It’s almost November. Just a few short days and then… The writing happens *cue spooky music*
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is, for some like me, a sacred holiday. For one month – 30 days – I put writing first. It’s all about getting the new words on the page. It’s about letting my ideas drive me. It’s about putting aside the other responsibilities of life and living the life of a writer.
Allow me to introduce you to Fanni Sütő, an author I’ve had the pleasure of working with recently. Fanni faces the unique challenge of writing across two languages, Hungarian and English. I am in total awe of her skills in her second language (and must admit, I can’t read in her first language). She has a short story collection, which she will be sharing her collection of bi-lingual short stories on her blog this month.
It’s November 30, the last day of NaNoWriMo. It was a wonderful run for me and my characters. We started out with a good lead, almost 3000 words on Nov 1. The characters were more than happy to talk to me, including Lord Tromadin – the bad guy slated to die at the end of the book – insisted that this story just couldn’t be told without his viewpoint. Turns out he had some interesting things to say throughout the book.
One of the great myths of the creative arts is that of inspiration. How many starving artists are out there waiting for inspiration to start their next project? Too many. Really, if you want to be a not-starving artist, you can’t just wait for inspiration to find you. You are going to have to go out and find inspiration, or learn to work without it. I recommend the former.
Inspiration isn’t all that hard to find.
One of the rules of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month – just in case some of you missed it) is that you aren’t supposed to edit as you go. If you just sort of make it up as you go the way that I do, you frequently run into a moment when you realize something about your plot that you need to go back and add so it doesn’t come off as cheesy.
Every year in the Twin Cities our NaNoWriMo group puts on a crazy event called the 28 Hour Writing Tour. As the name suggests, we spend 28 hours roaming from site to site around the city writing our novels. In essence it’s a super long, wandering write-in. A write-in is when writers gather in a library, coffee shop, restaurant or anywhere else for the purposes of writing in each other’s presence.
A little history –