Writers in the Storm

by Ellen Buikema

National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo, is an organization that promotes creative writing worldwide via annual writing challenges where participants attempt to write fifty thousand words in a month. I pondered whether or not to attempt their challenge for several years and finally opted to give it a try in 2020, the unhappy year many wish wasn’t. With a plethora of time available due to the curtailing of social activities during the pandemic, I took the NaNo plunge.

NaNoWriMo changed the way I write. Below is my story of moving from Pantser to Plantser.

Timing is everything.

We live in a beautiful area by the Sea of Cortez that attracts tourists from all over the world. This means lots and lots of noise. Fresh air therapy is good for minimizing exposure to COVID-19, so we throw open the windows to keep the breeze passing through our living space as often as possible. Unfortunately, the joyous sound of happy travelers . . . travels.

When we lived in a quieter area I could write any time. If writer’s block ever reared its ugliness, I’d step away from the laptop and find someplace out of the way to get horizontal and let my mind go blank. Sometimes Bailey, our lovable black lab, would lie down next to me to lend his special brand of calm and help me think. A few minutes of mind-clearing (sweeping out the panicked thought of not being able to think) and I’d be ready to continue the story.

Now that we live in the land of loud, it’s become vitally important to discover the quietest times of day. That ended up being from 3 AM to around 1 PM. Out of necessity I became a morning writer, and my writing schedule is between 8 AM and 1 PM.

There is no magical time for writing, except what works best for you.

The goal of 50,000 words in one short month scared the bejesus out of me. Prior to NaNoWriMo I rarely wrote more than 1000 words in a day, and I've never written every day of the week. The idea of no writing breaks caused some anxiety too.

I decided to wrap my stubborn streak around me and figure this out for a positive potential outcome. When moving to a new location, I completely unpack and organize one room. When I need a break from staring at disorder, I have a blissfully organized place to gaze at before I attack more of the unpacking. I applied this to the writing word count.

Instead of panicking, which causes brain freeze (not the fun ice cream-induced kind), I set a 1600-2000 word target, with breaks along the way. Those breaks made all the difference for me.

I wrote before and after breakfast, took a break to play solitaire with an old deck of cards, and did my lie down and let-the-mind-go-blank thing until an idea popped in. This worked well even without Bailey who has passed over the Rainbow Bridge.

To outline or not to outline, that is the question.

Being a happy Pantser, I typically don’t do detailed planning. I start with the beginning and end points, and have a basic idea rolling through my mind of how to get from point A to point Z. I suspected that 50,000 words in a month would require more planning than usual.

Here is what helped:

1. To help the Pantser in me become more "plotterly" -- a Plantser of sorts -- I took the month of October to ponder genre, age group, and point of view to use for this experimental novel. 
2. I decided to write a YA fantasy with elements of time travel titled “Crystal Memories.”
3. I wrote a basic outline and chose a location, time, grammatical tense, and basic character traits.
4. These ideas are not included in the word count, which is part of the challenge. Notes are "legal," just not in the count.

My internal editor was not a happy creature. For the first few days, I suffered through an internal war. Eyes drawn like a magnet to flaws, I had to force myself not to re-read and change things. Instead, I made use of the strikeout feature in Microsoft Word. (Here are the shortcuts for this feature if you need them [link], or Ctrl+D will get you right to strikeout.)

I reminded myself repeatedly that NaNoWriMo is not an exercise in perfection. My 50,000+ word novel could end up being a hot mess and still have good bones.

We are all in this together.

I never expected to complete the NaNo goal my first time around. I didn't even know I had it in me. I certainly couldn't have done it alone.

• Several times, joining the groups focused on encouragement and discussion kept me afloat.
• Every day I checked my stats on the NaNoWriMo site.
• During the last week I received a note on the site stating that I might finish my 50,000 words a few days early. To my surprise, I did.

What kept me going:

I wrote the last chapter the day after I hit the 50,000 word count goal. My internal editor awaits the next step.

Do you have a best place and time to write? What are your writing rituals? What methods do you use to help with writer’s block?

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About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents and a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works In Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and Crystal Memories, YA fantasy.

Find her at http://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Top Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Writers are funny about books. We have a love-love relationship with them from our earliest moments. I don’t know if we become students of the written word because we love to read or if we read because we were born to love the written word. All that chicken and egg Zen is well beyond me. All I know is I just flat out love books and every writer I know does too. You might even describe us as “obsessed with the printed word.”

"Book traits" most writers share:

• Every writer I've ever met can talk books for hours and discuss characters in grand detail.
• We have To Be Read piles (TBR for short) that are taller than small children.
• Our favorite authors and characters become our friends.

