Giveaways! None at the moment!
Check back soon!
TDF Staff Editor/Head Writer:
TDF Pamela
Regular Contributors:
Amanda
The Bibliomaniac
Emily
Lady T
LamoreVincera
Stacy B
Strangeness Abounds
WereGeek
To read more about us, head over and meet the geeks!
|
TDF Pamela, on November 21st, 2010 |
 by mulmatsherm @ flickr I’m way behind on my National Novel Writing Month word count. Way behind. I have good reasons for being so behind. The Fanfiancé and I just bought a house, and we’ve been settling in and getting things in order so we can ship all of our stuff from Texas to Oregon. But that excuse only goes so far, and the major reason that I haven’t caught up yet is because… well, I’m lazy.
I try to pass it off as writer’s block, and honestly, some of my inability to write does come from being blocked. I’ll open up my novel and stare at it for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to write next. And then I close it and go play Sims 2. Or write a blog post.
I keep finding myself wishing for things, as if they’ll help me write. We’re in the new house, but as I mentioned, most of our stuff is in storage in Texas. I’m sitting here in my barren little office, staring around, wishing I could paint the walls. If I could paint the walls, it wouldn’t be so dull-looking, and I’d feel better about working. Or I wish I had a scented candle, because that’s obviously the missing link in my ability to churn out words. Or my exercise ball office chair. Maybe if I put in a better light fixture…
Environment is important to me when I write, so I can’t completely blow off all of those flighty wishes. I know that it’s too damp outside to paint the walls, as they would take forever to dry and I wouldn’t be able to write in here anyway. Unless someone invents a teleporter, I won’t have my lovely exercise ball chair until the second week of December. I could go to the store and buy a scented candle, though… But that would take more time out of my writing schedule (though we do need to go to Target and look for anti-slip stickers for the bathtub)…
No! The best I can do right now is open the shade to let what little sunlight November in Oregon has to offer in, turn on some mellow music, and crack open the word processor. I really want to win my first NaNo attempt. This is part of my Hermione complex, I think. I want to have that winner’s badge, because it’s like getting an A in life.
So… I’d better finish this post and get back to writing.
 TDF Pamela
The Discriminating Fangirl, who is more likely to answer to Pamela if you shout it at her, is the proud owner of an MA in English, focusing on children's/young adult literature and popular culture. Because of her ample free time thanks to being gainfully unemployed, she reads voraciously. She also loves geeky movies and tv shows, reads comic books as often as she can buy them, and when she's procrastinating, she enjoys playing video games. She can be contacted at t.d.fangirl @ gmail.com and followed on Twitter at the link below.
profile | twitter
TDF Pamela, on November 2nd, 2010 |
For my fellow NaNoWriMo participants, I give you our favorite, geeky, adorable, fictional author doing what we’re all going to be doing feverishly throughout November:
Write away, my fellow fangirls (and fanboys)!
TDF Pamela
The Discriminating Fangirl, who is more likely to answer to Pamela if you shout it at her, is the proud owner of an MA in English, focusing on children's/young adult literature and popular culture. Because of her ample free time thanks to being gainfully unemployed, she reads voraciously. She also loves geeky movies and tv shows, reads comic books as often as she can buy them, and when she's procrastinating, she enjoys playing video games. She can be contacted at t.d.fangirl @ gmail.com and followed on Twitter at the link below.
profile | twitter
TDF Pamela, on October 26th, 2010 |
On November 1, National Novel Writing Month will kick off, and a bunch of people will spend the month writing feverishly, three of your fangirls included. Don’t know what NaNoWriMo is? Here’s their explanation:
 National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
In 2009, we had over 165,000 participants. More than 30,000 of them crossed the 50K finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.
Amanda, Stacy B, and I are all participating in NaNo this year, which means posts from the three of us might be a bit on the light-to-nonexistent side during November. This week’s Writing About Writing is our introduction to NaNo, what we’re doing, what we’ve done in the past, and how we’re feeling about the task.
If you’re participating in NaNo, or if you just want to be a cheerleader for us, add us as buddies by clicking the links to our profiles! If you’d like to keep track of our progress, you can check out TDF’s post on the NaNo forums.
Amanda
This is my third year doing NaNo since 2006. My first time around was pretty much a total failure, so I didn’t do it again until 2009 and won! It was a bit of fanfic… *cough*, but I still got my 50k in before midnight. I’m planning to do an original idea that came to me earlier this month after watching a couple episodes of My Ghost Story. Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree also gave me some inspiration – the set ups are similar, but I’m taking a different route than her story.
