Why NaNo's Not for Me

This is that time of year people lose their sanity and sign up for the monster novel writing rush of the year. Kudos to you! The idea that one could, during holiday season nonetheless, write something like 2,000 words a day - every day, unless you want to heap the extra unwritten words on the next day - frankly astounds me. you, you crazy writers you, you amaze me.

But it will not be me.

Not last year, or the one before that, or the one before that. Not this year, and not any future year, unless I am invaded by the soul of Stephen King or Danielle Steele or some equally prolific writer.

Before anyone else asks me whether or not I'm up for this, here are my reasons why I won't be NaNoing.

1. I write consistently on a normal basis. I think NaNo is a great motivation for people who don't write all the time - who need some external push, something to strive for and a community to write in. It gives a reason to sit the butt in the chair every single day. We all need challenges sometimes. That's why I recently did one with a few of my writing group friends. I need the challenge that comes with accountability to push forward when I am letting my fears keep me from going forward. But mostly, I am a writer. All the time.

2. I write slowly. Honestly, every other reason somewhat hinges on this. Some people are fast writers. Some people can be fast writers for a short time, if they need to be. I can never write fast. Never. If I manage 2,000 words in a day (I think I've done that three or four times in my entire career), it is because I had hours and hours to write. And I pretty much knew what I was going to write. But on average, 1,000 words is a really great day for me. And I've discovered that those days add up if there are enough of them strung together.

3. Stress is not something I need more of. My life is already more stressed than I want it to be. I am going in more directions than I'd like. I like being busy, and I like having purpose, but I don't like when that starts interfering with being the best me and mom I can be. Having an artificial deadline hanging over my head is something my blood pressure doesn't need, especially when the daily goals are already beyond my abilities.

4. I have a job now. I know, I know - probably the majority of people doing NaNo have a job. On top of parenting, I mean. I have been spoiled for the last fifteen years. Raising my kids has been my number one job, and that takes up most of my waking hours. Writing is something I consider a job, but not one I have to answer to anyone about other than me. Now I am adding 20-30 hours of work, and I think I am not as talented as the rest of you who have figured out how to juggle parenting, writing, and a job. I bow to your awesomeness. I don't know how you do it.

5. It is November. Hello? Short month, six weekdays off for my kids and husband, still high school football/marching band season, holiday in which we are hosting not only extended family but also half the British embassy. I'm not sure I'm going to make it even without the NaNo.

6. I would be setting myself up to fail. I am a slow writer, I am busy and stressed. I am a pathetically slow writer. All this is established. The thing is, I can look at this kind of challenge and know that I am defeated before I begin. If I missed one or two days, making those up would become utterly unmakeupable. And there is no way I could not miss one or two days.

7. I am on the eighth or ninth draft of this novel. I do not need a ton of rough pages. I need some really, really good ones. Ones that will be the last I write on this novel outside of very minor edits.

This is not to say I don't enjoy a good challenge. On Sept. 15, Brit challenged me to write 100 pages in 45 days, and I wrapped that up yesterday with 107 new pages for my now well-under-way novel.  It was about half what NaNo would be, with 15 more days to write. But I did it - every day at least a little. And 45 days later, I have some pages I am really proud of.

So I won't be NaNoing this month, but I know what it takes to do that, and I am impressed by those taking that challenge. I can't wait to see what you come up with, how this month challenges and changes you. I hope you get a novel out of it. Or the start of something good anyway. Check in every now and then, when your eyes are blurry and your fingers sore, and let me know how you are doing. :)

To Star or Not to Star... The Goodreads Dilemma

I've read some books I really didn't like lately. Even one I put down. For good. I almost NEVER do that.I'm not sure if I'm becoming more critical or my tastes are changing or I'm just not good at picking out what I think I'll like to begin with.

In the past, I've kept a running list of the books I've read online, mostly at Goodreads, but I'm finding myself conflicted now about how to do this. I am both a reader and a writer, and while I know the value of a good, honest review, I also know how much a writer pours their heart into their books and how subjective opinions are.

I used to give good, honest reviews. Ones I would have liked to have read if I was wondering whether or not to buy a book. I was never harsh or personal about an author, but I didn't flinch from saying a book was definitely not for me because of the way it was written.

