Reading Out of Left Field

A while back I posted about self-imposed deadlines and my experience with the Goodreads Reading Challenge for 2011. One of the problems I’ve had since then was a shortage of time and a lot of books left to read.

This has turned out to be a mixed blessing/curse in itself. I read a lot of books and I’m a very fast reader, but if I want to finish the challenge on time, I have to read 15 more books in 10 more days. To do that, I’m being forced to read some VERY short books. Right now I’m going through a whole pile of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books.

I’m totally okay with going outside my comfort zone to read books I normally wouldn’t consider, so the fact that these are aimed primarily at younger kids doesn’t bother me. In fact, I’m finding it to be incredibly worth while as a source of writing lessons.

Some takeaways I’m finding as I go through them:

• Don’t waste a lot of time describing things your audience is already familiar with.

I write in a make-believe universe, so I have to describe a lot, but these books take place in what is arguably the real world, or at least one that’s supposed to convincingly look like it. Detail is kept to a minimum so that kids reading these books can easily substitute images from their own minds and make the experience more invovling and more personal, all the more important since these are horror stories for kids. Making it personal makes it VERY effective.

• Give characters some strong, easily identifiable traits.

Usually this is done through dialogue; maybe a character has a catch phrase they repeat a lot, or yells a lot, or speaks largely in questions. Maybe it’s something done outside of dialogue, such as a character with a sprained ankle who has to walk with a limp constantly. These traits help the reader immediately latch on to the character and help make him, her or it memorable.

• Keep the action moving.

I’d estimate these books come in at roughly 20,000 to 25,000 words apiece. That’s NOT a lot of words for an entire book - NaNoWriMo books are typically 50,000 words, and those are very short for a finished novel. A more typical length for a book for adult readers is roughly 100,000 words. 

This means the Goosebumps series have to be very tight and concise, almost more like a long short story or novella. No time is wasted on trivial details. If something is described at all, you can be sure it’s going to play into the story somehow.

The more I read outside my usual stomping grounds of science fiction, science fact and fantasy, the more determined I am to read even more widely. It’s amazing how much you can pick up from a kid’s book.

Writing Life Interview

Earlier this week I was contacted by Emma Larkins about doing an interview for her Writing Life, 15 Minutes at a Time blog. It sounded like a lot of fun, and a rare opportunity since I just began this crazy project, so I accepted. 

You can check out the interview here: Interview with Gord McLeod on Community Fridays

The Blessing & Curse of Self-Imposed Limits

This year has been a year of experimentation for me. I’ve undertaken two huge projects, both exercises in self-imposed deadlines, and both have been profoundly beneficial, but with costs.

The first enormous task I undertook was the Goodreads 2011 Reading Challenge.  I’d felt that for the longest time I hadn’t been reading enough, and it seemed like a good way to get back in the habit. The other, of course, was NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.

The gist of the Goodreads challenge is that you set a goal for yourself. You’re going to read X number of books over the course of the year. Every time you indicate to Goodreads that you’ve finished a book while the challenge is active on your account, it counts toward your goal.

I set my goal this year to 100 books. I’m a pretty quick reader, so I thought this would be ambitious but doable. I still believe that to be true, even though as of 5 minutes ago I’m sitting at 80 out of 100 books read, 20 left to go, and only 14 days left to read them in.

Having a limit, or a goal, or a deadline, can be incredibly useful. In NaNoWriMo, it was a fantastic driver that enabled me to complete 50,000 words in a month. But with the Goodreads reading challenge, I find there are trade-offs. Even though I’ve read far more this year than I have in many many years previous, I often don’t enjoy it as much. And that’s not because I’m not enjoying the reading; I’ve liked each book I’ve chosen so far. But I feel constrained in my choices.

I’m a fan of long books. Hundreds and hundreds of pages is fantastic. I’ve read very few of those this year; the only ones I can think of offhand are A Game of Thrones, and Elantris. I’ve steered clear of most long books because they take longer to read.

