Commitment

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I've just had an article posted on Fuel Your Writing about why you might find it difficult to finish a project before you crack on with a new one. If you follow writers on Twitter, or read their blogs, you'll probably see a lot of mentions of "Have new idea for a project! Should I work on that, or stick to WIP?" or something similar.

Finishing a novel, or a short story, or any kind of creative project, requires a certain element of commitment to the project as a whole. The project may need you to spend a long period of time with your attention focussed on that one thing - it's hardly surprising your creative mind starts to wander, and terrified of stagnation, it starts trying to distract you. You're like the Lothario who thought he'd been finally tamed by the buxom brunette from the tavern by the beach, only to find himself eyeing up the local ladies after a few months of passion with his paramour. You want to stay faithful, really, you do, but those new ideas are just so exciting!

I tend to find that when I'm working on one particular project, I'll indulge in short but sweet side projects. So I might be working on a novella or a serial, but I'll still write my weekly Friday flash, or blog posts. They're such small projects that they're hardly projects at all, and doing them means I get to pay scant attention to the smaller ideas while keeping myself focussed on the larger idea of the work in progress.

Having said that, the Fuel Your Writing post does contain one particular point that comes from extremely personal experience. That point is the third reason why people may find it difficult to finish a project.

I'm scared. If I never finish writing it, or I never make all of the changes to the draft, then it'll always have the potential to be amazing. If I do finish it, then it loses that potential and just becomes a 'thing' I've done. It might not live up to expectation.

As some of you may know, lately I've been working on a novella, The Guns of Retribution. It's a Western, and clocks in a couple of hundred words shy of 30,000. I've had my trusted and highly valued beta readers give it the once over, and now I've made my changes based on their feedback, I'm pretty pleased with it. Having said that, for the few days before I actually finished it, I kept finding reasons not to make the changes. I told myself I "didn't want to ruin it" but when I really stopped to think about it, I realised that I didn't want to finish it. The moment I did, it wouldn't be a "work in progress" with the potential to be the book I had in my head. It would be done (or as done as it can be until I get feedback from "higher up").

What a stupid way of looking at it! Rather than being grateful for being able to tell the story, and excited by the prospect of having it finished and getting it out there, I was worried that it would fall short of both my expectations, and everyone else's. I was sabotaging my own efforts! Of course, with the novella as a work in progress, any flaws can be smoothed out, and I can always tell myself it can be improved. With my novella finished, I have to stand behind it and say "Yes, I did this."

Well you know what? I do stand behind it, and I'm damn proud to say I did it.

NaNoWriMo 2010

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It's November 30th, the last day of NaNoWriMo, and I'm pleased to say that I broke the 50,000 word mark on Sunday evening. Boy, am I glad! After being really excited by my story back in those halcyon days at the start of the month, I rapidly grew bored with it. Doing my daily words became a chore, and I was finding that I was writing as much as I could, not to meet the target or because I couldn't stop myself, but because I wanted it over and done with.

We Should Be Heroes is set in Vertigo City, my fictional metropolis that has already spawned a steampunk serial, The First Tale, and a mini-serial, Quantum Steam Theory. I decided to move 130 years into "the future", putting Vertigo into a twilight world akin to 1940s noir. Superheroes stalked the streets of the city. Sadly they didn't do much with their powers and it turned into a detective story.

Now, I'm proud of myself for having written another novel, and in the process I've found out a lot more about my characters. Two of them are actually from the steampunk era (there is a reason why they're still around over a century later) and they've given me a lot more back story through We Should Be Heroes. The problem is, I don't really want to use the novel as part of the Vertigo City universe.

There are three major problems with it. I could probably fix them, if I wanted to, but right now I don't. I want to focus on other things (an announcement about one of them is coming soon). The first problem was that I'd written myself into a hole by choosing to write it in first person present tense, which was annoying as secondary characters had far more interesting things to say. The second problem is linked with this, in that I couldn't maintain the "voice" of my main character beyond the opening scenes.

The third problem is perhaps the biggest, since no amount of rewrites would solve it. Basically...I don't like writing noir. There. I said it. The steampunk tales are like adventures stories, and they've a lot more fun to write. Liss gets to shoot things (or beat people up) and the automatons get more to do. Vertigo City is a more interesting place to write when it's a spiritual descendant of Victorian London, as opposed to 1940s New York.

So while I'm proud of myself for having written it, I'm not going to use it. I'll be keeping Vertigo City for my steampunk work, so there will be more adventures from Liss and the gang over the coming months. Just not any superheroes.

