Screenwriting for Novelists

TODAY BY NUMBERS:

Total word count of The Language of the Unheard: 52,008

Number of form rejections for Finding Innisburg: 0 (not sure if this is good or bad)

Number of books you have to read and review for the Seattle Public Library system to be entered to win a Kindle: 3

Number of free book giveaways entered on GoodReads.com: 15


So now for our main topic.  Screenwriting.  Last summer I decided to attempt to write a screenplay.  Although I'm fairly convinced that I will never be a famous screenwriter (Hollywood has too many politics and rules and cliques.  I prefer good old-fashioned publishing), writing a screenplay may have been the best thing I ever did for my writing abilities.

Screenwriting in much, much different than novel writing.  I didn't even write an original screenplay, I just adapted one of my favorite novels, Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery.  Screenplays are the epitome of SHOW don't TELL.  In a screenplay you can't even write a phrase like "Tom, Joe's brother, enters the room."  Unless Tom is going to be wearing a sign around his neck that says "Joe's brother" you can't put it in the screenplay.  You have to find a way to work it into the dialogue.  This is tricky, let me tell you.

Descriptions of locations have to be kept short and sweet also.  In screenwriting, one page of properly formatted text = one minute of screen time (approximately).  So if a scene is going to be shown for three seconds before the characters start talking, you have to sum up the scene in only a line or two.  No long-winded pages of purple prose here.  The trick is to choose one or two details that "sum up" the scene.  Instead of saying "The farmhouse is old and blue.  There is a flower bed in front but the flowers are dead and brown.  The fence running behind the house is falling down and the barbed wire is rusty.  The grass is long, clearly no animals have grazed here in a while," you cut it down to the essentials: "The paint on the farmhouse is peeling and the rusty barbed wire is sagging into the overgrown grass."

In screenwriting, the specific details (the color of the house, or exactly how many plants are in front) are pointless to put in, because the director is not going to follow your directions that closely.  What you want is to make a point about WHAT KIND of farmhouse this is, and let the director follow through with the details.

In novel writing, the same principle can be applied, not because a director is going to come in and change it, but because leaving some details up to your readers imagination is crucial.  Unless this is a classic Martian farmhouse, a reader will be able to fill in the scene without you spelling out every detail.  Pick a few things that sum up the feel of the scene and leave the rest out.  Over describing can pull a reader out of the scene, while the right choice of details can make them feel like they're right there with you.  Of course, if they were to draw what they pictured the farmhouse looking like, it might not be how you pictured it at all, but that's okay.  When a book is read, the reader brings his or her own experiences to the table and views the story against the backdrop of his or her life. 

So if you've ever been curious about writing a screenplay, even if you have no intention of selling it, I would absolutely recommend it.  Screenplays are short and sweet.  At 90-120 sparsely-filled pages, they are much faster to write than a novel, and you just might learn a thing or two about writing in the process.  I would highly recommend the book How Not to Write a Screenplay by Denny Martin Flinn for anyone thinking of undertaking this project.  The book covers formatting, plotting and everything else you need to know.  Also, every April the NaNoWriMo people have a screenwriting month called Script Frenzy, in which screenwriters attempt to write 100 pages of a screenplay in a month.

Happy Noveling!

P.S. If any of you noveling folks are on GoodReads.com, you should friend me!  My user name is Annakaris

On libraries, planning and psyching myself out

Word count on The Language of the Unheard: 51,012

Form Rejections on Finding Innisburg: 1 (so far.  Although it's almost 9 PM in NYC so that's probably it for tonight.

Super nice emails from the Agency Gatekeeper: 1

Volunteer Hours at Harborview Medical Center: 3

Holds placed at the library: 3

So about a year ago, I went on a library borrowing spree, checked out a TON of books, and then couldn't get myself over to the library to return them until they were...pretty late.  So I've had about 40 dollars in late fees that I have been putting off paying, and as a result, I have been buying books instead of borrowing them from the library.  Finally I realized that didn't make any financial sense, and I really wanted to read some new books (not ones I could find for cheap at the used bookstore next door), so I am going to go into the library tomorrow and pay my fees.  And from now on, I'm going to be good and return my books on time.  And I placed three holds on books from my GoodReads "to read" list.

I'm mulling over ideas for my next book(s).  For NaNoWriMo, I think I'm going to attempt my first fantasy novel but between now and then, I'm going to try to outline another book to write after the fantasy novel is finished.  The problem is, I have about four ideas and I can't decide which one I want to do.  So that's where you come in.  Here are the four choices, so leave me a comment and tell me which one you think you'd most like to read.