It takes a lot of love to go through what we must do to yank our stories from our hearts onto the page. And like I said above, most writers are funny about books, especially their own books.

Here are 10 things I know about you and your books, even if we've never met.

1. You read in bed after "lights out" when you were a child.
It might have been a flashlight, or a lantern, or (if you're young enough) the light from your phone. When your person-in-charge confiscated your first light source, you waited 5 minutes before pulling the back-up light from its crafty hidey-hole. If they were on to you and confiscated the back-up, you tilted the pages to try to read by the light from the hall.

2. You have different books for different moods. These are your go-to books when you’re in the grip of overwhelming emotion. You keep reading through that stash of books until the feeling gets a little more manageable. Every writer I know has revisited a favorite series (or two or three) during this pandemic.

3. I know you get uncomfortable when you are "bookless."
If you are stuck somewhere without a book, you will begin reading any words available – shampoo bottles, food labels, billboard signs. Whatever. Books and magazines are preferred, but in a pinch, any words will smooth your soul. (Do you keep a Kindle available and a bag of books in your car trunk like I do?)

4. When a book touches you, it is a safe bet that you will not only remember the details of that story, characters, etc…you will also remember where you were the first time you read it and what you were doing that day.

5. I am certain that if you named 10 best friends from the various periods of your life, at least half of them would be book characters or authors. We laughed and cried with those characters. Those authors reached into our hearts and showed us who we were, or at least who we wanted to become.

6. Piles of free books by your most cherished authors give you that same zing of attraction you felt the first time you saw the boy or girl you crushed on in high school. That feeling of "Ooooooooooooo, everyone go away so I can be with THIS one."

7. When you get the chance to meet your favorite author(s), your tongue gets tied in knots and the idea of speaking to them gives you an extreme physical reaction. I remember the first time I saw Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Janet Evanovich, and James Patterson. On those four occasions, I Could. Not. Move. I could only stare at them with absolute rapt focus while everyone else simply faded away.

8. You have rituals associated with your books.
Whether it’s the way you clean them, sort them, store them or lend them, there is something particular you do with your books. And it makes you feel happy and peaceful when you look at your books after you’ve done it.

(For me, it’s the way I order them and which shelf or room they’re in. My husband knows: don’t be moving my books without asking me first.)

9. On the touchy subject of lending…writers are quite particular about loaning their books.

I know that when someone borrows a treasured book from you and doesn’t return it – or worse, passes it on to someone else without asking you first – your friendship with them changes. You’re probably still their friend, but you’ll either “forget” to loan them books in the future or you'll buy a copy of your beloved book from the used bookstore and loan them that copy. There is an A-List of book-borrowers in your life and you love to have coffee with these people.

10. When a book touches your spirit and transports you to a place you’ve never been, it’s not uncommon for you to read the last page, turn the book over and start at Page 1 to figure out how the author did that.

I could easily find ten more things to share about writers and their reading habits but I want to hear from you. What are your book rituals and quirks? Do any of these habits sound familiar? Share your stories down in the comments!

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About Jenny

By day, Jenny provides corporate communications and LinkedIn advice for professional services firms. By night she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction, and short stories. After 18 years as a corporate trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Facebook at JennyHansenAuthor or at Writers In The Storm.

Top Image by Pexels from Pixabay

by Barbara Linn Probst

The deeper I go into the craft of writing, the more I keep returning to the importance of thinking like a reader. So much of the “advice” seems to be about what we, as writers, ought to be doing. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. But what about the reader’s experience? Does it match what writers think they’re doing? I compare the question to the cook’s experience of preparing a meal and the diner’s experience of eating it. They might be the same, or they might not.

By way of example, let’s consider the reader’s experience of a scene, since scenes are the building blocks of a story.

We’re told that every scene needs a purpose, a source of conflict or tension, and a pivot where something changes, concluding with an upward or downward shift in the protagonist’s journey. Like the beams and girders of a building, these guidelines are structural, architectural, not necessarily experiential.

What I’m calling the experiential level refers to the sense of satisfaction that a reader has when a scene feels meaningful and whole. Without it, a scene might be technically perfect, but flat.

What helps to create that sense of participation and organic coherence?  “Deep POV” is often cited as the key, and it can certainly be useful—although my own view is that it needs to be used strategically, not constantly, and that other “writer tools” are also needed.

Here are some suggestions.

