At My Book Therapy we kicked off NaNoWriMo on the Monday night chat with advice from Beth Vogts. Susan Warren ended the evening with cyber karaoke of Stand By Me. I love these classic words, “I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid.”
Part of writing a novel, whether in a month or in a year, is overcoming fear. Insecurities surface. Life interrupts and demands our attention. Two pages into our opening paragraph we discover we’ve already written every great idea we had about the book and now we’ve no place to go!
The temptation is to quit. So we never start at all.
As you attempt NaNoWriMo, keep these things in mind.
1. Writing is hard work. Period. Forget what everyone else is doing, how fast they are writing, how their crit partner loves the story or that they had a 10,000 word day while cooking, cleaning and sewing a quilt. It’s probably all hype. Those 10K only happened in his head. So, just roll up your sleeves, plant but in chair and write.
2. There are some free programs to shut off the internet for a set period of time. I use Concentrate. Look into downloading one of those. It’s amazing how it keeps me on track.
3. Do your pre writing work. Don’t start NaNoWriMo, or any writing venture, without having a plan. Even pantsers need a plan. We talk about this all the time at My Book Therapy: have developed characters! Do your character work. Dig deep. Don’t just stay on the surface. What is your heroine’s greatest fear, secret desire, the lie she believes, the dark moment from her past? All of those mold her story journey and play into the plot.
4. Don’t edit. If you have to go back and read a few paragraphs from the day before, that’s fine, but don’t edit. Let it go. Imagine you’re standing in front of a beautiful block of marble. You’re going to chisel the image in your head. Aiming your tools, you start to carve away at this amazing stone. The image looks like noting at first. Eyes look like nicks in the stone. As you carve and work the stone, the image eventually comes to life. Distinct features take place. It actually looks like a face in the marble. You can’t stop, you have to keep carving. If you go back and try to “edit” the eyes and nose, you’ll ruin the image and the marble. Why? Because you don’t know what the rest of the image looks like yet. You have to carve it completely, THEN you can fine tune, hone, and polish. It’s the same with a story, you must finish it to get the whole picture, to understand what you’re dealing with. KEEP WRITING.
5. Don’t worry about finesse. You don’t need pretty words. If all you have is dialog and action, a few of the senses, you’re doing well!
Rachel Hauck is an award winning, best selling author who’s made plenty of “author mistakes” and lived to tell about it.