This will happen now and again, as I get too complacent/lazy/procrastinate/whateverelse.
It’s not like I havn’t been writing, I’m constantly writing, constantly creating but I guess that’s where the complacent part comes in. I’ve just been neglecting this blog, and I promised myself that I would keep up with it. So this is my attempt to get back on track. There’s school (fast approaching exams), my writing (been knocking out the early chapters of a sequel I’m writing under my pen name), gaming (gearing up for Borderlands 2. I’ll probably be posting more on that in the coming days as B2-Day draws nearer. A review will definitely be coming!) .
Other than those things there are no excuses for my being away.
Are what I awoke to this morning. It wasn’t me talking to myself, but two other people. They were in the mental kitchen of my mental house (not a place for crazy people, just an imaginary place in my head where I sometimes go). I walked in on them talking, and then they immediately fell silent. Why? I have no clue, but I get the feeling they were talking about me.
I know the two guys fairly well. They’ve been guests in my mental house for about 4 or 5 months now. That’s a bit longer than the average tenant; others come and go, but not these guys.
Anyways, so I’m standing there, staring at these guys staring back at me. I can tell they want me to leave, but by this point I’m already suspicious. They give their scripted “good mornings” and then continue to stare at me. Coffee, I think. A good cup of mental coffee to wake me up. So I go over to the coffee pot only find it empty (because I don’t really drink coffee. I just need an excuse to stay in my mental kitchen for a bit longer). I shrug. I guess I’ll have to make more, except, I don’t even know how to make coffee (because I don’t really drink it). I take a closer look at the coffee pot- as if enough eyeballing will miraculously grant me with the knowhow to operate this thing- and I notice something interesting. There’s no coffee and there appears to have never been coffee inside it- not today, not ever! So what?
I turn to the other two guys, still watching me, taking silent sips from their mugs. And so I ask myself: What the hell are they drinking? I open the fridge and it’s empty. I’m not hungry, I’m just trying to figure this thing out. I’m searching every mental cabinet in my little mental kitchen of my mental house and there is no food to be found…anywhere!
Meanwhile, these two guys are still watching me. The blond one finally speaks. Jack, I think his name is. He asks me what I’m looking for, and I tell him I don’t know. And then he asks me if I want to know what it is he’s drinking, so I tell him yeah, sure, why not. He nods, takes another sip, and then doesnt tell me! The other guy, Chris, no, Caleb. He’s a younger guy. He laughs as if it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard and then he just vanishes. Poof! Just like that. Gone.
Now Jack’s laughing at the expression on my face. I’m dumbfounded. My mouth must be open. He strolls over to me and tells me that everything will be alright, that my greatest fears and frustrations are simply things of my imagination. “You haven’t paid your rent in over a month, Jack,” I say. I don’t know why this particular thought occurs to me, it just does.
He nods, digs through his pockets and pulls out a fat wad of cash, there must be at least a quarter million in that roll. I wonder where he gets that much money. He peels away a few hundreds and pauses.
“Four fifty,” I remind him.
He looks at me, shrugs, and shoves the entire roll into my pockets. “Then that should cover me for the next few years,” he says.
“And then some.”
Another nod, and then he vanishes, too, just like Caleb. I dig in my pockets and pull out a crisp handful of one-hundreds and smile.
But then I wake up. I check my pockets to only find lint, a couple of toothpicks, and a bubblegum wrapper. Brief disappointment, followed by anger, followed by the sudden realization that I don’t own a house in which I rent out to tenants who pretend to drink coffee and vanish into thin air.
Dreams are weird like that. And imagination and desire are conspirators in this grand scheme to drive me crazy!
- Choose a Direction, because setting goals means establishing a route to reach your goal. Decide that you want to write a novel. Get serious. Make plans. This includes deciding what audience you want to write for. This is super important. Too many people want to be liked by everyone, which isn’t a bad thing to want, but the problem is that it is very unrealistic. Sit down to write with that in mind every day, and you’re sure to end up with a watery, flavorless pile of nothing. Instead, identify who will like your story, who will get it (keeping in mind age, gender, and all those things) and keep that audience in mind, instead.
