NaNoWriMo – Page 3 – Words: I love them

I don’t want to write this post

April 13, 2014 by Jackie Dana

I love to write.

I do it for a living, assisting WordPress.com users, creating and updating support documentation, and communicating with colleagues. At a distributed company such as Automattic, there are few in-person/voice conversations. The majority of interaction among colleagues and between staff and our users is through written communication. Outside of work, I write fiction for fun and am an occasional blogger. For the month of April I signed up to do Camp NaNoWriMo and my colleague’s blogging challenge, so I have been writing quite a bit more than my norm, seven days a week.

Like I said, I love to write, so it’s great to have so many opportunities to do so. However, even for someone who does so much of it, it doesn’t ever get easy. And tonight, I really didn’t feel like writing a blog post, and had absolutely no ideas for what to write about.

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Each time I make a conscious decision to write something, I have to think about audience, tone, purpose, length… whether it’s a quick post on an internal company blog or the next chapter of my NaNoWriMo novel.

For work-related writing, it’s usually not too difficult unless I’m trying to describe a new process or assist someone with a complex problem.

It’s significantly harder to write the optional, creative projects. Often, like tonight, coming up with ideas is the challenging point. It’s tough coming up with something new to say every day. At least for my novel, after doing NaNoWriMo once, I’ve learned some tricks, so it’s not as difficult this time, because I just pick a character more or less at random and start writing, and see what happens. It’s also easier with the novel since I know that it’s a rough draft and if it’s terrible, I can delete it and no one will be the wiser. That’s harder to do with a blog.

Still, I’m stubborn, so I keep going. I want to prove to my friends and colleagues, but most of all myself, that I can complete the challenges. So each evening, no matter how I feel, I sit down and write. Usually I write a blog post first and then work on my novel until bedtime.

As I do so—as I put words together over and over, every day, without skipping a day for any reason, even when I went to the ER—I find both blogging and my creative writing project are improving. The act of starting a new post/chapter/character sketch isn’t as hard as it used to be, and because I’m not holding myself to the same strict standards I used to, I’m achieving more, and that feels good. And just knowing I’ve made it another day into the month without failing is an achievement in itself.

I know there are a lot of bloggers out there who really want to write more often, and like me, they discover it’s a significant challenge. I suspect a lot of them give up, much like I gave up trying to learn how to knit, because I just didn’t have the patience or a strong enough desire to master it.

If you’re like me, and enjoy writing but find it difficult, you’re not alone. However, if you can stick with it, and try to create something every day, you’ll be better for it. And maybe one day you’ll find that writing is easy.

I’m still waiting for that day to come, but I’m sure it’s just around the corner!

What Makes for a Successful Blog Post ?

April 8, 2014 by Jackie Dana

This month I’ve been participating in my colleague’s blogging challenge, and so far I’ve managed to post every day in the month of April, which means after tonight, that’s eight consecutive days of blog posts. All of the posts so far have dealt with writing, more specifically something related to Camp NaNoWriMo.

What I’ve found curious is examining which of my posts have been the most popular, measured by traffic or by comments.

The two winners so far are last night’s post, The Confession of a Perfectionist Writer, which I think has more comments than any blog post I’ve ever written, and perhaps my post Writing Partners, in which I did little other than post a photo of two of my cats.

My takeaways from this are that I either need to post about the inherent difficulties of writing, or just post more photos of my pets.

It also makes me wonder what makes for a successful blog post? Are there topics that resonate more than others? Or to be successful, should we all just post cute animal photos? 🙂

Beyond that, how should we measure a successful post? Should we consider overall traffic (stats numbers)? Engagement? Sharing? Something else?

If you have a blog, what have you found works the best for you?

Confession of a Perfectionist Writer

April 7, 2014 by Jackie Dana

I have a confession. I’m a perfectionist.

Isn’t that what writers aspire to become? The kind of writers who can spew perfectly-composed prose, elegant plots, and compelling characters right from their fingertips, as if every time they touch the keyboard another gem gets added to the page.

I’d like to be one of those writers. Hell, I’d like to meet one of those writers! Because the truth is, very few people can write beautiful stories the first time around. Even the greatest writers of all time have gone through drafts.

When I was a high school senior, I was lucky to go to Marquette University and see some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s manuscripts on display. I was astonished to learn that some of the characters we know and love didn’t start off with the same names we know them today (I seem to recall Gandalf was one of them). I was even more amazed to see lines scratched out and scribbles in the margin. Tolkien! Even a man that brilliant didn’t get it right the first time around.