A.  A paranormal thriller about a little boy sucked into a creepy wormhole by an evil child, and his sister's quest to get him back.

B.  A historical fiction novel about a female pirate.  NOT a romance novel, more action-adventure.  Set in the golden age of piracy (1700's-ish)

C.  A mystery novel about a woman who was given a necklace many years earlier by Elvis, and discovers that it holds the secret to a series of murders.

D. A journalist goes undercover as a prostitute and gets mixed up with the mob/a gang and has to fight for her life and the life of her young child.

So anyway, tell me what you think!

I've been reading a lot of blogs and writing sites lately and I have to keep remembering not to get too caught up in trends.  It's not so much that I want to write books that are trendy, that's never really been  desire of mine, but when I have an idea for a book, and then I read something that says that books like that are "out" I get freaked out.  For example, my fantasy novel that I'm planning for NaNoWriMo, is technically a "portal fantasy" and apparently portal fantasy is not cool anymore.  But I am reminding myself to write what I love and not worry about it.

Inspiration strikes again!

OK, so when I was in school we were taught that all good essays had a theme sentence which summed up the rest of the essay. So here goes. In this blog post I will tell you about the new title I came up with for my book, one of my favorite websites for writers, and for a new contest I really want to enter.

First off, the title I came up with for my "zombie" novel is "The Language of the Unheard." It's a little long since studies show that most bestsellers are three words or less, but some of those words in the middle are nice and short so they almost don't count. Its perfect in so many ways, some of which I didn't even realize until after I picked it. It's from a Martin Luther King Jr. quote which says "A riot is the language of the unheard," and since my novel is partially about civil rights for zombies and about taking a stand for those who can't take a stand for themselves and about not judging someone until you've gotten to know them, it's perfect for that; not preachy, but it makes sense. But on the other level, which I didn't realize until later, its prefect because the "zombies" in my book are deaf-mutes so they are literally the unheard as well. So tell me, what do you think?

Now for one of my favorite websites. It is the Lulu Titlescorer. It is basically a computer program which determines if any title is going to be a bestseller. Of course, that is not an exact science and has a lot more to do with you writing abilities, but it was put together by a team of statisticians who based it off of fifty years worth of bestsellers and and is proven to be about 40 percent more accurate than just randomly guessing. I have found it very helpful when I have several titles that I can't decide between and if you play around with it long enough, you can kind of figure out what types of things make for good titles. And, if you're curious, my title above has a 26 percent chance of being a bestseller if I consider the title figuratively and a 10 percent chance if I take it literally. But for both Finding Innisburg and North to the Klondike, I used it to select which title I wanted to use. I'm going to ignore the results for this one, however, because it's too perfect.

Now for the contest. I had heard of the Three Day Novel Contest before but I ran across it again and I got to thinking how fun it would be. Usually I'm not a fan of entering contests with a fifty dollar entry fee, but I'm seriously considering this. A novel in three days. Sounds like a seriously crazy challenge and I love seriously crazy challenges. Especially when they involve writing! Also on a side note, I am a firm NaNoWriMo believer. I would never, ever be where I am today without that. I would still be three chapters into a daunting unfinished novel and instead, I have written four over the last three years. So anyway, I was on a writing website and this guy, whoever he was, went off on this tangent about how it takes at least two years to write a novel and "those write-a-novel-in-thirty-days programs are just scams and they are the equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes. No one ever wrote a novel in thirty days, at least one that got published anyway." I was soooo mad. I looked for a way to contact the guy but there wasn't an option on his site and I almost wanted to smash my computer. If it had been a book I had bought I would have burned it. He was sooo wrong and it pissed me off. Just to point out that several novels have been published out of NaNoWriMo including Sara Gruen's "Water for Elephants" which was a New York Times Bestseller and is being made into a movie as we speak. But I was very angry that he would run NaNoWriMo into the dirt like that.

Anyway, in retaliation, here is my defence for NaNoWriMo (yes, I realize this was not in my theme sentence but I'm just annoyed again at that website so I need to vent). Many, many people in the world want to write a novel, or have started to write a novel. In fact, if you took a random poll, I am willing to bet that over half of people would agree that they have a good idea for a novel that they just haven't gotten around to writing. Part of the problem for this is that they think that writing a novel A. takes years and years to write even a rough draft of B. is something you can't do while you are working, raising kids, in school or just generally normal. They think that you have to take several bottles of scotch, rent an attic room somewhere, and not come out for twenty years while you pound out your masterpiece. But in reality, with only a one or two hours a day you can pound out a rough draft of a novel in a month or so. Is it going to be good right then? No. It's going to suck. But your rough draft is always going to suck even if you spend thirty years on it. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if you spent thirty years on it its going to suck even more because the flow and the pacing will be totally off since you are now thirty years distant from the first part of your story by the time you're done.