Resonance Between the Beginning and End of the Scene

The way the scene opens and the way it closes need to be related, but that relationship doesn’t have to be as mechanical or obvious as “the protagonist is closer to story goal” or “the protagonist is farther from story goal.” There are many other ways the beginning and ending can be related—and experienced as related, by the reader. For example:

• By echoing: the repetition of an evocative image, object, or phrase – first appearing early in the scene – whose meaning reverberates in a new way at the end.
• By intensifying: the solidification of a longing, foreboding, or hunch that was suggested at the beginning of the scene. This can be the movement from idea to action, or from lesser to greater intensity – that is, from a “quiet” desire, fear, or action to a stronger iteration of the same emotion or behavior.
• By inverting: the reversal of a belief, desire, alliance, or expectation that was dominant at the beginning of the scene. This can be partial, through the arousing of doubt, or total, through a shock such as betrayal or the appearance of new knowledge.
• By undoing: the character’s exit from a setting that provoked regret, humiliation, fear, or another emotion that threw her world off-balance.

Ask yourself: Isolate the first and last paragraphs of a scene. Is it clear that they belong together, like bookends?  If the answer is no, what can I do to create the missing resonance?

Creating a Moment of Peak Intensity

Somewhere in the scene, there needs to be a sentence that captures its specific emotional quality. It’s the moment that grabs the reader, the sentence the reader just can’t forget. Prior sentences lead up to this peak; subsequent sentences show its effects.

It’s the most intense moment in the scene—the reason the scene exists. A moment of choice, change, surprise, possibility, or emotional impact.

Although this peak moment can reflect a new realization, it’s better to avoid words like “realized” and “understood,” since they shift the focus to the mind. In general, the reader’s experience of peak intensity is strengthened by the use of concrete details, rather than by words that name generic emotions.

Ask yourself:  What is the one sentence, without which the scene would lose its emotional power? If you’re not sure, try deleting different sentences and note the effect. If you can’t find that peak sentence, add it. If there seem to be several, you may have over-written the scene; try picking just one.

Use of Supporting Features to Evoke Reader Participation

Story events are given texture, nuance, and depth by passages ofinteriority and exteriority. Interiority means stepping inside the point-of-view character’s mind (through response, reflection, or memory). Exteriority means describing the outer world, usually to create context or mood. The purpose of both techniques is to enhance the narrative events – to help the reader feel why an event matters, and to whom.

But their use can’t be random. Timing (placement in the scene) and duration (length of the passage) must be thoughtfully rendered, or they will jolt the reader out of the flow of empathetic engagement. Thus, the writer must be crystal clear about her intention.

If you’re using interiority, what is your specific purpose right now? Is it to evoke empathy, show conflict or struggle, connect with the past or future?  Why is interiority the best way to accomplish this?

Ask yourself: What would happen if I externalized the moment instead – through an action, gesture, or interaction with the environment (e.g. the character fingering the frayed fabric of the couch, rather than ruminating on how her life seems to be falling apart)? How can I draw the reader into the character’s embodied experience, rather than into her mind?

If you’re using exteriority, why have you selected a specific aspect of the environment to move into the foreground right now (e.g., sound, light, temperature) or given an object a specific quality (e.g., size, color, location)? Is it to evoke a memory or show something about the culture, social dynamics, or power relations among the characters?

Ask yourself: How else, other than through description, can I convey this?  Can I use dialogue or movement instead of descriptive details? How can I pull the reader inside the scene as a participant, rather than keeping her apart as an observer?

Re-opening after the apparent resolution.  Yes, every scene needs a satisfying ending, a clear indication of how the world of the protagonist is different from the way it was at the beginning. But it also needs to unsettle us again, to provoke a new question, suggest further complexity, signal that there’s more to come. A coda that says: Or maybe not. 

Ask yourself: What sentence lets the reader know that the story isn’t over? What sentence makes the reader want to continue to the next scene?

What about you? Do you use one or more of these tools? Can you share an example? Does one of these tools spark a new idea for you in your WIP?

About Barbara

BARBARA LINN PROBST is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, living on an historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her debut novel QUEEN OF THE OWLS (April 2020) is the powerful story of a woman’s search for wholeness, framed around the art and life of iconic American painter Georgia O’Keeffe. QUEEN OF THE OWLS was selected as one of the twenty most anticipated books of the year by Working Mother, a debut novel “too good to ignore” by Bustle, was featured in places like Pop Sugar, Entertainment Weekly, Parade Magazine, and Ms. Magazine. It also won the bronze medal for popular fiction from the Independent Publishers Association, placed first runner-up in general fiction for the Eric Hoffer Award, and was short-listed for the $2500 Grand Prize. Barbara’s second book, THE SOUND BETWEEN THE NOTES, launches in April 2021.

Barbara has a PhD in clinical social work and blogs for several award-winning sites for writers. To learn more about Barbara and her work, please see http://www.barbaralinnprobst.com/