“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: Try to please everybody.”
-Herbert Bayard Swope
Enough said.
- Set a Goal, make a commitment, create a writing schedule by setting time aside for writing, (morning, noon, or night) you know yourself better than anyone. Set a logical word count and the number of days in a week that you want to write. Get a calendar and keep track of your progress.
- 3. Reward and Reinforce yourself with things you want to do. You have to write because you’ve made the commitment and you’ve created the schedule. We do what we have to do so that we may do what we want to do. Find something that you enjoy doing, or better yet, as you’re sitting there not wanting to write, think about what you would rather be doing, and use that as your reward and reinforcement. And when you’re done with your target word count for the day, go have your plate of cookies, watch some TV, take that nap, go play on your Xbox (my reward) or PS3 or Wii or whatever. The basic idea is to reward yourself, so go have fun! You deserve it. Just make sure you buckle down and do what needs to be done first.
- 4. Be Consistent when you write, every day that you do so. This is very important. This is why was make word counts, and this is going to sound weird, but in keeping with the consistency rule, it’s probably a good idea (at least for beginners) to stay inside your target word count minimum/maximum range. For example, for Clockwork my target daily word count was 1500 (min) to 2000 (max). Most days I did more, but I never did less than 1500. And usually, about 1000 words in I’d be in a sort of creative zone that would allow me to knock out another 1000 words with no problem. But I had to reach my sweet spot of 1000 words first, so it might be a good idea to find your sweet spot (when the words start coming naturally) first.
The important thing here is to avoid being so erratic that it throws the pace of the story off (with 2500 words one day, 500 the next, and 1000 the following day). I even went as far as to stop myself deliberately at 2000 or 2500 words, even when I wanted to keep writing I used that hunger to keep going, and that excitement and eagerness to write usually rolled over to the next day when my mind was fresh and fully rested.
Well, those are the steps I used in my summer project. If you do NaNoWriMo then that might be an interesting way to approach it. Obviously, it is a very short and simple list. There are countless books out there that attempt to help you structure and write a novel if you need that sort of detailed support. In the coming days I will be posting some more useful tips and links to other beneficial material for beginning writers. Have a great day!
Ok, so I recently finished my second novel (though technically it’s more like my 3rd or 4th but whatever) over the summer. It was my first plotted novel from beginning to end. Usually I just have an idea, and then I just sit down and knock it out in three or four months. But this was the first one that I actually made a sort of storyboard for from scene to scene. Maybe it was because I knew this one was going to be a bit longer then my others and I was experimenting with a new sub-genre (it’s a YA steampunk fantasy, with an emphasis on fantasy, so not as much scifi) and I knew it was going to be part of a larger series.
Anywho, the result, as you know, in my opinion, was a pile of literary crap. BUT! As I’ve recently discovered, that pile of literary crap taught me a few things (as all finished projects do) about myself, my style, and my overall writing process. And though I hate the finished, very rough manuscript (with plans to completely rewrite and eventually post for free on my Fictionpress account) there are a few things that I am quite impressed with.
For one, I finished it in two months. Something like 110,000 words in two months. That’s two NaNoWriMos back to back, baby!…and then some. Also, because I plotted this one (we’lll just call it Clockwork, that’s the partial title) it was not only written much faster than my other novels, but it was put together in a way that left little to no room for many plot holes. There are still plot holes, no doubt, but not as many as I would have if I did not plot. And finally, I was able to find exactly what I did not like about the story.
My biggest problem with Clockwork was that it was too busy, there was too much happening, too much going on and I was only writing in one character’s POV. What this means is that my readers would only be getting a part of the entire story from only one characters perspective. After some debate, I decided that this was not the best way to tell this story. I needed more perspectives for a story of that size and complexity. Also, while I felt that I enjoyed writing a steampunk novel, I felt that I did not know enough about the genre to do it true justice. I think I need to read a few more steampunk novels and maybe visit a few steampunk forums to really get more familiar with it.
Vernon Smith 