So NaNoWriMo liberates people to write, to get their ideas down without worrying about making them perfect the first time. Of course if you want to edit it until its ready to sell, then that will probably take you a year or more, but so many people never get past the first page and NaNoWriMo does something about that. I think one of the problems people have is they think, and rightly so, that becoming a good writer takes some practice. If you've never written anything in your life, you're probably not going to be much of a writer. But you're never going to be much of a writer if you don't start somewhere. And NaNoWriMo is often that somewhere. I love it, I wrote my first novel for NaNo and it was utterly terrible but it got me on the path that I am today. Writing a novel is no longer an intimidating idea for me, something I'm going to do when I retire or when I win the lottery and can move to a cabin in Alaska. It's something I can do here, now, in a month or two. So while it may not work for everyone, it certainly works for some people so don't knock it. It is not a scam by any stretch of the imagination.


Alright, I'm done ranting.

Many apologies

So I owe everyone my sincerest apologies for the huge space of time between posts. And now, an update. I finished editing Finding Innisburg and sent it off to a few friends and family for critique. Mostly the feedback has been positive. I was planning for a while to do Script Frenzy (which, for those of you who don't know, is NaNoWriMo's sister program in April for screenwriters) but then a lot of stuff went down at the beginning of the month and I didn't think I'd have time to do it, so I dropped out. But then on the 16th I got laid off from my job so I have loads of free time now. So I decided to join up at the last minute and I just hit 100 pages (the goal for Script Frenzy) yesterday! It took me five days. I pretty much worked on it about eight hours a day. But it's still not done so I need to wrap that up, hopefully by the end of the month.  I'm adapting the L.M. Montgomery novel, Rilla of Ingleside and I think its coming along pretty good, although it will almost undoubtadly be over my maximum page count of 120 pages so I'll need to go back and cut some stuff at the end. But thats pretty what I've been up to! I hope to keep you all posted on a much more regular  basis from now on!

Down to the wire...

There are exactly 3 days and 2 hours left in NaNoWriMo, and my current word count is 43,625 which leaves me with 6,375 words left to write in that time.  Last time I did NaNo, in 2008, I hit 75,000 words and finished my story by the end of the month and this time I'm pushing the limit of just completeing it.  But last time I also didn't have a boyfriend and now I live with mine so that takes up some of my novel writing time.  But also I've just been lazy.  No real excuse.  But I'm planning to hit 46,000 by the end of the night tonight so then I'll just have that last four thousand to do over the next three days.  Shouldn't be too hard.  Then the hard part will be forcing myself to finish the story, since it won't be over by 50,000 words, especially since my main female character just went and got herself bit by a poisonous snake in the middle of the Mexican jungle.  Which was totally NOT scripted, I'd like to point out.  A bit of improv on her part.

Alright, I'm off to put some apple turnovers in the oven and then crank out another thousand or so words before they are done, hopefully!

Happy noveling!

Novel Update

So after writing that last entry, I decided to be brave and take a look at my stats on the NaNo website, which I knew wouldn't be good since I have pretty much ignored my novel for almost a week.  Fortunatly I found that I was only about two thousand words behind schedule so I set to work to catch up.  As it stands now, I've written a total of 38,769 words, 2428 from today which puts me barelly back on schedule.  So I'm going to try to break 40,000 words before Aaron gets home from work to put myself ahead again.  Then tomorrow I'm off too, so that will leave me lots of time to get close to wrapping this thing up!

Excerpt from Finding Innisburg

So I'm going to do something I have never done before: share a portion of my writing before the entire story is complete.  The following except is the first couple of pages of Finding Innisburg, my NaNo novel this year.  I'm working on leading into my books with something exciting, so tell me if this gets you hooked for more, or if you are bored before you get halfway through.

                The first thought in my mind as I floated slowly to earth, was, “Why are there manicured lawns in the middle of the Guatemalan rain forest?”  The second, was “How on earth am I going to get back out?”   I looked up at the parachute above me, floating serenely on air and carrying me down to the ground.  As the patch of fenced land I had seen several times from the helicopter and then from the airplane that brought me here today approached, I saw that I was right about the manicured lawns.  It was not a government test site as some had suggested, and I was not being shot down.  I saw buildings below and soon I could make out cars on the street and what appeared to be a park.  If I had not known better, I would have thought that I was jumping into a classic American town.  I aimed my parachute for a large parking lot, and as the ground rapidly drew nearer, I suddenly realized that many people were standing around on the sidewalks, looking up.

