Pep Talk

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you're probably ready to give up. You're past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You're not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You're in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more---and that even when they do you're preoccupied and no fun. You don't know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you're pretty sure that even if you finish it it won't have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began---a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read---it falls so painfully short that you're pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

Welcome to the club.

That's how novels get written.

You write. That's the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Dear NaNoWriMo author,

I've been trying to write this pep talk for almost a week. The problem, you see, is that I'm wickedly behind on my word count and I was determined to catch up first. Last night I realized that it wasn't going to happen. So. All you people who have vast amounts of words in the bank, gobs more than you're supposed to have at this point in the month? Super great! Keep it up! Those of you who are just a little bit depressed and crazy, not to mention googley-eyed because you've pulled eight all-nighters in a row trying to catch up? Come sit with me. We will get through this.

I started out with the best of intentions, namely letting my OCD run free. I created a spreadsheet that shows my word count for the day and what my word count should be if I had completed my 1667 words a day. Just looking at that growing column made me feel giddy---If I could just drag my way through 1667 words each day, I'd sail on through the month and be the proud owner of 50,000 shiny new words.

Then life got in the way. My horse got conjunctivitis, and while I was out treating her, I slipped and broke my foot, meaning I couldn't sit at my desk because my foot would balloon. But I was still determined, so I got up each morning, lay on the couch with my foot on pillows and my laptop propped open on my stomach. It made for a lot of typos and a toasty stomach (my laptop gets really hot!), but at least I was writing. Then my dog got sick. Really, really sick. As in, they thought she had cancer and might not come home sick. But as soon as we'd spent the requisite fortune to prove to her that we love her, she miraculously recovered (all our pets have taken up this method of proving our continued devotion). Meanwhile, my word count was slipping a little further every day. (You're probably wondering where the pep part of this pep talk comes in, aren't you?)

Hey, boys and girls!

This is Sue Grafton, just checking in to see how you're doing. I've been thinking about you often and I hope your work is going smoothly. In the event that it's not, I wanted to assure you that I get bogged down all the time. Someone asked me once if I ever got writer's block and I said, 'only once or twice a day.'

For reasons absolutely unknown to Science, many writers begin their novels with a burst of enthusiasm. There's a measurable outpouring of time and energy. I experience this myself. At the outset, my optimism rides high and my hopes are boundless. This book...this book, I say to myself...will be clever, inventive, fresh, original, witty, and profound. My characters will be complex, textured, and amazingly true to life. My prose will sing. The pacing will be relentless, yet the story will ebb and flow in a manner that will produce both thrilling surprises and quiet moments where the reader can reflect on what's gone before. My descriptive passages will be evocative, bringing scenes to life in a way that will later translate into a movie sale with all the attendant fame and glory and big bucks. (Personally, of course, I'd never sell my character to Hollywood, but you get the point...)

Dear NaNoWriMo Writer,

The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer---carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.

The rest of this advice comes out of my own bag of tricks for getting those ten words and then turning them into many. It may well be that only some of these or none at all will work for you; they may not fit into your life or your own mindset. But if these don't, try and come up with others that do work for you.

Remove distractions. The internet is a phenomenal research and community tool without which you might never have started the novel you're working on right now. It is an equally phenomenal tool for procrastination and wasting time. Unplug your connection. While you're at it, put down that book, turn off the TV, shut down the Wii. Make scrambled eggs and salad for dinner. The dishes can wait to be washed. Ideally, get out of your house filled with your stuff that you like and go somewhere where you have nothing better to do than write.

Dear NaNoWriMo participant,

When you sit down to begin that novel of yours, the first thing you might want to do is toss a handful of powdered napalm over both shoulders---so as to dispense with any and all of your old writing teachers, the ones whose ghosts surely will be hovering there, saying such things as, "Adverbs should never be...", or "A novel is supposed to convey...", et cetera. Enough! Ye literary bureaucrats, vamoose!

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Ah, but how can you know if it's working? The truth is, you can't always know (I nearly burned my first novel a dozen times, and it's still in print after 35 years), you just have to sense it, feel it, trust it. It's intuitive, and that peculiar brand of intuition is a gift from the gods. Obviously, most people have received a different package altogether, but until you undo the ribbons you can never be sure.

As the great Nelson Algren once said, “Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.” Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.