April is over and with it Camp NaNoWriMo, which means it’s time for another progress report. I hoped to jump into something new this month but ended up rewriting something old instead.

If I don’t polish finished material, I’ll never get to the querying stage and while part of me knows that I’m hiding from rejections, the other part is aware that by doing this I’m also hiding from success.

My goal in 2017 is to improve my writing by exercising daily, which means I’m attempting to write a thousand words every day. I’ve got a second goal though: send out my work and send it out again straight away after each rejection.

The first goal is going well. I’ve only missed three days so far this year. I was sick one day, frankly too tired on another day and just last week I suffered from a bad migraine. Each time I felt guilty and thought about sitting down anyway, open a document and just write down whatever comes to mind.

However, I reminded myself that my goal is to improve. Writing down ‘my head hurts’ roughly 300 times definitely wouldn’t help me improve and that’s all I would have managed the other day.

The second goal… well… I’m getting there.

Just like in March, I’ve taken a look at my progress this year so far. What have I written? How much of it is useable? Am I improving?

Or am I wasting my time?

I’m definitely improving. It feels a lot easier each day to just sit down and get words onto a page.

So far in 2017 I have finished the first draft of a psychological suspense novel and edited a children’s fantasy I’d written a couple of years ago.

Let’s look at the suspense novel first. The first draft has about 40K words, but some of the chapters are very rough summaries of what is supposed to happen without any description added just yet. I realised towards the end that I needed to make quite a few changes to the beginning of the novel and hence the last few chapters might turn out quite differently.

Instead of fleshing out the last few chapters, I wrote a detailed outline for my writing group and presented them with a chapter by chapter description of the plot. Thanks to the feedback I received from everyone, I was able to add more meat to the bone and managed to make crucial changes to some of the characters and story development. I feel like I have a much stronger outline, with raised stakes and additional conflict. I plan to write the 2nd draft of this novel somewhere between now and the end of June and I hope to reach 70K words.

The children’s fantasy is finally approaching the stage where I feel confident enough to start the querying process. I’ve rewritten it at least 3 times and I gave it several thorough polishes.

Additionally, I’ve put together a few character biographies for short stories I plan to write in a post-apocalyptic setting. Who knows, maybe they’ll turn into novellas or maybe even into a set of novels. For now they’re extensive character biographies I can use in future stories.

I have shared some of my older shorts with my writing group and am polishing those after receiving feedback and will start sending them out to magazines.

In May I plan to rewrite my first novel, Crossing Over, which is essentially a contemporary novel with a science fiction twist. I hope to get it ready to begin querying agents by June.

It’ll be a busy summer.

How’s your writing year going?

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See you next week,
Olivia

Every now and then I feel completely uninspired and just sit in front of a blank page and don’t even know which genre to pick for my next story, and sometimes I simply don’t know how to continue the story I’m working on. Where am I going with it? How can I complicate things? Can I raise the stakes? How can I add more conflict?

Those are the moments I turn to the following things for inspiration:

1. Books. I generally pick one up in the same genre as I’m currently writing and have a notebook with me to jot down particularly well written paragraphs. If I’m trying to choose a genre for my next short story, I often browse Goodreads and Amazon summaries of popular or new books.
2. Cooking. I find cooking relaxing. It’s my way to meditate. Slowly stirring a stew offers plenty of time to think about the next chapter.
3. Music. I can’t listen to anything with lyrics since I either end up paying attention to the lyrics or (worse) end up singing along. When I’m looking for inspiration, I really enjoy classical music or even better, a good soundtrack. I made several playlists on Spotify to fit different moods. (My favourite is probably the Doctor Who soundtrack.)
4. Walk the Dogs. Alternatively I just go outside. For a walk, or maybe a run. If outside doesn’t work, or if it’s too cold, then maybe it’s time to take a shower. All these activities offer plenty of time to have arguments with my characters or think of a new plot. Plus it’s relaxing. Except for running. I don’t understand how anyone can relax while running.
5. Cinema. Films (much like books) often provide inspiration for me.
6. History. I love reading up on bizarre, horrific or important historic events to find inspiration for major conflicts in my stories. Things like the Jonestown Massacre, the Manson murders or even just reading up on the British Empire or the American Civil War can be a well of inspiration.
7. Newspapers. You know the crappy local news that tell you these ridiculous stories about feuds between neighbours? Those are great fodder! I love reading the letters as well. And I make notes whenever something catches my attention.

