It's on! NaBalWriMo

Many of you are on board with a NaNoWriMo alternative in which we DON'T push ourselves to the brink of insanity drafting 50K words in a month (kudos to those who do--there's a great site with support and accountability all ready for you).

Rather than call it something negative, like NaNo-No, which I did jokingly in a previous post, I'd love this to be a positive, fun, relaxed, 30-day creativity-enriching experience, so I'm dubbing it:

NaBalWriMo
National Balanced Writers Month
More creativity, less guilt!

If you're up for it, please take a moment to think about places in your life that feel out of balance, and share your list of a few simple things you'd like to try to regain sanity and creative joy this month. We can cheer each other on! I'll go first.

My November goals:

-To be more emotionally present, especially to family
-To have more energy
-To recharge spiritually and emotionally
-To explore deeply some themes that I care about
-To rediscover the joy of creating
-To offer encouragement to other writers
-To maintain momentum with querying

And my "action items"
(to steal from boring corporate training I've sat through):

-Write one page a day of memories or notes or wordplay
-Watch lots of movies
-Read widely and with relish
-Have coffee with a friend
-Do a messy craft with hobbit girl weekly
-Walk the dog 4x week on the hiking trails nearby
-Blog some journal explorations and fun stuff
-Cheer on my NaNoWriMo, NaNoWraMo and NaNoRevMo pals
-Query 10 more agents

Anyone up for designing a badge? Let me know that you did and I'll send folks over to copy it and display with pride.

What do you think of the concept? Let me know if you're planning to join in NaBalWriMo!

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NaNo-No: Because this ain't the month to disappear

The interwebs are all abuzz with the approach of November, which for many will mean NaNoWriMo: an intense 30 days of drafting something completely new, very fast, with built-in support and accountability. Intense bursts can be a wonderful thing for getting a draft underway, and if you're the sort that can schedule that kind of intense creativity, kudos to you.

There are a few alternate November support/accountability groups forming for those not starting a draft from scratch.

Sara McClung is gathering writers needing an intense burst to wrap up a manuscript in progress. It's called NaNoWraMo. Go check out her site to learn more.

I've heard buzz from many quarters about spending the month revising, or NaNoRevMo. If anyone knows who's spearheading support/accountability for this, let me know in the comments.

For me, it's going to be NaNo-No. This is simply not the time to disappear from my family. Fall never is. My husband has an insane teaching load--165 students this semester, with a grading load that would make you weep. My daughter's teacher called this AM to discuss all the emotional problems hobbit girl is having at school. I can't help but think a lot more Mommy time would do her some good.

It's all about balance. I plan to go on querying my finished book and continue researching and drafting my second. I'll be blogging as I'm able and baking more cookies, building more forts, taking more hikes and playing more board games.

Anyone else saying "no" to NaNo this year? Want to be my buddy? What shall we call ourselves?

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"Writer's block": Wall or desert? (part 2)

We all get stuck at times, find our productivity come to a screeching--or sputtering--halt. In THIS previous post, I discussed one of the causes--hitting walls because we hadn't let our intuition guide the process and had taken the story in the wrong direction.

In the comments on that post, I got the sense that walls are not as common as desert times for making us unproductive. So what is this phenomenon--"desert" writer's block?

Image from weathersavvy.com.

Desert

"The word block suggests you are constipated or stuck, when in truth you are empty."

--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird 178.

"You're blocked because you have nothing to say. Your talent didn't abandon you. If you had something to say, you couldn't stop writing. You can't kill your talent, but you can starve it into a coma through ignorance."

--Robert McKee, Story 73-74

We've all been there--somehow stuck in a place where you're plumb out of ideas. This place feels hot and parched and lifeless--desert-like. Entering a desert usually looks like the following:

- Your characters are faceless mannequins.
- The story setting is a big white box.
- Your characters slump around looking bored.
- The sound loop is your head is chirping crickets, or some really annoying pop song with unintelligible words.
- When you sit down to write, the only word that comes to mind is "waffles."
- You can't blog, tweet or update your Facebook status.
- Your house is exceptionally clean.

Lamott says that you need to accept that these desert times are going to come. In that acceptance, you free yourself to begin filling up again. When the Israelites let the pillar of cloud and fire lead them, God sent them the resources they needed--manna to fell from the sky, water gushed from a rock. The fact was, they couldn't get to the Promised Land on their own--they needed divine intervention. So do we. Call it "the muse," one's "inner light," "intuition," "unconscious mind," "talent" or "the Holy Spirit"--the sources of creativity need freedom and care and feeding.