80 books in one year is a LOT, and if I don’t make it to 100, I won’t be too upset. I would at least like to make 90. But for 2012, I will absolutely NOT be setting the limit to 100 again. Maybe 30 would be a better target. Lesson learned; limits are good, as long as you don’t limit yourself too much.

The True Writer's Block - First Drafts

I need a bit of a break from the fiction for today so I’m writing this instead. It’s just one of those days.

About a month ago I got into a discussion with a friend about writing and the concept of 10,000 hours to mastery and it spawned the idea of this post. You can find the discussion in the comments of Indre Viskontas’ Effortless Mastery post.

I believe in writer’s block. I do NOT believe that it is something that causes you to be unable to write, despite having suffered from it for very long stretches of time in the past. That is simply a misunderstanding that occurs when you run into a speed bump during your writing. Sometimes things come to you quickly, other times it doesn’t. Those are the times you feel like you’re blocked.

Over the years I have come to think of writing as being very similar to sculpture. Michaelangelo said “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”

Writers too must do this, chipping away at our blocks to reveal a beautiful story or a novel. The main difference between the writer and and the sculptor is that we as writers have to create our blocks first. We do this by writing a first draft.

There are plenty of ways to write a first draft. You can do it slowly and carefully, editing as you go, valuing quality over quantity and/or speed. You can do it all in a rush, ignoring problems in a reckless, headlong dash to get it all down, valuing quantity (or speed) over quality; this is the NaNoWriMo method. But either way you need to end up with your first draft when you’re done.

First drafts are just the starting point. The REAL work begins when the first draft is done. You’ve got your block. Now you have to carve it, shape it, chisel away at it, fine-tune it and polish it into something ‘shaped and perfect in attitude and action.’

Embrace your writer’s block, and then break it, and reshape it. Your writing will thank you for it.

Motivation in Crisis - Word Targets to the Rescue

Anyone who’s here reading this blog is surely aware that I’m taking part in National Novel Writing Month this year. (You can add me as a writing buddy there if you like!) NaNoWriMo is a daunting task; writing 50,000 words in a month while juggling the rest of one’s life is tricky at the best of times.

Earlier this year I discovered Scrivener, which has for several years been a Mac-only writer’s first drafting tool. It’s now available for Windows, allowing me to discover the joys and pains of using it. In particular I’ve discovered a way to use it to increase motivation and get the words flowing.

Scrivener has a fantastic Targets feature. It allows you to set a word target or character target. This is nothing more and nothing less than a counter in which you say “I want to write 5000 words.” It then throws a progress bar down at the bottom of the work window. It starts in the red and gradually transitions to green as you approach your target.

This can be a double-edged sword, however. When I first started using it, I would set goals in the thousands. Usually 1,667, the daily average for NaNoWriMo, or sometimes I’d round it up to 5,000. This has the effect of letting you work for what feels like a long time, only to glance down and see that you’re still in the red on your word count.

This can be frustrating, demoralizing, and can give you a feeling of futility. “Only 300 words done? I thought I had way more than that!”

The answer I’ve come up with is so incredibly simple I’m ashamed it took me so long to come up with it. I simply set my initial target to 250 words.

250 words is a very low goal. It’s no more than a few decent-sized paragraphs. You can blow through that in no time. And when you do, you reset the target to 500 words. Only 250 more to go. And now your progress bar is already half full, because of that first 250 set you wrote. When you reach 500, set it to 750. And so on. And so on.

For me, it leaves me always feeling like I’m making good progress. The bar is almost always in the green, and that brief time at the start when you’re at 0 and just beginning, it advances out of the red so fast it’s a reward in itself.

Scrivener is by far my favorite tool, but you should be able to accomplish something similar with any writing app that supports word targets. Some other examples are FocusWriter for Windows/Mac/Linux, and Q10 for Windows. With a little work, you could even manage it in Word, though you’d have to remember to check your word counts manually once in a while, and that will get distracting and probably harm your writing flow more than it’ll help.