However, no matter how uninspired I am, one of the more important lessons I had to learn as a writer was: You can’t wait for inspiration to hit. You have to put the work in and that means that some days you just have to write and give it your best without any inspiration.

Where do you draw your inspiration from? Let me know in the comments.

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See you next week,
Olivia

My name is Olivia and I hate research.

This is a problem because as a writer you have to do some research (at least every now and then).

I really wish that wasn’t the case and I avoid having to research like the plague. In fact this is the reason I ruled out writing historical novels, medical dramas and police procedurals.

I’ve had to do a fair bit of research back at university and most of it consisted of ordering the right books at the library before digging through hundreds of pages of uninteresting material to find that one necessary bit of information.

I hated it. I would procrastinate researching my papers just as much as I’d procrastinate the actual writing of it. In fact freaking out, because the library didn’t have the book I needed for a 20 page paper due three days later, was a frequent occurrence.

These days Google (or Bing if you like) does most of the looking up for you, but I’m still not a fan. Now you don’t just have to research, now you also have to make sure the date of the information is current and the information itself is accurate, not slanted or misleading.

Considering that, I think I preferred walking to the library.

For many writers research is just another way to procrastinate. Luckily that can’t happen to me. I seldom fall down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and end up hopping from article to article.

If I could just make it all up, I would. But you never know which detail adds authenticity to a scene and I really don’t want my character dying of a disease that is 100% survivable.

How do I get around that and do the much dreaded research, you ask? I add square brackets [ ] behind sentences/paragraphs that I need additional information for. Either with a short comment explaining the question to my future self or simply with a question mark. Whenever I’m editing I look up the information I need for those square brackets and fill them in before I start rewriting.

For example:

Jake clutched his stomach. The knife was buried deep [where exactly does a knife have to enter the body to pierce a kidney?] and blood was seeping through his fingers. Damn, he’d need a doctor before boarding the train. There was no way he was surviving [length of train ride from NYC to LA in hours?] hours until his arrival in LA. Not with this wound.

But, I kept wondering, is that really enough?

John Grisham said in an interview:

“When I write fiction, it takes a lot to get me out of the seat to check anything. I hate to stop the writing to go check a fact, to go find a city, to go to a hotel – I’ll just make stuff up.”

For all I knew, all bestselling authors were big on research who wouldn’t put letter to page without first having learned every last tidbit of information about a particular subject or place. Maybe that’s why they’re successful authors.

You have no idea how happy I was to read John Grisham’s words. It’s okay for me to feel the way I feel about doing research, and it’s okay for me to work it into my process however I see fit.

Thank you, Mr. Grisham. Thank you.

How do you feel about research? Do you enjoy going down the rabbit hole? Or do you avoid it? Let me know in the comments.

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The Washington Post article from which I took the Grisham quote can be found here.

See you next week,
Olivia

A couple of years ago I found out that my mind works differently when it comes to recalling or conjuring visuals. I read this BBC article and suddenly realised my inability to conjure images in my mind’s eye is not the norm and has a name: Aphantasia

After I read the article I waited until my partner came home. I didn’t even let her change out of her work clothes and instead asked her to sit down on the stairs: “Can you picture a green elephant wearing pink pants and a hat?” And she said, yes.

I was stunned.

Some people report seeing nothing whatsoever. Their minds display only black. I don’t see nothing. I see short flashes of almost images.

If you ask me to think of a sunrise I will quickly see a flash of orange and maybe the sun before my mind goes dark again. If you ask me to picture a green elephant wearing pink pants and a hat, I will see flashes of a normal grey elephant, the colour green, some pants I own and wear frequently, a hat I own and the colour pink. It’s a weird mix. The flashes blend into each other and the whole thing does not form a proper image and then disappears again.

