Preparing for NaNoWriMo: One Final Trick

November is National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. It's an entire month dedicated to writing, or, more specifically, to amassing fifty thousand words on an original novel. Last year, over 400,000 writers from around the world participated. The NaNo website helps you track your word count, provides regional support and chat boards, and allows you to "win" when you hit your 50,000-word goal. Every November, bookstores, coffee shops, and 24-hour diners fill up with writers - you can practically feel the creativity in the air! NaNo provides a great community, and it's a great motivation for starting or continuing a novel project. 2017 will be my seventh year tackling NaNo, and I can't wait to get started!

That said, there are a few ways to set yourself up in advance for NaNo success. We'll explore these each Thursday in October, so you'll be ready to hit the ground running on November 1st!

Writing every day for a month (or for long stretches of time over several days during the month) can be really tough. A lot of writers drop out of NaNo part-way through - the time commitment is nothing to sneeze at. And it can also feel disheartening when a project you started on November 1st begins getting bogged down around the middle. You might encounter writer's block, or just feel like your time could be better spent doing something else. You might open that Word doc, or your notebook, and get queasy at the idea of spending an hour or more working on your book.

But before you close that document or notebook, I want to give you one tip to help you keep writing when you really, really don't want to. It's a very simple tip, but it nearly always works.

End your day's writing in the middle of a sentence.

That's it. It doesn't even have to be an exciting, eventful sentence, though that never hurts. But it's so much easier to start writing each day when you know all you *have* to do is finish that darn sentence from the day before. Chances are, you'll do that, and then you'll keep going. Let's try it:

1) Katya couldn't believe her ears: had Emilio really professed his love for her? That's a complete thought. Where do you go from there? When you pick up the book the next day, you have to stay within the confines of Emilio's confession, whether you want to or not.

2) Katya couldn't believe That's an incomplete sentence and it can go a lot of different places. Maybe she couldn't believe her luck, or what had just happened, or in some aspect of her religion, or a million other things. The point is, when you're greeted with this sentence fragment on a new writing day, you have to get your creativity flowing right away to figure out what Katya couldn't believe. It's not hard to finish a sentence. And once you do, then you're already writing! You might as well keep going, right?

What do you do on days when you really just don't feel like writing?

A story and a sentence walked into a bar together...

Guest post by Kristen James

They both noticed a woman with long, dark hair and an inviting smile, so they sat at the bar, four stools away from her. She glanced over at their entrance before turning back to her conversation with her friends. Sentence told Story, “Watch this. I’m going to wiggle my perfect construction at her. She won’t be able to resist!”

Story watched as Sentence tried to catch the woman’s eye. The woman and her friends gave Sentence a few polite glances, but they weren’t interested.

When Story had enough, he announced, “My turn!” He walked around Sentence to sit closer to the woman and gave her a nod and a wink. The woman immediately moved down the bar three seats to talk to Story.

“Your characters are amazing! How did you come up with this idea, anyway?” She leaned closer and tilted her head back to tease him with a half smile. “And the twist at the end! I didn’t see that coming, but then it made perfect sense. Please tell me there’s a sequel. Does Jake ever win Kathryne over, and does his father ever forgive him? Is there another mystery to solve?”

Story motioned for another round of drinks and murmured, “I’ll tell you everything if you have a few hours…”

Sentence sulked in his seat. What had he done wrong?

“Sentence” missed the simple fact that readers don’t go into bookstores and online retailers to buy groups of sentences. There aren’t any reviews that read, “This book is full of perfect sentences! Check out the metaphor on page 82. The sentences were so wonderful that I forgot about the story and highlighted the comas and semicolons. This author knows how to vary sentence length! Wonderful!”

Readers often say a novel is well written, and they might mention the imagery or fresh use of language, but that alone won’t win readers. Personally, I don’t want to throw a reader out of the story with a impressive sentence. I want the plot and characters to pull the reader in so she’ll keep reading past her bedtime. Of course, I don’t want poor writing to distract the reader either, but I know the point of the novel is the story.

As an artist, do you want others to see the picture you’re painting or the brushstrokes?

Do you need to write well on a sentence level to write good stories? Yes, of course! But are the sentences more important than the story you’re telling? Not in my opinion. Aren’t authors selling stories, not sentences?

Writing well is very important. I don’t mean to argue that point, but it really bugs me when I hear someone put down a mega bestselling author for their writing. It’s usually on a sentence level: “Look at all the clichés, passive voice, and simple sentences! A fifth grader could write better.” It could be true–the given book might very well be full of sentences that could be written better. Maybe their modifiers don’t line up. Maybe they like using clichés as shortcuts in certain places. Maybe they choose choppy or run on sentences over proper grammar to show the character’s thoughts and emotions. But, if the writing really is that poor, then the author must be doing something else right. And that “something else” really sells copies. Millions of readers are buying those books. Despite what people say, you can’t sell a book month after month on marketing alone. If it’s not a good story, people complain. They won’t tell other people about the book.

Readers want an experience away from their life. They want to get sucked into a great story that makes them forget everything else for a few hours. They want to connect with the character and see the world differently. They want to experience a great story. They want to feel.