At the moment, I have a good picture of my main character Ren and her background, but the rest is a little vague. The idea of doing something original makes me a little nervous only because I tried it the first year and I couldn’t get it to work. Another challenge is that it’s horror and I want to be able to keep the story tense and creepy enough without falling into every cliché about haunted houses. The story starts with Ren moving into a new house post-break up and I want to incorporate the stress of that relationship ending into the growing strangeness in the house.
Part of my preparation is picking up a couple books about hauntings and getting a better idea of what I want in that house. I have two books at the moment, but I’m going to pick up a few more that are focused on a personal account of a haunting rather than an investigation of one. I want to know what scared them, how it started and how they dealt with it. I’m trying to avoid the “this house is clean” moment for the end of the book because it’s just too common and expected with a lot of ghost stories.
Amanda’s NaNo Profile
Stacy B
This is my first year doing NaNo – I’ve had a couple of friends who have been trying to convince me to do it for years, but I never thought I really had the drive to make myself not only adhere to the timeline, but to suppress my inner editor. I tend to edit as I go, and edit again every reread before I add more information. That’s going to be a problem. Currently I’m battling with myself as to which idea I’m going to go with – because as I understand it you have to start from scratch, and pretty much every idea of mine has SOMETHING written down SOMEWHERE. I think it’s going to be hard-going, but I’m sure the payoff at the end, hitting 50k, is going to be worth the trouble. Plus I’ve got a great support network, and I’m told that’s one of the best parts.
Stacy B’s NaNo Profile
TDF Pamela
This is my first NaNo, too, though I have done something sort of similar before. I took a creative writing course in grad school that involved writing 50,000 words in a semester. Not quite as much of a madcap rush to the finish line as NaNo, but close.
And I’m kicking off my first NaNo by being a rebel. See, I really want to finish that novel that I started in the creative writing class. It needs about 50,000 words or so to finish it off and flesh it out. I would much rather bend the rules a little bit and work on an existing project than start something new and never finish anything. I know myself too well. I tend to jump between projects, and I’m going to finish this one, damn it.
I’ve been working on outlining the new stuff, making notes on parts I want to completely rewrite, and I’m going to try out Scrivener for Windows, which is in public beta at the moment.
I’m honestly pretty intimidated by this whole thing. In order to hit 50,000 words in 30 days, I’ll need to write 1,667 words a day. Based on what I’ve been able to write in the past (especially under pressure), I should be able to do it. But (isn’t there always a but?) the Fanfiancé and I are closing on a house pretty soon, and we’ll need to go to Texas, load up our stuff, and move it up here to Oregon during November. Eep! I think I’m going to have to do some extra writing so I’ll have a nice pad to fall back on.
Pamela’s NaNo Profile
TDF Pamela
The Discriminating Fangirl, who is more likely to answer to Pamela if you shout it at her, is the proud owner of an MA in English, focusing on children's/young adult literature and popular culture. Because of her ample free time thanks to being gainfully unemployed, she reads voraciously. She also loves geeky movies and tv shows, reads comic books as often as she can buy them, and when she's procrastinating, she enjoys playing video games. She can be contacted at t.d.fangirl @ gmail.com and followed on Twitter at the link below.
profile | twitter
TDF Pamela, on October 18th, 2010 |
It seems contradictory, to write about writer’s block, doesn’t it? Well… I don’t know if I’d say that I’m writing right now. More like sitting here in front of my computer, wracking my brain for something to write about, and thinking about giving up and playing The Sims instead.
In fact, I just paused in writing this post to go read a few articles on BBC News.
Le sigh.
For me, writer’s block tends to be linked to with periodic bursts of low self-esteem. I think my writing sucks, therefore I stop writing. Eventually, I convince myself that I’m not that bad, and that if I keep writing, I’ll learn and improve and get better, but it’s a difficult path.
This overwhelming feeling of suckitude often goes hand in hand with deeply ingrained perfectionism. I want what I write to be good. Really good. And when I write something that’s not good, even if it’s a very rough draft, I get discouraged. This leads either to not writing for a while, or focusing too intently on one part of a larger project to the point where I never finish the whole thing because I can’t get that one part right.
I haven’t written any fiction since the beginning of September. I’ve opened up a few projects and stared at them for a while, but that’s as far as I go. It’s incredibly frustrating because I want to write. I want to finish at least one of the damn things soon, but every time I try to work on writing lately, it’s like my brain locks up.
I know that the best way to get past writer’s block is to just suck it up and write. Even if what you write is crappy, the importance is to get past the idea that you can’t do it and just do it. You can always polish it up later, but it’s got to get on paper somehow.