                I barely had time to register that they were not dressed like indigenous Guatemalans before I had to pull my feet up and I scraped across the bumpy gravel in my jump suit before coming to a halt.  I stood up, looked around me like a spaceman on a distant planet, and began to unzip my flight suit to reveal my street clothes.  Just then I saw someone approaching cautiously from across the street.  He was probably in his 60’s wearing a thin tie and a sport coat.  Pinned on his jacket was a silver star and he was carrying a baton.  A couple of other men were behind him.

                “Estoy un amigo!” I called to him, although he didn’t look like he was a native Guatemalan.

                “Sir! Put your hands up and turn around,” he yelled to me, and I could hear fear in his voice. Surprised that he could speak English, I slowly stepped both feet out of the full body flight suit, leaving the empty shell on the ground.  Then I put my hands on my head and slowly turned around.  As I did so, I realized that I was in the parking lot of a drive up movie theater and the screen was now in front of me.  Posters announced the newest movies showing which were “From Here to Eternity” and “Shane.”  I had seen Shane once.  With my grandfather, when I was a kid. My grandfather loved old westerns.

                “Wow,” I thought, “This place must not be used much.”  Although the posters looked like they hadn’t been up very long.

                Just then I felt the cold weight of the handcuffs as they latched onto my wrists.  I didn’t resist, not knowing what these people were doing here or who they thought I was.  When I was turned around, I could see that the star pinned to the mans shirt was engraved, “Chief, Innisburg Municipal Police Force.” 

                “Who do you think you’re fooling, parachuting in like this?”  He sounded mad, and was clearly more confident now that I was in handcuffs, although his companions still hung back nervously. “Just because we’re a small town doesn’t mean were an easy target for you Communist invasion!”

                “Communist!?” I exclaimed, almost laughing to think what my dad would think of me being mistaken for a communist. “I’m not a Communist!  I’m just a photo journalist and I wanted to know what you guys were doing down here!”

                “A likely story,” huffed the chief in disbelief, “Come on, boys!” he called to the men behind him, “let’s get him down to the jail!”

                He grabbed the chain connecting my wrists and led me towards the street.  I twisted around, trying to get my bearings.

                “Hey, don’t try any fancy stuff,” he said, giving me a small tug. “I may be a small town chief but that just means I’ll have nothing better to do than to hunt you down should you try to skip town.”

                “You’re awfully touchy about this being a small town,” I said with a small grin.

                “Now don’t you be impudent with me, son,” he growled, shoving me roughly toward the sidewalk.  When we got there, there were three or four men, a couple of them carrying sticks or other crude clubs.  They nervously took in my leather jacket, jeans and Converse shoes. 

                “He doesn’t look like a Commie, Al,” said one of them, addressing the police chief.

                “Why else would he come falling out of the sky? He’s got a fancy looking camera and this weird communication device,” said Al, holding up my iPhone, which must have fallen out my pocket. 

                “No, look, that’s…” I began.

                “Shut it, boy,”  said, Al.  “Come on, let’s get him down to the jail and I’ll phone the authorities.  They’ll want to hear about this.”

                “Look, my name is Jonathan Carrington,” I said, not really wanting to spend the night in jail.  There were too many questions that I needed answers to about this place.

                “Yeah, sure it is,” said one of the men behind me, sarcastically.

                I said nothing.  I didn’t know why on earth they would assume I was Communist, but I decided to figure out a way to convince them otherwise before I said something that would get me into trouble.  Besides, there was too much about this town that was strange, and I wanted the chance to look around.  We headed down the sidewalk and turned at the next street.  The streets of the town were quiet but as we passed the park, a car turned the corner and drove slowly past us.  I immediately recognized it as a 1950 Pontiac Chieftain, a car I had often admired in classic car magazines but had never seen in real life.

                “Wow! Sweet ride!” I exclaimed in spite of myself.  One of the men behind me, who was a bit younger than the rest, said,

“Yeah Doug just got that last year.”  He seemed about to say more but his voice trailed off and there was an awkward silence.  Down the street I saw a couple of girls and as they approached, they quickly crossed the street at the sight of me being lead down the sidewalk with a posse of men surrounding me.  The girls were very cute but they looked like they were going to a costume party or something, with skirts that hung just below their knees and knitted button up sweaters on.  As they got closer I noticed that they both carried books under their arms and I figured that it must be fifties day at school or something.  They stared and gigged as they passed, and I threw a wink their direction, which only incited more laughs. 

