jimhines

I figured I’d try doing National Novel Writing Month to get some momentum on my next project. I spent a week or two at the end of October figuring out the characters, doing some preliminary worldbuilding, and getting most of the plot figured out.

The writing was a little slow this week, for some reason, but I’d gotten 3000 or so words done by the time I went to bed yesterday. Then as I was lying there not sleeping, I realized the book might work better if I simplified the central concept.

That meant throwing out a lot of the backstory, as well as everything I’d already written. On the bright side, 3000 words isn’t really that much, and I’m feeling a lot more excited about the new, streamlined idea for the book.

This  isn’t under contract with a publisher yet. I’d been working on a pitch to send to my agent, but that’s gotta be scrapped and redone now. I think I’ll try writing a chapter or two first to get a better feel for the book before I try again to get a pitch we can use to hopefully sell this thing.

I won’t go into detail for now, except to say that it would be a standalone fantasy, and I think most of y’all will be excited about it.

Anyone else attempting NaNo this year? Like anything else, it’s an approach that works for some people but not for others. I’ve had mixed results in the past. And with all the extra stress of this month, I refuse to beat myself up for not being on track with word count.

At the last minute — okay, technically after the last minute, since it was later in the day on November 1 — I signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I joined knowing there was pretty much 0% chance of me reaching the 50,000 word goal for November. I doubt I’ll even get close.

Which is fine, because while 50,000 words of novel would be great, that’s not my goal. I wanted to try to push myself into working more on Terminal Peace. I haven’t written at my usual pace for about a year now, and at least half of that time, I wasn’t writing at all. For the past month, I’ve been slowly getting back into the book, maybe a few hundred words a day. I figured this might help me shift into a higher gear.

It sort of worked. In the first five days of November, I did 6,474 words. I averaged more than a thousand words/day. It’s the best writing streak I’ve had since 2018.

Then, of course, I hit a point in the story where I needed to know the backstory of an entire planet, build an alien culture or two, figure out the motivations of two ambiguous villains … basically, yesterday and today were 0-wordcount days as I tried to figure out the next chunk of the book.

That’s disappointing after a good five-day streak, but I don’t want to ignore the significance of those five days. I was able to focus more, and get closer to being the working writer I was a year ago. I’m not there yet, but it’s progress. And as I noted on Facebook, Terminal Peace now includes the phrase “ranivorous cleavage,” so you know, that’s a thing.

I’m still brainstorming and making notes, but hopefully I’ll get back to producing actual words tomorrow.

Good luck to everyone taking NaNoWriMo on this year!

One of the Lansing municipal liaisons for NaNoWriMo asked if I’d write up a pep talk for week two. I decided to talk about that part in my process where the novelty and shininess has worn off, and I realize my outline is broken, and suddenly it feels like the story is crumbling in my hands, and what was I even thinking???

It happens with pretty much every book I write, usually around 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through the first draft.

Here’s an excerpt from the pep talk:

This is the time in Jim’s writing process where, like Charlie Brown kicking at that elusive football, I lose my footing and end up flat on my back, staring into the sky and wondering what the heck just happened.

My shiny new idea isn’t quite so shiny anymore. I’ve gotten lots of words down, but they don’t exactly match what I was imagining. And this next part of the outline doesn’t make any sense at all, now that I think about it more closely. Good grief, the Jim who was outlining this thing last month is an idiot. And now I have to fix his mess.

Everyone’s writing process is different, of course. You might zip through the entire month with never a doubt, never a stumble. (In which case I hate you a little bit.) But most of the writers I know, beginners and pros, hit a point at least once in every project, sometimes more, where everything feels like it’s falling apart.

I’ve got eleven books in print from major publishers, and about 33% of the way through writing every single one of them, I felt like I’d missed the football. I stared at the clouds and asked who had swapped my brilliant, perfect outline with this meandering, illogical, half-baked nonsense. This was it. I’d have to tell my publisher I’d failed. The whole world would finally know I’d been faking it all along.

Now for the good news. After twenty years, I know this is a normal part of my process. I know I can get through it. I know that once I climb back out of the Pit of Despair, I’ll discover that hey, maybe this book is pretty cool after all.

Ups and downs are a normal part of the writing process. It doesn’t mean we suck. It doesn’t mean we’re going to fail. It means we’re human. Our job isn’t to be perfect; it’s to get the story down.

You can read the whole thing in the NaNoWriMo Forums.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

On Sunday, I was invited to give a pep talk/Q&A to the Lansing NaNoWriMo group. They had a great turnout at their event, and I had a lot of fun chatting with folks. (I hope it was fun and useful for them, too!)

I’ve been doing my own novel push in October, trying to finish this draft of Codex Born by the end of the month. I’ve failed, thanks to a number of reasons I won’t get into now. With that said, I’ve gotten significantly more writing done than I would have without this push, so I’m calling that a victory anyway. And while I won’t be officially doing NaNo in November, in part because I’ve got a Toastmaster gig in Iowa and a week-long New York trip, I’m still going to keep pushing myself to finish this draft.

To everyone who will be doing NaNo, good luck! Here are some of the tidbits from my talk, in the hope that they’ll be useful.

Nobody is born knowing how to write. We’ve created the myth of the Instant Writer, the person who sits down at their laptop and magically produces brilliant, award-winning prose. But writing is just like anything else. It takes practice. Don’t expect perfection the first time through, and don’t beat yourself up if you stumble along the way.

There’s no one right way to write a book. There’s a lot of advice out there. Try different things. Experiment. Figure out what works for you. Anyone who preaches the Gospel of the True Right Way to write (or sell) a book? Smile and back away as quickly as possible. All those readers out there don’t care how you wrote the book. They just care if the end result is worth reading.

What do you want? There’s no right answer here, but it’s important to know if you’re hoping to be professionally published, if you want to self-publish your stuff, or if you’re just writing for you. Maybe your goal is to write that 50,000 word Spock/Doctor Who fanfic piece. Go for it! But it can help a lot to know your goals going in.

Give yourself permission to write crap. This may be the single most important lesson I’ve learned. It got me through the worst bout of Writer’s Block I ever had. I basically imagined a sign over my monitor that said in big neon letters, “IT’S OKAY TO WRITE CRAP!” Now this doesn’t mean it’s okay to publish crap, and I suspect my editor would have some issues if I started turning in incoherent drivel. But don’t demand perfection in a first draft. Allowing myself to get messy, to scribble outside the lines and stumble through my mistakes, this also allowed me to finish the draft, to explore the story and figure out what the book was about. You’ll have plenty of time to edit and rewrite.

Do edit and rewrite. Once you finish your book, the impulse to immediately start submitting it, or to put it up on Amazon, can be very strong. All I’ll say here is that if I had published my first drafts, I would have had to change my name to distance myself from the shame. Everyone’s different, but most of the writers I know (myself very much included) don’t get everything right the first time through.

Watch out for scams. There are a lot of scammers out there, and they know it’s NaNoWriMo. Be careful. As a general rule, “Money flows toward the writer” should protect you from a lot of them. Also, if you’re not sure if something’s a scam, look at how they make their money. Does this publisher have a website geared toward selling books to readers, or are they more interested in selling services to writers? You want to work with agents and publishers who stay in business by selling books to readers, because they have the most incentive to sell your books. Writer Beware and the Writer Beware Blog have been great resources for me to learn about and avoid most writing traps.

Finally, good luck, and have fun! (And to Annette and all of the Lansing NaNo crew, thanks for the sweet hat and other goodies! )

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.