As you work on refining your skill as a writer, you trick yourself into thinking you can get it right the first time, every time, and then get disappointed when things fall flat. That’s where a lot of people give up, in fact. If you keep at it, you realize that writing is all about drafts and editing.

Once you come to that point as a writer, and fully embrace the concept of ripping apart all of your drafts, tossing countless words and phrases to the proverbial cutting room floor, something happens.

Hint: It’s not that you become a great writer and start publishing everything. Oh, no, it’s never so simple.

What happens is that you become obsessed with editing, and refining, and getting it perfect. Didn’t I say we all aspire to become perfectionists?

And once you fall into that trap, it can become just as crippling as the feeling the new writer experiences when nothing sounds right. You can get so caught up in the process of writing-editing-writing-editing-editing-editing that you can’t really move forward.

That’s where I was stuck last fall. I couldn’t really start new chapters, much less new projects, because the old ones weren’t done. I still had editing to do. I needed to finish.

When I participated in NaNoWriMo last November, I had to break out of that trap. NaNoWriMo is about quantity, not quality.

Wait, what?

Yes. The idea is that every day you write something new, and keep moving forward. You don’t edit, you don’t cut and paste. If you’re honest, you don’t even go back and re-read what you wrote for the entire month. Instead, you spend time every single day creating something new.

This is liberating, because you break out of the editing trap. You give yourself permission to experiment. You learn tricks to breaking out of writer’s block. And at the end, you have a massive piece of writing that could never have happened so quickly if you kept going back and editing, proofreading, cutting, changing.

I’ve managed to overcome the editing trap, but I’m still a perfectionist at heart. This means that it’s still difficult for me to share my fiction until it’s done, until it has been through the crucible of editing and been refined, purified, polished up to a sparkling gem. What I cannot do is put rough drafts out for all eyes to see.

One of my colleagues, Robyn, has just started a blog that stands in defiance of perfectionism. In Goodbye, Red Pen, she is doing what I can only dream about… writing and publishing a draft chapter every day. While I sit here belaboring the process of writing for my daily blog challenge, she’s actually putting herself out there, displaying her fiction as naked, unedited prose for the world to see.

I am so awestruck by her courage… and her gorgeous writing.

I’m also inspired by her example, and am considering posting a few snippets from this month’s writing as part of Camp NaNoWriMo here on my blog… but even then it won’t be everything, just the stuff that has passed through my harsh internal censors. Even the thought of doing it gives me hives, so we’ll see how it goes.

For now, check out her blog… it’s been a week and the story is fantastic. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Writing and Music

April 6, 2014 by Jackie Dana

When I write fiction and really want to focus, like many people I like to listen to music. To this end, I’ve discovered that there are three different broad categories of music that work for me:

All-purpose writing music
Mood music
Project-specific music

For the first category, I like classical and early music (medieval/renaissance/baroque). This generally is music that either has no lyrics or the words are in another language so it’s not “sing along” music. Most of the time I get distracted by music with lyrics that I know and am more tempted to actively engage with the songs than actually get writing done. Some of my favorites here include Debussy, the flute music of Seamus Egan, the Baltimore Consort, and the music of Philip Glass, which also is something I frequently turn to when I am trying to visualize a scene.

When I say “mood music” it’s music that helps me set a general tone for the work. If I’m writing about characters in a dance club, I might listen to music that evokes that kind of setting. For scenes that are supposed to be disturbing—for example, in my current work, that might be nightmares that I’m describing—I like classical music in lower ranges or that are a bit atonal.

In this category I’m also discovering soundtracks to be useful. The music from Doctor Who, the TV show Merlin, and the Hobbit all are on this list because of the memories/images they evoke in me and how those emotional responses translate into writing. And recently, I’ve added the soundtrack to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is excellent.

My favorite is the third category. As I write, there are songs that evoke a certain feeling, or that are referenced in some way by my characters, and over time the songs take on meaning. For my current project, I include in this list Fiona Apple’s version of Pure Imagination, which I think would be a great song to open the movie version of this novel, should I be so lucky. (I disregard the fact that the accompanying video was made as a commercial). I also include in this list the original Singing in the Rain since one of my characters sings it, and Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing, which I envision is playing by the band in a dream sequence.

Thanks to Spotify, I am always exploring new “soundtracks” that aid in the writing process. I’d love to hear what music others find particularly helpful, and why.