                Within minutes we had arrived at our destination and the chief opened the door of the police station.  There was a desk with a few papers on it, but it was the phone that caught my attention.  It was tall and black with a separate piece hooked on the side for listening. 

                “What’s with all the antiques around here?” I asked, finally putting my finger on the strangeness that had surrounded me, “Did I go through a time warp and end up in Mayberry?”

                “Come on,” was all the chief said.  He pushed me towards the back where I could see two cells with one wall made of bars and a large door which he unlocked.  He unlocked my handcuffs and I rubbed my wrists.

                “Give me your backpack,” he said.

                “Oh come on,” I said, not wanting to give up the only possessions I had with me. “This is ridiculous.  My name is Jonathan Carrington and I’m from Arizona.  In the US,” I added after a pause, nearly forgetting that I was still in the jungles of Guatemala.”

                “Give me the backpack.  If you’re telling the truth, then you have nothing to fear,” he said, in a way that told me he was sure I was lying.

                I sighed, slipping out of the backpack.  I had not known what to expect when I jumped out of the airplane only a few short minutes earlier, but this was not it. The police chief closed the cell door behind me and walked back into the station, closing another door so I could no longer see or hear him. 

NaNo and other writing projects update!

So I'd been getting a bit discouraged lately by my novel, not because it's bad, because I don't think it's that bad, not because my word count is low, which it isn't, but because I'm not sure I have enough story left.  Although 50,000 words is the requirement for NaNoWriMo, it is a bit low for an acutal novel, and I was hoping that I would have enough story to fill out 80,000 or more words.  As it stands, I think this book will end up around 60,000.  So I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to write a book of the length that I wanted, but I was doing some research online today and it looks like mystery novels, which mine could be considered, usually fall more in the range of 60,000 to 80,000, which is much more attainable to me at this point.  So I feel a little better, and I also know that there are parts of my novel which could be fleshed out a bit, although I hate doing that.  I prefer the action to the detail and tend to jump from action to action in my writing.  Mostly because that is the way I like to read; I hate reading boring filler scenes.  If something exciting isn't happening, I usually get bored.

So right now I am at 35,195 words, with plans to add a few thousand more before the day is over.  My characters escaped from jail and are now trying to figure out the next step in their plans.  I still have almost half the month left, so at the rate I'm going, I'll be done in time to spend the rest of the month outlining my next book, which I think will be a sequal to Runaway Train, which I need to finish editing and begin submitting to agents.

So my current projects or soon-to-be projects are:

1. Runaway Train.  Possibly young adult survival adventure romance which stands at 40,277 words and needs some more editing and adding before it is ready to submit to agents.

2. Finding Innisburg.  Currently at 35,195 words, needs to be finished, edited and submitted to agents.                                                                                                                                                                       
 3. As yet unnamed short story.  Probably will be an Old West rendition of Much Ado about Nothing, with no comic spoofiness to it and delving deeply into the characters of the original Shakespeare.

4. As yet unnamed sequals to Runaway Train.  Before I started, I planned a whole trilogy so I have rough outlines for two more books.

5. Unnamed screenplay.  Probably about a girl who embezzles a bunch of money from her work with no forethought and runs away to Guatemala just because she felt impulsive.  Will be writing that for Script Frenzy in April.

So that's what I'll be working on for probably another year or so.  Hows your life?

2:56AM Update

Yes, I'm still awake.  Just hit 26,000 words and starting to feel a little tired.  But at least I am way out in front on my word count, over 6,000 words higher than where I need to be to be on track.  So that is a nice feeling. 

Happy Noveling!

2:05AM Update!

Well, as you can see from the title, it's 2:05AM and I just passed the 25,000 word mark! Halfway there and it feels great! The NaNo website has these cool stats for number people like me, so according to mine, I have to write 1389 words per day to finish on time, and on average I've written 2085 words per day and at that rate I will finish on November 23.  That's a whole week ahead! This is the first time that I've been scheduled to finish earlier than November 25.  Two years ago I hit 75,000 words and finished my novel on November 25, so the goal is to beat that this year. 

Well, more stretching exercises for me and then on to 26,000!

1:10 AM update!

