Celebrating a Week of Writing

Celebrating any little victory can be important for writers. I've touched on that before and it's always good to celebrate with a group of writers.  Today I am drinking a toast to my Heart of Denver Romance Writers group and its monthly book in a week challenge. This sort of writing challenge can be done by any group wanting to dedicate a full week to their writing. The Kiss of Death Chapter of RWA also does such a challenge every couple of months.

It's a good practice to fall into and you can even do it on your own, though I like the idea of a group participating.  What purpose does one week of steady writing serve, you might ask? There are five good reasons I always participate when I can:

1. It helps me to be accountable. We set a goal at the beginning of the week and then try to meet it. For some it might be as lofty as writing 10,000 words.  Or it can be as small as 350 words a day.
Either way, there is a goal there, and if you work to achieve it, it furthers your writing. Even if you don't you will probably end up with more words written than you might otherwise have completed.

2. It makes me schedule a time to write. Sometimes days can be so hectic, but if there is a goal set and we want to reach our goals, we need to make the time to get the work done. And setting that goal makes me want to achieve it. And you only achieve it by sitting down and writing.

3. It makes me turn off my inner editor. Sometimes my writing slows down because I get caught up in a few paragraphs, trying to make them perfect before moving on. When you are participating in something like Book in a week (or in NaNoWriMo) there is no time for editing. You simply have to sit down and put the words on paper. Maybe they aren't as graceful as you wanted, but you're moving your story forward and getting something accomplished. The editing can come later.

4. It does good to see how the others are doing. I'll admit I can be very competitive and when I feel good about my 785 words written and I see someone else or a couple of other people double that, well, then the next day I am going to try as hard as possible to match them and their output.  I want to write more!

5. There is a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the week. It feels good to look back and see how much got done, and often I have propelled myself past a knotty part of the story that was perhaps slowing me down. Writing fast can push me through that and suddenly I am on to the next part of the story and moving forward again.

So, even if you don't have a group to work with, try the book in a week challenge. Set a total word goal for yourself for the next week and then see how much you can get done.  And then drink that glass of champagne and celebrate.

Celebrating NaNoWriMo

by Becky Martinez

 For some reason every year for the past five years I have sat down during the month of November and attempted to write a 50-thousand word novel.  It’s all part of the fun of National November Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. For thirty days I plug away at a book or two to see how many words I can possibly write.  Most of those years I’ve actually made it to the 50-thousand threshold.  (See my Writing Corner on Monday for why I love to do it and how those NaNo deadlines can help you to keep the writing process going and how to keep the word count flowing, even past November.

You’ll notice I didn’t celebrate until a week later. That’s because I think I was all written out when I finished last Friday, November 29. (Yes! I got through a day early).

But today I am celebrating that accomplishment. Tomorrow I will pick up the book I wrote and start in on the process of editing. It will take some work, because some of those scenes need to be moved around and some need to be fixed and there is lots of research I need to check.

But as I’ve often heard Nora Roberts and other prolific writers say, you can’t edit what you haven’t written, and a blank page cannot be edited.  That is one of the joys of NaNoWriMo. It frees up the imagination so that you are just writing down whatever pops into your head.

Many times I’ll come back to the words and find out that I had a really good scene going. It just needs some cleaning up. Other times I’ll discover plot twists I might not have known about if I hadn’t allowed my brain and my characters to carry me off in some crazy direction.

So for now I am celebrating the brain-freedom for writing provided by NaNoWriMo. Oh, and also those 50-thousand-plus words!

For December, I am going to celebrate my good fortune in finishing 50-thousand words by helping other writers. Please join me at The Help Desk at Savvy Authors. Along with several other writers and writing teachers I will be donating my time to answering questions and looking through your material. Click on the Workshops and Classes and look for the sessions for Becky Martinez. I'll be there all next week to answer your questions and provide you with help.

Celebrating why we Write

Writing conferences are always stimulating for me and I am a big fan of smaller conferences where the smaller venue gives writers a better chance to talk and to visit with the headline authors who are giving workshops. Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Tony Hillerman Writer's Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a smaller conference with several hundred writers and would be writers in attendance. What a great experience!  I only attended for one day, but it was so jam packed with information, I came home with my head spinning.

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the day was hearing from the "the father of Rambo," David Morrell, but action-packed military thrillers were not on his agenda for that day. He discussed his latest book,  Murder as a Fine Art, which is historical mystery, but still packs plenty of action. As part of that discussion he provided a fine lesson in writing and being a writer. He told us there should be one of three reasons for writing and none of them had anything to do with making money or simply chasing the market place, which so many aspiring writers do.


The three reasons can be very fulfilling to any writer, even if you don't get sold or make millions:

1. Write for yourself. This had to do with having a story you want to tell, something you want to impart to others. He has written plenty of thrillers, but he wanted to try something different so he turned to Victorian England for his latest book. It was a personal choice that spurred him, and he says you as a writer should look for those sort of personal decisions.  Look for what you want to write or experiment with and go for it.

2.  Write to learn something.  If you want to do research on something, or if you want to explore a topic, what better way to do that than to do research and then write about it. He is well known for his well-researched books and just from the way he described the work he put into Murder, it was obvious he wanted to learn something about the period, the people and the setting in Victorian London.  He urged us to look for something we want to know and then to learn about it and write about it.

3.  Write to express a part of yourself. This can be a good way of letting go of the past, or searching for the future or digging deep inside of yourself to say things you might not be able to say in another way. I've always felt that writing can help a person (me) express things I might not otherwise do. Want to tell off a nasty boss? Kill him off in your mystery.  Wish there were things you had said to an old boyfriend? Put them into a romantic scene.  Wish you had been stronger in a certain situation or wish you had just broken down and cried your eyes out?  Let your characters do it in a book. All the emotion can be useful when you're writing a story. 

All three made perfect sense as he discussed how he had started researching his book from one angle, as research on writer Thomas de  Quincey, a friend of Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth who was known for writing Confession of an English Opium Eater.  de Quincey was an influence on writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But the more research he did, the more he found himself going in a different direction until in the end he pulled in de Quincey's daughter as one of his main characters, telling the story from her eyes, using her perspective.

But what struck me was his willingness to stop and talk to everyone and to provide advice to writers of all ages. When I stopped in the book store he was talking writing to a group of young people.  Earlier he had been very willing to discuss with me and a friend why he finds short story writing so difficult, but why he likes to do it. She was expressing a concern about attempting to write a short story and his advice was, "go for it." I'll be writing more on what he had to say about short story writing in a future blog.

In fact I'll be writing more about the entire day.  But at the end of the day the main thing I kept thinking about was Morrell's comments. Write for yourself. Make that your goal and you won't be disappointed if the sales aren't there or if the reviews are bad. Know at the end of the day you've learned something and you've improved and pleased yourself. I went home ready to write!