NaNoWriMo – Lit World Interviews

5 WAYS TO MOVE AHEAD IN YOUR NOVEL.

It’s the end of the ‘work’ week and I thought before we hit the weekend and more easily accessible writing time, I would do a little bit of NaNoWriMo talk.

As of the writing of this post, I am over 25,000 words on my NaNoWriMo book, Honor Bound: Monsters. Crazy, right? The thing is I wrote 13,000 of that on Wednesday. How?

Actually it took me a while to find that groove. I was stuck in research limbo over wanting a fact to bridge one scene of the book to the next scene. Yes, I hear some of you now, “Dude, that is stoopid!”

And yes, it was not quite intelligent. I got caught in a trap. A trap I knew to look out for and to avoid during a first draft of a work of FICTION.

My advice has been “Just write the freaking story.”

And I was “Stalling on a freaking point.”

Now to the how to get in to your groove.

Don’t get stuck on the finer details at this point. It is just a first draft.
- How did I move from stuck to the next scene. I just went to the next scene. I knew where I was going, and I knew all I wanted was a simple dialogue scene with a touch of information in it, but I was too brain tired to get that part done, so I went on to where the ground was fertile, while making a HUGE note there was a need for a scene addition. And the great thing is, by the time I get back to that scene, I will know the characters even better and very likely have the information that I need to use in that scene. Or maybe, I will find I don’t need the bridge at all.
Take a break. If you write and push through exhaustion you end up burning out and for some they end up in pain. I do this too often, pushing. I did it Wednesday and suffered for it most of Thursday. I finally kicked back into the groove late in the day and put in a good number of words. I think begin half way to the NaNo goal isn’t bad. And when you do take a break what should you do?
Leave your writing in the middle of a sentence or scene. This way you know what to pick up with next time. Walking away at the end of a scene or chapter is one of the worst things you can do.
A big thing that helped me get my word count moving was being part of the facebook group for my NaNoWriMo Region. A bunch of strangers, or some are friends of each other, joining in and doing sprints. Sprints are when you write for 15 minutes as focused as you can and then time is called. You share your word count and people encourage and the like. It seriously helped me late last night. It got to the point my hands were so tired my fingers didn’t want to lift off the keys and move.
A challenge buddy is also pushing me. I have one particular friend that is as competitive if not more so than I am about this. I’m not overly competitive but I like to use competition to help encourage others to push onward, and you get caught up in it.

I find it odd that last year only about 17% of those who signed up for NaNoWriMo actually finished it. I think most of those not finishing never started, at least that’s my opinion. And if you don’t finish, at least get a habit going of writing.

Writing around 2000 words a day, writing a story that isn’t supposed to be read yet, isn’t that difficult. You keep writing and get yourself out of whatever you got yourself into.

Author and LWI Team Member Jo Robinson has a great article about Writer’s Block called Dodge Around the Blocks. Make sure to check it out for some more advice. Also the other helpful tips in the NaNoWriMo Support section might give you an idea to get you to where you want to be.

Ronovan Hester is an author, with his debut historical adventure novel Amber Wake: Gabriel Falling due out in December of 2015. He shares his life as an amnesiac and Chronic Pain sufferer through his blog RonovanWrites.WordPress.com. His love of poetry, authors and community through his online world has lead to a growing Weekly Haiku Challenge and the creation of a site dedicated to book reviews, interviews and author resources known as LitWorldInterviews.com.

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@RonovanWrites

Two More Sleeps to NaNoWriMo and a Little Prize or Two

Two days to go to NaNoWriMo 2015! Your NaNo month might seem like it could be a little hard and stressful, but actually it should be the very opposite. An entire blissful thirty days that you get to devote entirely and without ANY guilt at all to your writing. All other business relating to your Indie empire gets to idle along. What more could any scribbler’s heart desire? Don’t put off joining the NaNo this year because life is a little stressful lately. Rather do take part in it so that all that stress can be ignored while you’re banging away at your hot keyboard. That’s another great thing about being Indie. You get to give yourself last minute urgent jobs to do anytime you like. I am sorely tempted to push my science fiction series release back a month and join you all. Don’t tempt me! I’m already on the ledge with this one.