Not that anyone probably cares, but I promised updates, so here they are.  It's 1:10 AM. I got home from Aaron's store about quarter to midnight, stopped at the store to pick up some novel food in the form of Pringles, 5-Hour Energy, G2 Gatorade, Cherry Dr. Pepper and Red Vines, and then got to work on the novel.  So as it stands now, I'm at 24,084 words and going to push on towards 25,000 here in a minute after I do some stretching and breathing exercises to keep me from being too sore tomorrow.  I'm feeling good, the novel is coming well, I'm right in the midst of the suspense of my novel and the story is so creepy that I'm getting scared just writing it. 

Onward to 25,000!

Script Frenzy and All Nighters

A quick blog entry, and then I'm going to work on my novel.  For reals.

Two things I wanted to share with you, dear readers.  The first is that I am planning on staying up all night to work on my novel/do other things unrelated to working on my novel.  Aaron has inventory at work tonight; he left about two hours ago and won't be home until 6 or 7 AM probably.  So being the supportive girlfriend that I am, I'm going to attempt to stay up for as much of that as I can, puttering away on my trusty laptop, so that I can sleep in with him tomorrow.  Not that sleeping in is usually a problem for me.  So as I embark on my own Night of Writing Dangerously, my word count stands at 22,660 and at bare minimum, I would like to hit the halfway point of 25,000.

The second thing I wanted to tell you about is that I am seriously considering doing Script Frenzy in April.  For those of you who do not know what this is, it is a sister operation of sorts of NaNoWriMo and is for writing screenplays, plays, TV scripts etc.  I have never participated in Script Frenzy but I've recently become intriegued by the idea of writing a screenplay.  I have a couple of ideas that wouldn't work great in a novel but I think would make a great movie.  So I'm bouncing that idea around in my head.  We'll see.

Well, Aaron just called and he forgot something here that he needs for inventory, so I'm going to run that down to him.  Then I'll start on the nightly word count when I get home.

Writing as a career?

For about two years now, I have had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I dropped out of college at 20 because I didn’t want to take out student loans if I didn’t know what I was going to use my degree for. Since then, I have been working at Blockbuster trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. My parents are getting anxious.

Well last night, the answer seemed to hit me. Ever since I was a very small child, I wanted to be an author. It wasn’t until I was a teenager and realized that being an author is not a sure source of income, that I tried to choose a different career path. Well last night I decided that I should just go for it. I’m 22 years old, I have quite a bit of life ahead of me before I have to become responsible, so if I want to become a published author, I should just try now. So I gave myself a deadline of three years, which puts me at 25. If, by my 25th birthday, I have still not made any headway towards becoming a full-time writer, then I will put my writing aside and find something responsible to do.

In the meantime, however, this is the plan. Write on my blog on a much more regular basis. If you guys enjoy reading my blog, I’d very much appreciate it if you would share it with your family and friends. This way I can establish a readership base. Second on the plan is to write at least two novels a year, revise them and seriously start querying agents. Thirdly, I will write some short stories and attempt to win contests with them and get them published to get some credentials under my belt.

On the NaNoing side of things, I am at 14,549 words!

Wish me luck!

And so it begins

Well, NaNoWriMo has officially begun.  I managed to force myself to stay up until midnight last night, and when it finally rolled around, I cheered quietly to myself and pounded out about two hundred words before passing out at about 12:20.  Today between my bus rides to and from work and my lunch break I'm at 1,505 words, nearly to my daily quota so another half hour before bed should put me up to about 2000 words.  The story seems to be working out ok, my main character is already beginning to take over the story in a good way, and I discovered that 5 Hour Energy drinks, when added to G2 low calorie Gatorade, taste wonderful, give me energy and don't make me hyper/jittery.  I felt great all day even on 5 hours of sleep and I think they may end up being a November staple.  Unlike coffee or soda or most other energy drinks, I didn't feel like I was going insane, I could focus on work instead of having my brain running a million miles an hour in six different directions, and so far no crash.  Probably a combination of the electrolytes in the Gatorade, the low sugar content and the hydration from drinking a reasonably healthy form of liquid. So all in all, a good start to NaNo.

Oh, and yesterday I happen to glance at my horoscope in a magazine.  Now I'm not particularly into that whole thing, but I have to say I was pretty happy when I saw that it said, "A creative venture of yours will be successful."  That's got to be a good omen for November.

Happy noveling!

The Final Countdown!

Well it is officially one week until NaNoWriMo starts! I am more than ready for it to begin and already have figured out where I am going to be at midnight on Halloween. I'll be at the local pizza place, which is open late, with my laptop and a slice of pizza and at the stroke of midnight I will furiously type out the first 1,667 words (the daily quota for NaNoWriMo) before bed. Now I'll probably have to work the following morning at nine o'clock or so, so I may not be the happiest camper in the world, but it's all worth it in pursuit of literary mediocrity.