So, yes, please learn to write sentences well and play with language. Study English, spelling, and grammar. Create fresh images and strive to be original. Learn how to write well so readers can understand what you’re saying. And if you want to sell that writing, remember your job is to tell a damn good story.

Kristen James has written over twenty books and ranked in the top 100 Bestsellers in Kindle US, UK and Canada, #1 in ten different categories, #1 in Movers & Shakers, and #1 free rankings.

Visit Kristen's WEBSITE

Follow Kristen on FACEBOOK 

Follow Kristen on TWITTER

Copy Editor Quick Tip #1: Varying Sentences

Quick Tip #1: Vary your sentences. 

I know it seems obvious, like it should go without saying, but this is probably the biggest, best tip I can give anybody who wants to make his or her copy editor happy.

Varying sentence structure means several things. Let me break it down for our skimmers out there:

• Some long sentences, some short sentences (e.g. It wasn't simply that I occasionally misread algebraic expressions or that calculus turned my mind into jelly-textured mush. I hated math.)
• Avoid overusing passive voice (I'm one who appreciates passive voice in certain books, especially if it goes well with the narrator's voice, but every sentence should not contain passive words and phrases: had, has, were, was -ing. Variety is the spice of life.)
• Use similes AND metaphors, as well as symbols that only the deep readers will get (otherwise, you may end up with a lot of 'like' and 'as' in your manuscript, which will wear down even your patient readers. Try changing it from, "My legs were like jelly," to, "My legs turned to jelly.")
• Dialogue and exposition (Few readers have the patience to read through pages and pages of exposition without any action/dialogue, but too much dialogue can present the same problem, particularly if the action during dialogue is unclear. The rule of thumb seems to be half a page of each, and keep things moving.)
• Mood or tone (i.e. Don't depress the reader with a narrator who constantly has the same low mood. Just as reading a constantly peppy narrator would exhaust anyone, reading a moody, broody voice will also wear over time. Let readers see your characters through a natural scope of moods and emotions. If you don't see how this is possible, consider that even someone who is depressed will sometimes put on a smile and fake it for company or genuinely laugh at something unexpectedly funny. Kiersten White is my hero for mixing the peppy with the dark and broody in her trilogy, Paranormalcy.)

Being that I'm fairly new to this copy editing gig, I find that I'm learning new things constantly from the amazing authors I get to pre-read. I hope you find something helpful in these quick tips, as well. 

P.S. If you're looking for a good read this week, brand new off the presses is Jen McConnel's DAUGHTER OF CHAOS from her Red Magic series. Or for middle grade age zombie lovers who want to learn more about the dark and sinister workings of Capitol Hill, there's Ty Drago's UNDERTAKERS: Secret of the Corpse Eater also out this week.

In Praise of Sentences

Internet, I want to talk about sentences.

There's a lot of wonderful writing advice out there.  Essays and hand-drawn diagrams emphasize that writers write, writers edit, writers finish their work.  Blog post after blog post will tell you to kill your darlings, to structure your manuscript, to build compelling characters, to pace properly, to incorporate the Hero's Journey (or not).

But I rarely see writing advice focus on the sentence.  Which is a shame, because in my experience, sentence-by-sentence work is the foundation of a good manuscript.  In fact, a careful sentence-by-sentence edit goes a long way toward fixing macro problems of scale, pacing, and emotional intensity, while preserving the writer's original vision.

Sentences tell stories.  If your book is a movie, then sentence work is the billion-dollar special effects and postproduction process that transforms miniatures and puppets and CGI into a T-Rex attacking a jeep.

A few weeks ago I reproduced here Alan Ginsberg's fourteen steps to revising poetry.  He reminds himself to make abstract details concrete, to remove articles and unnecessary words when possible, to reread with an eye toward rhythm.  Sentence work can include all these steps and more.  A sentence-by-sentence edit will examine good and bad internal rhymes (avoiding too many '-ing' words in the same sentence or paragraph), meter, relative length, repeated words.  I try to scrub out unnecessary words—especially tense signifiers, words like 'had' when they're not needed.

Combing through your work one measured word at a time is slow.  It's often thankless, since many readers don't pay enough attention to notice the effects except in the aggregate.  But the aggregate is where sentence work pays off.  Think of the reader's ability to focus on your story as a fixed quantity.  Each word they read spends some of that focus.  Fill your sentences with meaningless words, leave too much slack and play, and the reader spends all her focus on 'had' and 'of' and 'very'.  Polish and refine on a sentence level, and the reader's focus carriers her further.  More heartbreak, more excitement, more adventure per page.  A story that lags may suffer from fundamental structure problems—but it's also possible that too many words stand between the reader and what she's come to see.

The best part about sentence work is that it only takes time. Not every film has the special effects budget to be Jurassic Park.  But when you stand alone at your desk, you have limitless power to refine and distill, to formulate and revise.  Writing is the only form of art I know where the artist has limitless power to refine and fix.  A sculptor can't un-carve a piece of marble, a painter must work within the brushstrokes they've left, a fencer builds a bout point by point.  But writers can always edit, always revise, always improve.  It's the art form's great strength.

Now, knowing when you're done—that's another issue entirely.  Let me know if any of you figure that out.