So how do you allow the empty places to refill? Acceptance, as Lamott says, is a huge piece of it. If you try to push, "Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down it's neck" (Lamott, 182). She suggests writing 300 words a day culling your memories--just rough journaling to keep you loose. Then seek things that feed you--walks, visits with friends, reading lots of great and terrible books, go to museums and historic sites.

McKee's advice is strikingly similar. He suggests research as a way of filling up in empty times: "No matter how talented, the ignorant cannot write. Talent must be stimulated by facts and ideas. Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and its cousin, depression."

Veronica Roth had a great post on this same concept, "Not Writing, or Why Your Brain Is an Ice Cream Maker."

In other news, I just won my very own copy of Lamott's wonderful book from C.A. Marshall. Go check out her fabulous blog!

What things have helped feed you in empty, desert times? What new thing might you try based on Lamott's and McKee's advice?

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Austen fans--giveaway at Read. Write. Repeat.

Lisa Galek, a fellow YA writer, is giving away a copy of the YA historical novel I Was Jane Austen's Best Friend by Cora Harrison over at Read. Write. Repeat. Click HERE to find out more and enter to win.

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"Writer's block": Wall or desert? (part 1)

Every writer has times when s/he can't seem to make forward progress on a project. Writing books everywhere have suggestions about why this is, and how to overcome it.

In my reading, I've seen two common ways to understand low/no productivity: as a wall and as a desert. I'd argue that all creative people will experience BOTH, because the underlying issues are different, even if the end result is the same. For brevity's sake, I'll tackle each in a separate post.

Wall

Sometimes we're happily drafting away, when BANG! we can't move ahead further. Productivity comes to a screeching halt. Hitting a wall usually looks like one of the following:

-a character is in crisis and you can't seem to get him out
-you've given the character something to do and she refuses
-your characters stop speaking to you
-despite your best efforts, the wrong characters keep flirting or fighting or snubbing each other
-you really need character Z in this scene for balance, but he doesn't quite fit
-a minor character keeps upstaging the major ones
-you've heard over and over that you can't give characters what they want
-you're miserable only making the characters miserable

Walls pop up when you stubbornly insist on continuing in the wrong direction. As writers, we serve the story. And sometimes that means binding and gagging one's rational mind and shoving it into a closet.

Instead, make space for your intuition and just try things. That might mean letting characters decide which ones get the biggest roles, and letting them show you what's truly an "in character" action. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird has a chapter called "Broccoli" that explains how she encourages her intuition. Lamott says, "Writing is about about hypnotizing yourself into believing yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly" (114).

For me, walls happen when I follow writing "rules" too rigidly, or let a too simplistic understanding control how I shape scenes. Take for example "tension on every page" and "put your character up a tree and throw rocks at her." The fact of the matter is no published book I've ever read does this. There are always periods of reversal, peace, safety, humor, etc. that release tension periodically. If you have unmitigated misery and difficulty, your reader will begin to disengage, or your serious story will simply become a farce.

Think of the Battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers film. Peter Jackson deftly keeps ramping up the tension without wearing us out by putting in Gimli's humor as a pressure release valve.

Consider letting a character have just one crumb of the thing they want in order to keep alive the hunger and motivation for more of this desired thing.

What have your walls looked like? Have you had success letting intuition and "just trying things" move your story from stuck to steaming ahead?

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Giveaway winner!

Thanks to all who entered my drawing to win the easy reader Adventures of the Poodle Posse: Creepy Tails.

I entered your names in random.org and let it choose my lucky winner (so easy; why haven't I used this site sooner??)

Drumroll, please....raditta, taditta, raditta, taditta

And the winner is:

Charity Bradford!

Congratulations, Charity. Please send me your postal address to laurels (dot) leaves (at) gmail (dot) com. I'll make haste to ship it to you!

How was your weekend, friends?

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Sunday fun: shop with zombies

I tend to think of Sears as a place to pick up tools and appliances, though I vaguely remember their fat Christmas catalog we'd pore over when I was little--mostly for the toys, because the clothes were always so...sturdy and boring.

But check this out: Sears is now catering to a growing clientele: ZOMBIES. Check out their "Afterlife. Well spent." shop!

Go. Now. You'll thank me, because this is self-ironizing at its very best.

Think about it--Sears itself is trying to revive its style. How better than well-placed humor? And just in time for Halloween. Now that's great marketing.

Check out the site and tell me, what's your zombie style? Slow, cranky, hungry or dirty? Brain preference? Chilled, runny, boiled or a la mode?

Remember to enter my drawing HERE to win a cute Halloween book for kids.

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