On a somewhat side note, I came up with an idea for a fabulous short story which I will probably write after NaNo. Now I am taking a sort of risk, I suppose, by putting my idea out here, so NO TOUCHY TOUCHY! HANDS OFF MY IDEA!

Anyway, now that that official admonition has been issued, the idea is to write an Old West rendition of the Shakespeare play Much Ado about Nothing. It's my favorite of all of his plays and I feel it could be perfectly set on a cattle ranch in Montana. The only thing I have to figure out is if I can actually get it published/enter it in contests, or if it is plagiarism since it's a rendition of a separate work. I know Shakespeare is public property or whatever the legal terms is, but since I didn't come up with the idea myself, is it still ok? I think it is, since books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies basically do the same thing. But I'll have to look into that some more. Either way, it would be fun to write.

NOTE: After doing a big more research on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it appears that that book has Jane Austin credited as co-author. I wonder if that makes it ok?

Short Stories

So when I was a kid I always always wanted to be a writer. I loved writing short stories and hated writing anything longer than that. From before I could even write, I would dictate stories to my mom (usually about a girl named Rose who incidentally had the exact same things happen to her as happened to me, only with way cooler outcomes. Like instead of simply stubbing her toe falling off the swing, she would break her arm. Etc.) Then when I was about nineteen I suddenly had an urge to write a real novel, "The Great American Novel" in fact, so I sat down with my laptop and no outline whatsoever and wrote the first few chapters of what would later become Runaway Train. (Sort of. My computer crashed and I lost those first few chapters and then later started over and rewrote them with a few details changed). Then I discovered NaNo and wrote my first NaNo novel in 2008 which was pretty much a load of crap with a horribly Mary Sue main character and no conflict whatsoever. Then I rewrote Runaway Train as I mentioned above in June of this year and now I'm going into NaNo prepared for a third novel.

So all in all, it's been several years since I've written anything other than journal and blog entries, novels, and an occasional poem. I used to really enjoy short stories because they can be so intense, so real. Also, one technique I used to use all the time when I was a kid, which I would still love to really pull off successfully, is to write a short story with no names. Only a couple of characters, maybe as few as two, and not name any of them. I did it a couple of times as a teenager with varying degrees of success.

So anyway, I've had a couple of novel ideas that would probably either need to be a short story, or would need some serious subplots to really pull off as a novel, so I was thinking about trying my hand at some short stories after NaNo. By that point, I'll have two hopefully halfway decent novels, which I will be revising, editing and hopefully querying some agents about, so getting some short stories under my belt might be good. Also, I've heard that having some published work is useful when querying agents which I hope to be doing by next summer or so, and I currently have none (well, except for a poem which I published in the Highlights for Children's reader section when I was 12).

So I found a few short story contests with no entry fees that have deadlines in the late winter, early spring, so I think I'm going to write a few short stories after NaNo. Wish me luck!

Maps, Trees and other projects

So a good chunk of the novel I will be writing in November takes place in the small, isolated town of Innisburg, so naturally I felt that I should make a map of the town to ensure that I won't confuse myself come November. And of course, being a NaNoer, I was not content to simply sketch one up on a piece of notebook paper. So I got a big piece of foam poster board stuff and some Sharpies and drew up a map of the whole town.

And then, of course, there were two sides to the board so I had to come up with something to decorate the other side. So since my town of fifty has been living in isolation for three generations, they have a complicated family tree, and I was determined that no one should be married to siblings or first cousins, so that made it a little bit more complicated. But with some colorful Sharpies to keep it from being too confusing, I managed to get the whole family tree mapped out on the other side.

It was fun and challenging but it's done now, so I'm all ready for November to start!

Biding my time til November...

So I was re-checking out the book that Chris Baty (founder of NaNoWriMo and God to all insane novelists) wrote called "No Plot, No Problem, and I remembered all the pitfalls that over planning can cause in the noveling process. I began to get worried that I had already overplanned for my NaNo novel (I am a very paranoid novelist) and there is still a lot of time left before November. I knew that if I didn't find another project for myself to work on until then, that I would very likely over plan.

So I decided to go back and begin the editing process on the book I wrote in June/July of this year. It's called Runaway Train and it's a sort of post-apocalyptic romance story. I hadn't looked at it at all since I wrote it and so I was a bit nervous to open it up and see if there was anything salvagable among it. The first three pages or so were total BS and I cut them immediatly, and even after that the beginning is going to need a bit of work to keep it from dragging, but over all it was suprisingly well written. I found myself getting pulled into the story almost as if I hadn't written it, and laughing at a few funny things that I had forgotten I had written. It is refreshing to work on a new project, and I'm excited both for Runaway Train and the NaNo novel which is currently called Finding Innisburg. It seems I do have some writing talent after all and I'm stoked to edit Runaway Train and make the whole thing as great as some of it is already.

