As
part of my participation in My
500 words, I am posting what I write each day.
If you’re participating in
NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, I hope you win. And I hope that if you
don’t, you learn from it and try again next year. Writing is about learning by
doing and finding out what works.
I never went to school to learn to write.
I’ve taken workshops here and there, attended conferences and seminars. I’ve
studied the craft for years, reading Writer’s Digest and articles online
about writing. I follow author blogs and Twitter feeds and listen to author
interviews on podcasts. I’ve read good books about writing, namely Bird by
Bird by Anne Lamott and On Writing by Steven King. A decade of this
made me a better writer, above all, writing is what made me who I am as a
writer.
Everyone has a voice. In addition to the
tone and inflection of their spoken words, that voice comes out in any way they
communicate. A parent or teacher can tell which child drew a particular picture
by a signature style, colors, subject, even the direction of the drawn lines.
The same goes with writing.
Every writer has a voice that’s uniquely
theirs. But it won’t begin to stand out until that writer recognizes it as
their own and begins to refine it. The only way to learn it is to write. Do you
want to become a better writer? By all means, study the craft, even go to
school to learn to write if you can. But none of that matters without the
writer actually writing things, every day if possible.
Yesterday I promised to share why I failed
my first year. I had a good story idea in mind but never completed it, and it
wasn’t because my laptop crashed. I think I used it as an excuse. Now what I
will say is my own opinion. Others will disagree with me. Like any writer, you
need to find out what works for you. But this is one reason why I succeeded the
next two years. I planned to write every day.
November is a great time to write a novel if
you live in part of the world that observes Daylight Saving Time. Although I
think it’s a scourge and would rather we didn’t have it, Daylight Saving Time
has an advantage. If you’re used to waking up at 6:00 every morning, it becomes
5:00 after the first Sunday of the month. You’re already acclimated to waking
up early. Granted, that hour has to come from somewhere. You’ll be ready for
bed an hour earlier each evening. What’s stopping you from going to be early?
For many people, it’s just not possible to
go to bed an hour earlier. Kids, chores, even a job might prevent that. I work
until 10pm most nights. But if your only reason to stay up is television, I
encourage you to cut TV out for the month of November. If I got started, I
could go on and on about cutting TV out entirely forever. It’s little more than
passively staring at an electronic appliance.
But that’s not what I’m going on about today
and I won’t go into it tomorrow. Today it’s about this: plan to write every day
for as long as it takes to produce 1,667 words. That might be two hours for some
of us. That might mean getting up very early. It could mean splitting the time up.
But have the time set aside to do it. I failed my first year of NaNoWriMo because
I thought I could just sit at the computer whenever I found the time or felt like
it and work on my novel. I succeeded the next year when I made the time, woke up
early and wrote for 90-120 minutes each day.
I’ve got something else to share tomorrow about
writing in general
No comments:
Post a Comment