By now you’ll probably already have created your novel profile and synopsis. That will probably change as you go along, but that doesn’t matter – you still need to get that up on the site. It’s time to sit the family down in a row on the couch, and let them know what their extra chores will be for November. Don’t be shy – give them all away. It’s only one month and nobody will expire from doing a little bit extra. Twist the nose of any little voice that starts whispering in your ear about duty and so on. Don’t think of it as family neglect, but rather as a bit of excitement for everyone. Everyone, except your writerly self that is, can have a go at the cooking, which can really be an adventure – you might in fact discover that you are nurturing the next Jamie Oliver in your bosom. If they’re not as good as you are at having at dust bunnies, that doesn’t matter at all. If you’re into cleaning think of all the good stuff awaiting you in December. A bit of mess never killed anyone, so let it go.

One story. One month. That’s all you have to think about. If you don’t have an outline and are planning on pantsing it, don’t worry, the words will come! It’s all about you now NaNoers, so if you have any questions or need any help with anything, fire away in the comments. My apologies for being a bit slow to answer comments here recently, but I haven’t been able to spend much time online. I’m back here now though.

One final thing for today. For any of you joining this year, the first two of you who say, I WANT A COVER in the comments, and already have an idea of what they want, will get a free cover design made by yours truly. Then you have to finish the book, don’t you? At the end of the challenge, we’ll put up a Rafflecopter and all the challenge winners who want to participate will have a shot at a free cover as well as a gift copy of my how to publish on Amazon book and one on one help from me to put your new baby out there to start selling like hotcakes. So NaNo warriors – tell us where you are so far.

Finally, a very special doodle for you to print out and stick on the door, or anywhere conspicuous while you’re immersed in the worlds behind your eyes. Good Luck Guys!

Jen’s Top 10 NaNoWriMo Tips @JensPenDen

Here are Tips from a fellow brave soul, Author Jenna Willett-2015 NaNoWriMo participant.

Jen's Pen Den

Up until a few days ago, I hadn’t planned on participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I had planned on spending the month revising the latest draft of my current WIP. Unfortunately, my current WIP came to a grinding halt last week when I realized I’d made a fatal error:

I’d chosen the wrong narrator.

So, guess what? I have to rip up the majority of my first draft and start over.

*cue tears*

Okay, okay. Things aren’t that bad. Thanks to my methods of madness, I’ve already written a significant chunk of my new narrator’s backstory. Still, it’s going to be a lot of work. I need something–anything–to motivate me and push me to finish this new draft as quickly as possible.

After some hemming and hawing, I realized there’s no better motivator than NaNo. So, I’m signing up!

To prepare myself, and to help the rest of you who’ve accepted the daunting task of writing 50K words in one…

View original post 1,303 more words

Time to Kick the Critic to the Kerb

Even though finding a terrible review of any of your writing can slice your soul in two, and have you spending a week in your jammies going through super deluxe boxes of tissues, some of your own inner dialogue has probably been a lot worse at various points along the way. Perfection is something we all secretly wish for, but perfection in any pursuit, creative or otherwise is probably something attained only accidentally. NaNoWriMo November is fabulous because there really isn’t any time for agonizing over sentences, and you have a golden free writing ticket to bang away at your story without any exact sense of expectation for the outcome. If it sucks when it’s done, that’s perfectly alright. There will be lots of time for repair later.

If we could inject some of that good stuff – that happy, fearless scribbling – into our day to day writing lives, we’d probably produce more of our best work. In fact, I think that a lot of our best work gets deleted and never sees the light of day because of the stern critique we often subject our own writing to. I don’t think that I’ve ever read anything, no matter how much I loved it, that was perfect in every single respect. Maybe I found only a single sentence in a hundred thousand word book ever so slightly jarring, which made it not entirely perfect for me, but someone else probably loved that very sentence and found something else lacking in perfection.

Self-confidence is often in short supply in creative souls. We’re mostly quite an empathic lot – total softies. Probably we have to be to convey feelings that we may not have personally needed to feel in our stories, so we’re overly sensitive to what kind of effect we have on others to begin with. Add to that the potential infliction of our very own creations on others who might hate it, or think badly of us for having the temerity to actually try and sell it to them, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a pretty mean inner critic.

For all you NaNoers out there, prepare to tie that critic up with industrial strength rope in eight days time. Get out the duct tape while you’re at it so he can’t yell when you accidently pinch him as you toss him into the cupboard. Anything that flows from your fingertips for thirty whole days is going to be straight from your scribblers soul – no matter what it is, and what you’d ordinarily think of it. Write it down and leave it alone till after you’ve slept through the entire day and night on the first of December. And for those of you not partaking in any NaNo madness this year, how about you send that little guy who chuckles and sneers in your ear on a month long holiday anyway? Whatever you’re writing right now, save the critique till the very last month of this year, and have at that scribbling!