What would help me the most is something I unfortunately don’t have anymore. I took a creative writing course while I was working on my Master’s that was basically a semester-long version of NaNoWriMo: we had to write a 50,000 word rough draft of a novel. I always thought that trying to write fiction in a structured environment like a class would be impossible. I couldn’t produce creativity on demand like that! But I was shocked to discover that I actually worked really well under that kind of pressure. I made it to about 45,000, which was the minimum word count that would get me an A in the class. I didn’t write every day, which is what I tell myself I should have done, and there were a few weeks where I hardly turned in any words. The final week of class was looming overhead and I needed to write at least 7,500 words to make it to that A. I surprised myself by writing 8,250 words all in the course of about three days.
Unfortunately I’m not in class anymore and don’t have the terror of getting a B to whip me into shape (I have a bit of a Hermione complex, see). I just need to figure out something that will strongly encourage me to set a daily writing goal and actually stick to it. When I do get inspired to write, I’ve found that using Write Or Die by Dr. Wicked is amazingly helpful. I even sprung for the desktop edition so I could use it anytime (the web edition died partway through that creative writing class, and I wept and gnashed my teeth when I couldn’t use it). From Dr. Wicked’s website:
The idea is to instill in the would-be writer with a fear of not writing. We do this by employing principles taught in Introduction to Psychology. Anyone remember Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement?
Negative Reinforcement “strengthens a behavior because a negative condition is stopped or avoided as a consequence of the behavior.”
Consequences:
- Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.
- Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.
- Kamikaze Mode: Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself
These consequences will persist until your preset conditions have been met (that is, your time is up or you’ve written you wordcount goal or both).
It seems kind of evil, but that’s the point. It forces me to write with all the subtlety of a pitchfork to the backside, and it’s really, really helpful.
Have any suggestions? What do you do when you’re afflicted with writer’s block? Tell me your tips and tricks (or your sob stories) in the comments.
TDF Pamela
The Discriminating Fangirl, who is more likely to answer to Pamela if you shout it at her, is the proud owner of an MA in English, focusing on children's/young adult literature and popular culture. Because of her ample free time thanks to being gainfully unemployed, she reads voraciously. She also loves geeky movies and tv shows, reads comic books as often as she can buy them, and when she's procrastinating, she enjoys playing video games. She can be contacted at t.d.fangirl @ gmail.com and followed on Twitter at the link below.
profile | twitter
|
Subscribe 
Subscribe by Email
 
Become a Friend of TDF!
TDF does NaNoWriMo Copyright Information 
All original content copyright to The Discriminating Fangirl and its respective authors, 2007-2010.
Please do not reproduce posts in their entirety without written permission. You may quote sections of posts with attribution (i.e. attribute the quote to The Discriminating Fangirl & the quote's author, including a link to the original post).
|
You Can Do It, and Other Stuff to Say to NaNoWriMo Runners
On November 7, people from all over the world come to my hometown of New York City to run in the New York City Marathon. People line the streets the entire route, cheering the runners onward, waving signs and handing out water. Meanwhile, on the internet, thousands more are running a different kind of marathon–NaNoWriMo.
National Novel Writing Month is probably known to anyone who spends a lot of time online (ie geeks like us). But if you haven’t participated in NaNoWriMo you might not know how accurate the logo of a runner carrying a pencil truly is. In previous years, I’ve done NaNo and it really is a marathon for the brain. I reached my 50,000 words and collapsed, like a lot of the runners of the NYC Marathon do.
Since I’m not participating in NaNo this year, like so many of my friends are, including our very own TDF Pamela, I tried to think of a way to cheer the runners along their route. YEAH! GO WRITERS! GO WRITERS! GO! YOU CAN DO IT!
I’ve also decided to handle out some mental refreshment, courtesy of one of the best nerdy writers out there, Uncle Ray Bradbury. I’ve read his Zen and the Art of Writing several times, and I think there are parts that really speak to the NaNo writer. Certainly, it speaks to the critics that say writing 50,000 words only focuses on quantity and not quality.
Yes, do all that! Listen to Ray Bradbury.
Or, if you need a break, you can buy the book that contains this essay or watch this video, which I find both hilarious and a tiny bit disturbing.
Emily is a book nerd currently living in New York City. She recently completed a master’s degree at New York University and doesn’t really know what to do with her free time. When she is not reading, working or sleeping, she is planning for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. She doesn’t really like writing bios, but if you would like to know more about her then you can contact her at bintwin @ yahoo.com.
profile