed. So I tried it. I wrote an outline to help with the time restriction, and on November 1st, started with chapter one. I made plenty of mistakes, but decided to plow through and fix it later.

Every writer has a different method for getting things done. What I learned from NaNoWriMo is what works for me, and I might not have figured it out on my own. Though you will not end up with an industry-ready manuscript at the end of the month (I'm still editing the first novel I did in a month), you will learn things, get a lot of practice, establish a writing routine, and (hopefully) have a good time.

Appetite

If you like short stories, I recommend Appetite by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh.  It's about a guy who is a waiter and his adventures, if you will.  The thing I loved the most about this story is that he describes almost everything I've ever felt about work (anywhere - retail in particular, but some of it goes for the office, too).  The opening scene where the main character wants to ask for a raise is painfully vivid (in a good way).  Also, the character has a dream, but instead of faking out the reader by having something good happen and then PSYCH!! waking up, the author accurately describes a confusing jumble of memories and TV shows, and conversations that might have been.  When the character wakes up and realizes he's been asleep instead of watching TV, instead of feeling played, I think, "aww, that's happened to me too."

What bothers me about modern literary fiction in general (and what happened with this particular story also), is that sometimes nothing really happens.  There are a bunch of good characters who flash back and dream and interact, but when it comes to the ending, I'm left feeling a bit ... blah.  I will tell you that I'm totally lost when it comes to symbolism, and that might be holding me back with the genre.  Someone please clue me in: when reaching the end, am I supposed to feel something other than, "huh.  Well ... that's it, I guess"?

Mind's Eye by Håkan Nesser

Now that I've stopped writing for a little while, I've got to read a few books.  So I went to my library, and ended up borrowing Mind's Eye by Hakan Nesser, who is, apparently, pretty popular in Sweden.  I thought, Good! I like European things, and the description of the story sounded interesting.

The mystery starts out really promising.  Guy wakes up and doesn't know what happened (quite like what I just wrote -- one reason I chose this book), and discovers his wife is dead.  Guy goes to prison, but he didn't do it -- and gets murdered himself (don't worry, this is all in the blurb, so I'm not giving anything important away).  

That's all good.  Interesting.  Okay, now what?

The investigators investigate.  They talk to people.  Halfway though, they're talking to people.  At the 3/4 point, they're talking to people.  At the end, they're talking to people.  

I don't know.  If you read on Amazon, it got really good reviews, but I didn't feel it.  It was sort of like the middle sagged all the way to the end, and all the questioning became really repetitive.  Very much a plot-driven story, since the characters didn't really have lives of their own (not as much as I like -- i.e. they didn't really do any extra-curricular activities that weren't mentioned as a side-note).

Nothing strikingly "wrong" with the story or the writing style, just not my cup of tea.

A new plot

Oi.  A new plot snuck up on me a few weeks ago, and it's developing really nicely.  However, I already have a nice, very detailed outline to work from in November.  Maybe the same thing will happen this year that happened last year: I'll finish my planned story 2 weeks in and then start on the new plot in the second half of the month.  Last year, I was unemployed, though ... this year, I'll probably be doing overtime.  Eh... it can't hurt to have too many plots, right?

It started as just a murder mystery, but a ghost story has sort of crept into it.  I've wanted to do a ghost story for a while (especially dealing with spirit photography), but couldn't think of a non-cheesy way to approach it.  This murder plot coupled with a ghostly sub-plot complement each other nicely; while the amateur sleuth is trying to figure out who killed her friend, she's also got to reconcile her feelings about the afterlife and if her murdered friend is still in her apartment.

I still need a title for this thing.  I can't keep calling it "New Idea" ...

Edit:
Ah, I've got a title:  Die once, and then ...

It's actually taken from a Bible verse which some use to prove there are no ghosts.  But it's got all the elements of a murder mystery in it as well.  We'll see if it sticks.

Brainstorming

Stephen King's On Writing compares writing a story to unearthing a skeleton (like a dinosaur). The first step would be knowing where the skeleton is, then carefully taking away enough of the dirt to know what kind of skeleton you've got. As you work, more detail emerges until at last, you're flicking away the last pieces of dirt with a toothbrush. (I paraphrase)

Of course, not everyone writes the same way, but the method described by Stephen King really fit the way I like to write. I don't have to have the entire outline or the entire idea to get started. If I have one thing - an idea, an image, a character - I can build around it, picking up more detail as I go.

With the current story I'm working on, I have a lot of holes to fill (we'll say I still don't know where some of the dinosaur bones are). So I've written down everything I know about the story (characters, situations, basic plot points), and a list of questions of things I want to know about the story (why a character did such and such, what the consequences of blank are, etc.). It's a lot of fun when I'm doing something boring (like dishes or laundry) to think about my story and ask a lot of "why" and "what if" questions, because those questions lead to new pieces.

A sort of update on my previous project, The Morning After: I've written a query letter for it and submitted it to one (1) literary agent. So far, I haven't heard anything back, but in all likelihood I won't hear anything on my very first try. We'll see.