5 TIPS FOR NaNoWriMo PREPARATION TODAY!

BEGIN TODAY!

Only around 17% of the people who signed up for NaNoWriMo actually finished NaNoWriMo. Why the low percentage?

A lot of likely signed up on impulse.
Some even just plain forgot about it.
Then there are those who wrote 45,000 words and didn’t want to find a way of putting in another 5,000 because they didn’t think the story needed it.
And you have those who thought they had a 50,000 word idea and it was more like 15,000.

A big reason for those who were successful can be found in their preparation.

PREPARATION NaNoWriMo

HAVING AN IDEA

You need to know what your story is about before that first day. You may want to do a YA Paranormal Romance but once you get into it you realize that the genre just isn’t speaking to you, or maybe even the story isn’t. You can easily sit and think, if you want to take that route, about the plot and how it will go.

DOING SOME RESEARCH

If you’re certain of your idea and it might need some research for parts, maybe some historical event or a technical aspect, go ahead and get that done and out of the way. But also remember this is a first draft and you can wing it for now and change it later if you need to. But if a big part of your book is based on those little details, research now. A second draft of complete rewriting is never fun.

HAVING A LOOSE OUTLINE

Know roughly where you will go from one chapter to the next. It could be once sentence, just as long as you know. This doesn’t mean you must stick to it, but it will let you know if you have a full length story or not.

HAVING NAMES

One of the most difficult things for a book is determining names. It sounds easy and it may be for some, but I tend to do research into names to fit regions and ancestry. I want the names to seem as authentic as possible. A boy named Bubba who was born and raised in Paris might take the reader out of the story, unless you have a very good reason for his name being Bubba. That’s a bit extreme and very unlikely a case but I think it shows you what I mean. The same goes for restaurants.

One of the best things to do is base your character names on people you know and perhaps even the setting where you live, if possible. You can’t write any more authentic than the place you know.

PREPARING YOUR HABITS

This is the most important thing. Begin now to write during the time you plan to write for NaNoWriMo. Begin writing roughly 2000 words on any subject, but write. And don’t stop writing and walk away until you have that 2000 words. You are not only training yourself but those around you as well. They’ll know that during this time is your time and not to disturb you. If you have the habit you’ll be surprised how quickly you can write 2000 words.

More tips, suggestions, and writing habits to come, stay tuned!

Check out the NaNoWriMo Pinterest Board I’ve started. As I find articles, mine or otherwise, I’ll be Pinning them, and I’ve allowed some others to do so as well that I know will find some great things to contribute. And here is a quote from a pep talk on NaNoWriMo from last year.

To be my NaNoWriMo Writing Buddy, click

http://nanowrimo.org/participants/ronovan

Much Respect

NaNoRonOvanO

About the Author and a Winner of NaNoWriMo 2014!

Ronovan Hester is an author, whose debut novel Amber Wake: Gabriel Falling is due to release in December of 2015. He’s also a blogger and former educator who shares his life as an amnesiac and Chronic Pain sufferer though his blog RonovanWrites.WordPress.com. His love of poetry, authors and community through his online world has lead to a growing Weekly Haiku Challenge and the creation of LitWorldInterviews.WordPress.com, a site dedicated to book reviews, interviews and author resources. For those serious about book reviewing and interested in reviewing for the LWI site, email Ronovan at ronovanwrites (at) gmail (dot) com to begin a dialogue. It may not work out but then again it might.

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WHY GO NaNoWriMo? WHY NOT? 5 Reasons to take the plunge.

Are you nervous about writing 50,000 words in 30 days? That’s about an average of 1,667 words per day.

Sound like a lot to you?

If you blog, how many words do you write per day in your posts, comments, social media?
If you are a normal human, how much do you write in emails or on social media? Just think about your facebook exchanges.

I’ll let you in on a secret though; This isn’t supposed to be submission quality work. AT ALL!

ONE REASON PEOPLE LIKE NaNoWriMo IS:

You write and write and get your basic story and plot down with encouragement and a goal. You have messages from the community and great guest posts from published authors, even superstars in the publishing world, who give you tips about what to do. I want to say last year that Jim Butcher was one of the authors who joined in.

A SECOND REASON IS:

NaNoWriMo is a lot easier to DO and get started in than you think. You sign up and your good to go. There is no sign in blood commitment. There is no fee. There is no criticism. You get out of NaNoWriMo what you want to get out of it.

With NaNoWriMo you can have “Buddies” who will encourage you and you can turn to. You can see their progress which in turn encourages you and yours.

