MoWriMo Success or Failure?

This is the first time I have done MoWriMo, our local version of NaNoWriMo. I set my goal for 5,000 words a day- because this is what I am doing now- writing.

 

Why this number? My big non – mathematical head figured I can easily type 60 wpm, of which I will round down for easier, quicker math to 50 wpm, multiply the easy way of an hour being 50 minutes gets me… 250 words an hour… that’s not right… oh, add another zero. Yeah, I can do 2,500 words in an hour. Piece of cake to do 5,000 in even three hours.

 

I realized I could type this amount in a day. But after a point I sound like a teenager who has had way too much Diet Coke on a celery only diet with fingernail polish fumes in a windowless room. Yes! I can create reams of printed paper that later no amount of polish fumes will make it sound good.

 

This is what I felt like when I tried for 5,000 words a day.

 

Right from the start gate, I realized it wouldn’t work. I was just shooting off unnecessary, unwanted words to get to that goal. Trying to wade through the nonsense and edit it was tedious and confusing. Writing it was almost the same. Would I save any time or my sanity? Would this be productive? No. I wasn’t working any harder or working any smarter.

 

I adjusted down to a more acceptable level- 40,000 words for the month.

 

Did I make it then? No, I didn’t. And I’m okay with that.

 

I wrote what needed to be written- I had some due dates on stuff that happened to all be in various stages from nothing on the paper to final read through. I worked on several projects in progress. Started a few new ones. Edited others. Some of what I wrote was ok to be rough draft, early or middle stages, some if it needed to be written and edited right then. Editing puts me behind on my word count. I didn’t subtract or add as I went. I did a rough grand total that included everything I did that month.

 

Was I happy with the things I did write? YES! I got some great stuff that covered rough drafts to finished pieces. Did I learn many things about my writing? Yes, look at some of the things I learned on this blog.

 

Therefore, I’m not going to look at my 20,000 words as:

• A Failure
• I tried
• I Gave It My Best Shot

 

I saw what works and what doesn’t. I ended up with a broader understanding of my job, and my craft, which will enable me to create better solutions to my problems.

 

So, no. I don’t think I failed.

Spinning Your Plates – How To Do It Correctly

James Van Pelt, writing, and the old black and white video of a woman in leotards multi tasking her plates, poles, rope, and exercise ball will forever go together in my mind now. James tells us writing is like keeping a bunch of plates spinning on a pole as you jump rope on a big ball, simultaneously making sure none of the plates stop spinning and fall off the poles. It’s taking all the things you have learned about character building, plot structure, dialogue, and putting each on a plate, then spinning those plates into a story that is worthy of you.

He shared many tips on how to do this in his presentation of “A Unified Field Theory of Nearly Everything to Write Stronger Fiction (and how to avoid editorial rejection)” at the Western Slope Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers event in January.

Start with good writing. Editors don’t throw out bad stories, they throw out writing that isn’t professional.That is probably the most important tip.

Here are some more:

     Describe and create action. Don’t do “She stood at the window and looked at the landscape.” Describe the landscape, not just a tree – an aspen. What is she doing, thinking, how is she interacting with the window, the landscape, her thoughts? Where is the action? Action can be both internal and external.

     Where is her “pluck”? That essence of a character that makes them fight to the end while being true to themselves is pluck. What makes you want to stand up and cheer her on? What is it about her that keeps you reading? How does she demonstrate this willpower to keep going when the going gets tough? What makes her your hero?Your character is not a wimp. If she is, she’s going to find her core strength. As readers we don’t root for passive people who are boring, do nothing, feel nothing, think nothing, experience nothing and never change. We need to want to tag along for the wild ride that she is going on.

     Don’t let your dialogue be numbing. Dialogue is narration. Stuff is said, responded to, commented upon, interruptions happen. A great way to reveal character is for her do or think the opposite of what she is saying. Have her change the subject, or not respond. And remember no one talks in perfect sentences.

     Plot is another spinning plate – your plucky character is going to do something, and effects are going to happen, cascades of actions will ripple and have to be reacted to again. The plot is about cause and effect repeating in an upward spiral of tension. With each action/reaction comes conflict. Your character wants something; but of course the story is plotting against her, things stand in her way, she herself stands in her way sometimes, what she wants and what she needs are in conflict. She has to make sacrifices, reach down deep to her center to get to the end of her story.

     Remember that your story is also a circle. Your first pages should reflect the end. Wrap up those loose threads. If your character needs a gun to shoot someone, you need to put the gun in the story before it ends up by magic in her hand. If she doesn’t believe in using guns, we need to know why. What happened to change her mind? How does she change after she fired that gun? Show us the conflict she goes through, the highs and the lows she took to get to this point.

     At the end of all those conflicts is the epiphany- the moral, the theme, the point where the reader nods and gets it. It was sprinkled and shown throughout the story.

Writers don’t write their first drafts at a professional level. Professionalism happens during the editing portion. This is when you keep all your plates spinning. You’ve tightened up your prose, made sure there is no clichés of characters or situations. The sentence length is varied. None of it is vague or redundant with a bunch of linking verbs. You’ve searched for which plate is empty, and which is overflowing, and adjusted them to make this wonderful story into great writing where the editor and reader says to friends “You just have to read this, its incredible!”