The Inevitable NaNoWriMo Post

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Monday 1st November is almost upon us, which in the writing world, means just one thing. No, we writer folk don't celebrate All Saint's Day (well, some of us might). No, I mean it's almost NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month. The name is something of a misnomer since the concept has since gone international since its American inception in 1999, but if you know a writer, you'll no doubt hear plenty of "NaNo" talk over the coming weeks. Hell, if you use Twitter, you'll no doubt consider un-following anyone who mentions it for the 8394th time.

The Internet is already crammed with posts about why people are doing NaNo, why they aren't doing NaNo, why you should do NaNo, etc. etc., and as much as I could sit here and blather on about the same, I figured I'd just give you a couple of my strategies for getting through it. If you don't have any intention of doing NaNo, then look away now...

It's not Zombigeddon
I'll let you in on a secret. NaNoWriMo is not an experience that you must "survive". This is not a zombie apocalypse or the Poseidon Adventure. You will not find yourself going on the run with Snake Plissken. It is a hard slog but it is one that should be enjoyed as opposed to endured. If you think it's going to be too hard and that you might want go "Bruce Banner" ten days in, then maybe consider not doing it. Furthermore, if writing that many words at all, let alone in one month, fills you with fear, then might I suggest crochet or origami as a hobby as opposed to writing?

Project
Before you do anything else, you're going to need to decide on your project. Why stop at a novel? By name, it might be National Novel Writing Month but you could easily use the time to write a bunch of short stories, or even a web serial which you can then divide up and start posting in December. There is no NaNo police who will hunt you down if you choose not to write a novel. (I hope - don't quote me on that) The whole point of the exercise is purely to write, and to get yourself into the habit of writing daily.

If you do choose a novel, make sure the plot is strong enough to sustain one. What might seem like a neat idea to start with might turn out to be less of a concept and more of a notion, better suited to a flash fiction or at its longest, a short story. Remember that while books can often be boiled down to a single sentence (Hobbits take Ring to Mordor, boy wizard battles evil wizard, vampire emigrates to the UK and causes hassle for the locals) there's a lot more going on in them. Have you got sub-plots?

Plan
So you've got your idea, and you think it'll be enough to support the weight of a novel. Excellent! Well done. Now you have to break it down into chunks. Why? Well I'm not saying you need to have a wall covered in Post-It notes, or an entire floor of your home dedicated to a plot map, but it might be a good idea to know roughly where the story is going to go before you start. If you don't, then your characters might run away with you, leading you down blind alleys and causing you to waste precious words on diverting but ultimately pointless excursions. Try and work out major plot landmarks ahead of time - then you can feel free to make stuff up as you go along to get the novel from point to point.

Words
50,000 words certainly sounds like a lot, and it works out as a minimum of 1,667 words per day. Writing that much used to be enough to write a complete book, but many novels nowadays are 75,000 words or more. Still, you can't expect writing novices to sit down and crank out 2,500 words a day (unless they want to) and 50,000 words seems far more attainable. Besides, you don't have to limit yourself to 50,000 words by 30 November. The whole point of NaNo is to get you writing - if you want to keep going and not finish your book until January when it will weigh in at a mighty 140,000 words, there's nothing stopping you.

Targets
I would argue that your most important strategy is to make sure you write something every day to keep the momentum going. If you only write 500 words one day, that's fine, but remember you'll need to write 2834 words the following day to stay on track. My suggestion is to aim to write more than 1667 words per day, so if you fall short of that target, you should still make your minimum word count.

Yeah yeah yeah, Icy, but I've got other stuff to be getting on with, I hear you say. Well, not to be facetious, but so did I when I wrote my first novel in 2008. I had to find time where I could. Nowhere does it say you have to write all 1667 words in one sitting. If you wrote 580 words in three bouts, you'd have written 1680 words in one day. Doesn't seem so much when you break it down, does it? If you do 500 words before breakfast, another 500 words at lunch, 500 words before dinner and 500 words before you go to bed, you've done 2000 words. As the meerkat would say, "Simples."

All you need is love
You will need a whole heap of love to get the job done. Love for your plot and your characters, in particular. If you don't love writing them, even the villains (or should I say, especially the villains), and you don't love your story, then it will feel like a chore. If that happens, don't get too despondent - maybe your story and your characters are better suited to a short story, or a novella.

Allow yourself to suckLast but not least, remember that you will not get a finished book out of NaNoWriMo. If you make it to the finish line, or go beyond the 50,000 mark and complete the novel, all you will have is a first draft. It will need a lot of polishing to get it to an acceptable state for an agent. Therefore, you may allow your writing to be utterly awful. No one need ever see this but you. So just get your head down, get writing, and have fun.