JURASSIC PARK COMPENDIUM
And my favorite:
(Why I Quit by Asaf Hanuka)
(Source: zillahletty)
another note to self and well to everyone, really.
Neil Gaiman: ON WRITER'S BLOCK.
If you’re being lazy, don’t be. If you’re being a perfectionist, don’t be. And if you’re stuck, figure out where the story went off the rails, or what you got wrong, or where you need to go deeper, or what you need to add to make it work, and then start writing again.
May I? Should I? Or have I too often craved miracles?
My First NaNoWriMo: An Ode to Outlines
image from morguefile
About 5 days before the end of October, I decided to take part in NaNoWriMo, because a month earlier I had fleshed out a sci-fi novel that I was really excited about and despite my high level of excitement, I had yet to actually do anything about making it come to life.
I registered on the NaNo site and everything, and specifically told myself, “I’m not holding you to anything. You don’t have to finish. The goal of this is just to start writing something.” I was pessimistic, because I don’t have a very good track record of finishing projects that I start. But I was also optimistic, because I had done more work on this novel than any other project I had started before. I actually used notecards to outline my plot. This is a Big Thing for me. I used to detest outlines. Now I’m actually…fond of them?
So when I woke up at 11am on November 1 and sat down and procrastinated a little before I started writing my 1,667 words, I was feeling so-so about the whole thing. “Yeah,” I said to myself, “I probably won’t finish this. I’ll be dry after 500 words, and I’ll feel like a failure. Again. No big deal.”
Except I wrote much more than 500 words.
“Hey,” I said, coming back that evening after surpassing 2,000 words. “This isn’t that hard. In fact, it’s kind of fun!” And I wrote 700 more.
To tell the truth, I probably would have drowned if I didn’t outline my plot. I started to write a story about a year ago without knowing where it was headed and stalled, because I had no idea what was coming next. When I was in 7th grade, I was a fan of the pottery wheel, and instead of putting down a lump of clay, centering it, mashing it, centering it, mashing it, centering it, mashing it, building it up, mashing it, centering it, mashing it—in short, instead of doing the groundwork, I closed my eyes and decided to let my heart sculpt the vase. Yeah, I realize it’s dumb now, but I felt like Pocahontas at the time (sculpting with all the colors of the clay). What happened? I came out with a lousy pot.
Same with stories, I realize nine years later. (Things take a little while to sink in with me.) And if you have a good story, you don’t have to eschew outlines. You can be just as excited about the outline as the final product. In fact, for this novel I—gasp!—outlined twice.
There was the notecard outline that I whipped up in about thirty minutes and carried around for weeks in my purse, then typed up to scribble on two days before NaNo began. And then, inspired by Lazette Gifford’sNaNo for the New and Insane, especially the part about “phase outlines,” I decided to make my (very sparse) outline a little fleshier. Her phase outlines are little shorthand paragraphs that detail the action, dialogue, and any specific phrasing you want to use in the actual narrative. Imagine someone is dictating your novel to a class, and your phase outlines are the notes you jot down. Or you’ve been given someone’s notes they’ve taken in a class and it’s up to you to reconstruct the class. Whatever analogy doesn’t give you a headache. Mine look like class notes, handwritten on computer paper, with doodles accompanying them and little notes to self like “NO ENIGMATIC PHILOSOPHY” and “JEEZ WHAT IS THIS CRAP BLAH BLAH BLAH.”
For the past few days, I’ve been working on this outline before I go to bed, working ahead to figure out what comes next and to get excited for tomorrow’s writing. I have about 9 pages so far. In 2 days of NaNoWriMo, I’ve gotten through four and a half. So if one night I’m too exhausted to outline, I have about a day of safety net.
Obviously I’m not going to keep this up all month. (But I might. How crazy would that be?) But I’ve realized that writing isn’t as hard as I’ve been pretending it is. If you have a healthy dose of enthusiasm, you can get through anything.
Today I wrote 2,774 words. I’m 10.9% done. I’m optimistic and excited. I’ve already won—because my goal was just to write something. Now my goal is to keep doing as well as I have been. Then my goal will be to write just two great little words: the end.
A special addition of WEATHER IS LAME, for all my central Texas peeps.
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