I don’t like to read overly descriptive books, because the words remain just words in my mind. My memory is excellent, I will recall most things I’ve read and am able to tell you in words what the author described but there’s no mental image to go with it.

Take Severus Snape for example: I knew he had dark eyes, a hooked nose and greasy, black hair, but that didn’t result in an image in my mind. When I saw Alan Rickman in the first Harry Potter film, I thought: YES! That’s exactly what he’s supposed to look like. I finally had an image.

I do sometimes miss details in books and, especially in fantasy, have found out at the end that a race has blue skin when looking at illustrations online.

This is probably one of the reasons why books rarely manage to scare me or make me cry. I’m missing the visuals and words alone do not have the same impact.

Aphantasia also poses a problem for me as a writer.

If I don’t jot down the hair colour of my main character, I will definitely give them brown hair in chapter one and red hair in chapter seven and possibly not even notice until a beta reader points it out.

I also struggle with adding description to my work. Since I can’t picture things I don’t know how to describe them. That fantasy city my main character just entered? Or the wedding dress another character has in her wardrobe? Or the flowers someone picked? I don’t see them and I have no idea what they look like and I often focus on sound and smell instead.

To help get around this problem I usually browse through Pinterest boards and find pictures to help me be consistent and find more details to add to my work.

Do any of you struggle with descriptions? Or perhaps a few of you are aphantasiac, too. How do you get around it? Let me know in the comments.

Come and join us on Pinterest and Twitter and come chat with us on Facebook.

Here are two more articles about Aphantasia from The Guardian and The New Scientist.

See you next week,
Olivia

I’ve mentioned quite a few times that I like to procrastinate. I really do, and without deadlines I procrastinate even more.

This is why I love NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and happens once a year in November. The goal is simple: write 50,000 words in 30 days (about 1667 a day). There are also two similar events in April and July but without the 50,000 words rule.

I always participate. It’s a deadline, albeit a fake one. I just don’t work well without pressure and this is why I attempt to pressure myself whenever I can.

I’m the student who started writing her papers 48 hours before the deadline and stayed up all night cramming an 800 page book before an exam.

Not everyone is a fan of NaNoWriMo and not everyone is a fan of writing a thousand words every day, which I’m still doing. And I can understand that. It’s not helpful to sit down with a fever or a headache or if you’re simply tired after an exhausting day and are writing down words just for the sake of writing down words.

In fact I skipped my thousand words a day twice this year: once with a fever and once on my birthday. My goals are to improve my writing, create a habit, and develop strong writing muscles.

I wouldn’t have improved on those two days. I’d probably have written down nonsense just to be able to go to bed. And that’s not what this writing thing is about.

This is why NaNoWriMo is not for everyone.

NaNoWriMo is the permission to write crap. My thousand words a day is my permission to write crap every single day.

I have to. I used to stare at white spaces on notebooks, phones and computers… just stare. Every sentence I wrote wasn’t good enough to publish, so I would delete them. Every paragraph was uninspired and bland. Deleted. I’d go to bed with as much white space left on the page as I started with.

NaNoWriMo is the permission to write a story–an entire story, from beginning to end. It does not matter if it’s any good or if the chosen words are the right words. Everything wrong can be fixed during the editing process. Editing is hard work, sure, but you can’t edit without first having a story.

I needed, and still need, that permission to write crap. Because once I’ve written something, I can fix it later. But if I don’t allow myself the freedom to create without judgement, the white space will never be filled.

NaNoWriMo kills the fear for me, and the deadline (the end of the month) is what motivates and pressures me.

If you like to edit as you write or if you like to work slower and finish with a cleaner first draft than you would after 30 days of frantic writing, then no, it’s probably not for you. If 1667 words a day is too much, then it may not be for you either and that’s fine.

But if fear of failure, procrastination and other shiny things keep you from writing then maybe it’s worth a try.

April and July are the Camp NaNoWriMo months and I’m currently trying to write the first draft of something new. Hopefully I can knock it out in 30 days and win this thing for virtual internet points and a badge. I like badges.

Are you a NaNoWriMoer? How do you motivate yourself? Do you need a deadline? Or can you just write? Let me know in the comments.

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See you next week,
Olivia