So that is my project between now and November.

Also, I officially got Halloween night off of work so that I can begin noveling right at midnight. Although there is a good chance I'll have to work in the morning at like 9 or some other unholy hour. Somewhere behind my eyes my brain is contemplating pulling an all-nighter to novel, attempting to pull ahead of the pack by a few thousand right off the bat, but at 22 I'm not as young as I once was, so we'll see.

Outline complete!

So many apologies for the lack of blog posts lately. I have no excuse other than that I've just been doing other things.

So I finished my outline for NaNoWriMo. It's quite exciting because I had experienced some moments of doubt as I wasn't sure I was going to be able to figure out the novel. But I've got a plot, a sub-plot and I'm working on planning out some more fun, well-rounded characters. Since that's mostly what I've been working on, I thought I'd fill you in on the details of how I plan a novel.

1. It starts with an idea. One beautiful, shining nugget of an idea. It will pop into my head randomly and I will immediately get very excited and start running around like a chicken with it's head cut off.

2. As soon as I get the idea, more ideas start to come. I start to see some characters in my head that could work, and I begin to feel a tone for the book coming on. At this point I am euphoric and nothing could ever bring me down.

3. Now I decide to write. This could be the same day that I get the idea, or months or even years later. I'll begin by writing a short synopsis of the idea, sort of summing up the main points. Then I slowly begin to tease out the details.

4. I do a bullet list of an outline, listing points that I want to make, scenes that I want to include and characters that I want to introduce. Then I put the list more or less in chronological order. This is where the hard part comes in. Once I have part of my idea down, I begin to realize that there are huge holes or gaps in the story, where the characters jump from J to P without stopping at K, L, M, N or O first. This is frustrating because often I have no idea what these letters are going to be. But often I find that if I just let my brain work over these problems during my day to day activities, as long as I keep them in the back of my mind, the solutions usually slowly come to me, one day at a time.

5. This is also an exciting time because great, perfect ideas will come to and eventually the book really seems to be coming together. Now I take my rough bullet list and turn it into an actual, beautiful outline, with Roman numerals and everything. I fill the list in and put things where they go. It is usually at this point that I find my plot holes, and realize (in the case of this novel) that one character can not be hero, villain, and be killed, so I will need a few more characters.

6. Once the outline is done, I go back through all my notes and miscellaneous questions and comments to myself and make sure that I haven't forgotten anything that I wanted to include.

7. At this point I usually begin writing the book itself, but in the case of this particular novel, I still have over 17 days until NaNo starts so now I'll have to content myself with possibly picking up a few more subplots, and creating some more characters.

So it's quite a relief to have the outline done, because now I know that the book can be pulled off, it's like planning a trip for months and finally getting your vacation approved at work, making your hotel reservations and booking the flight. It's all coming together now and I think it's really doable. I have my road map and now I'm ready for the trip to begin!

Bring it on, November!

(Comic used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at http://www.inkygirl.com)

NaNoWriMo 2010

So it's official. The NaNo website has been cleared of all past years and relaunched. I have logged back in to my friendly AnnaKaris account which has happily wasted my precious time during November. I have trolled the forums and made a few posts of my own. I have talked my boyfriend's ear off about my novel, and I have come up with a sketchy, Swiss-cheese-resembling outline for my book. NaNo is officially only 23 days, 14 hours, 22 minutes and 9 seconds from beginning. (And yes, I have had a countdown on my desktop for about a month now.)

So as far as my noveling (I just ran spell check and they want me to change noveling to "novelising." Hmmm. I think I'm going to stick with noveling) plot goes, I have A. I have Z. I probably have about B through G or so, and then J, N, P, and X along the way, and now I have 23 days to find the other letters and get them worked in.

I did some research yesterday online and came up with some good specifics for my plot, mostly based around conspiracy theories and actual government cover ups of the 1950's. NaNoWriMo, here I come!

Also, on a side note, I don't think I've mentioned it but with in the NaNo world, there are regions. Each region can be as small as Seattle or as big as Austria and Germany. Either way, the regions compete for the most combined word count from all members of the region. This year Seattle will be defending their fifth title for highest word count, so we're pretty stoked and planning on totally nailing it this year!