I did NaNoWriMo for the first time last year and P.S. Bartlett was my only buddy. But having that buddy was encouraging. We would email our progress, see each others progress in word count on the NaNoWriMo site, and generally have that person doing the same thing we were doing. That person going through what we were going through.

Want to find me? Well, not too many people named Ronovan and my Author picture is the one I use there. I’ll be committing to NaNoWriMo in a big way this year. I will be attempting to get more involved in the community and whatever community we build here on LWI under the NaNoWriMo Support page and NaNoWriMo Support Articles.

And if you have a competitive type Buddy and you are competitive, then it’s game on!

I LIKE NaNoWriMo BECAUSE:

It forces me to put thoughts into words and I don’t have to worry about quality at that point. All I have to do is keep writing and flowing.

This year I am going to work on a book I’ve been promising my son I’ll do for a long time. Yes, I’ve had hugely legitimate reasons for not having done it yet, but now I’m going to do it. It’ll be something that will have his name attached to it because I sat with him one day while his Grandma was in an appointment we had taken her to and I had slowly nudged him through creating an idea. Now I’m combining his idea and my thoughts.

ANOTHER REASON I LIKE NaNoWriMo IS:

There is no failure in NaNoWriMo. So you don’t reach 50,000 words. Maybe you reach 40,000, but you wrote and you wrote. There is no judgement. Everyone is in the same boat and doing the same thing. Everyone gets it.

A FINAL REASON IS:

This is a world wide event. Sometimes regions compete against each other for fun, even cities. Last year my city competed against another one that is a rival to our college football team. I do believe we won. Not that we won anything personally, but it was an added thing of fun to the whole experience.

There really isn’t a reason not to try NaNoWriMo. It is a beginning for some, a yearly start for a novel for a lot of Indie Authors for their next published work, and a fun experience for those who love to write.

About the Author and a Winner of NaNoWriMo 2014!

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30 Tips for NaNoWriMo from @JessicaStrawser & About LWI Support.

It’s that time of the year, or almost. November. Writing 50,000 words in one month. We cringe at the thought, but have you ever thought how many words you write on your blogs, social media, and just general messing around online? Think about it that way and you would be surprised how books you’ve written. Here’s a way to get focused, bear down, and get it done. WITH SUPPORT.

Here on LWI we’re going to have a page dedicated to NaNoWriMo. There will be inspirational posts you can comment on and receive feedback and support. If you need a pep talk, we’re here for you. Whenever we find something great we’ll share it and it will show under that dedicated page. So you visit here and click the NaNoWriMo tab/page in the menu and there you are. Our resident guru of Indie Authorship suggested we do something. I might be taking it over the top but I shoot for the unknown galaxies and your bound to hit a star somewhere along the way.

To start us off, here is an article from Writer’s Digest by Jessica Strawser. The beginning blurb is below, then click the HERE to go to juicy parts.

“Sometimes it’s a lone writer who’s been putting off a story idea for too long, and decides it’s now or never. Sometimes it’s a pair or a group determined to find out what they can achieve by sharing self-imposed deadlines and strong pots of coffee. Sometimes it’s peer pressure or curiosity about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.org), that challenge that rallies ever-increasing numbers of writers around the globe every November to band together in pursuit of a 50,000-word “win.”

Book-in-a-month challenges take all forms, fueled by all stripes of writers with all manner of motivations—make the most of that time alone in a borrowed cabin, hunker down for the winter, stop procrastinating, have something ready to pitch at that conference, prove to yourself you can do it, prove to someone else you can do it, get a fresh start—and in this hyperconnected age of 24-hour fingertip resources and networks, of tiny portable keyboards and glow-in-the-dark screens, they’re more popular than ever.”

For the rest of the article and the 30 Tips, click HERE.

ABOUT JESSICA STRAWSER

@JessicaStrawser

Editor of Writer’s Digest magazine | debut novel, ALMOST MISSED YOU, coming from @StMartinsPress in 2017 | mother of two | book lover | repped by agent @bpoelle

About the Finder of the Article and a Winner of NaNoWriMo 2014!

Ronovan is an author, blogger and former educator who shares his life as an amnesiac and Chronic Pain sufferer though his blog RonovanWrites.WordPress.com. His love of poetry, authors and community through his online world has lead to a growing Weekly Haiku Challenge and the creation of LitWorldInterviews.WordPress.com, a site dedicated to book reviews, interviews and author resources. For those serious about book reviewing and interested in reviewing for the LWI site, email Ronovan at ronovanwrites (at) gmail (dot) com to begin a dialogue. It may not work out but then again it might.

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