Then I was published, and that brings a burden of its own. I don't want to be the writer that is critical of other writers. I hate when authors bash each other, publicly calling each other out as phonies or hacks or undeserved millionaires. Jonathan Franzen and Stephen King have earned poor reputations for publicly denouncing the quality of other writer's books.

(Which made me wonder if semi-famous writers like Ann Patchett or even lesser-famed but well-established and talented writers like Therese Fowler review books in public forums? Certainly they read!)

I also realized how sensitive some writers are about low ratings, and how mean people can be about something that maybe just isn't their own taste.

If I don't like science fiction, but I try one because everyone is raving about it, is it fair to give it only two stars because I think the plot is outlandish? If I have a pet peeve about casual sex in books aimed at thirteen and fourteen year olds, is that fair to hold that against the book?

Harder yet, reading books by people I know. Between the faculty at school that I adore, the great students I studied with that are putting out their own books now, and you great blogging peeps, I am reading more and more books by people that are personal to me. And not all of those books are up my alley.

I've sat more times that I liked to admit staring at the Goodreads screen wondering what to do. Do I just unlist a book I didn't like, so I don't come off looking like a critical nincompoop? Do I just mark it as "read" but give it no rating or review? Do I give stars but no review? Do I lie?

I have done all of these. Not outright lying... I can't do that. But I have fudged. I have said what I loved about a book - all true - but not mentioned that the things I didn't like overshadowed what I did. I have said, "This wasn't for me, but there are things about it I can see others loving." It's both honest, and lying by omission, but right now it seems the best option.

I don't know if I'll come to a resolution I like, but I'm curious about you. Do you review books publicly - on your blog, Amazon, Goodreads, Library Thing, or some other site? And what do you do about books you don't like?

And, as long as you're here, what's the best book you've read lately?

Do the Work. Even if It's Work.

 I now have a few hundred tutoring sessions under my belt, and I can say that I am pleasantly surprised at how much most of the students really want to learn. Where my instinct is to just correct and edit, I am required to actually explain and work through examples with the students, and I thought they might balk about it, but mostly they don't. They really do want to know WHY a comma should go here, but not there.

On the other hand, there are the students who come who don't want to work. Who want me to do the work for them. And not just on editing, but on the actual writing.

I can't tell you how many times I've said, "I can help you generate ideas and clarify your position. I can help you outline and develop a strong thesis statement. But I can't actually write this for you. You have to do that hard work yourself."

And it is hard. I know that. For some people, having ideas are very different than putting those ideas down on paper into words that flow and have meaning and structure. But still, that is their job as a student. Do the work. Even if it's hard.

I've come to a part in revising my novel where I've hit a snag between the old version and the new. The old version is one point of view, the new is two, and trying to shift some of the story into someone else's eyes has gotten tricky.

Yesterday I realized that the chapter I was writing in a new point of view had lost all the magic of the first version by putting it in another character's eyes. All the zing? Gone.

My impulse was to just ditch the idea of alternating chapters and let the girl take this one, even though she had the last chapter, and the chapter after it. Or make on long, long chapter with her. I wasn't looking at that as the easy way out... I just thought it would work better.

But it didn't feel right. It felt like I was reneging on a bargain I'd made myself when I began revisions.  I closed the computer and began to turn it over in my head. How can I keep this chapter in her POV without losing the need for alternating POVs?

If I kept this chapter as it was, I could add another, new chapter, in the boy's POV before it. That's a seemingly easy answer, of course, except there isn't anything that needed to be said between the last chapter and this. Time-wise, they bleed into each other.

I couldn't just throw in something random. It had to mean something. The whole point of the male POV is to offer the reader pieces of the puzzle the girl doesn't have. Something the audience knows that is important, but that she doesn't. A tension thing, really. So this newer chapter would have to have that. And what else could I throw in that wouldn't seem like I was just throwing it in?

I twisted so many things around, my brain hurt. It felt like work, this figuring things out.

But I did. Finally. After hours, I figured out a chapter for him that would throw a huge wrench in the plot - and strengthen a part of the book that was already a bit weak.

Win win!!

Could I have done something easier? Absolutely? Was taking the harder task on of fixing it right worth it? I sure think so right now.

Sometimes, I have to tell my students, "Do the work. Even if it feels like work."

It's good advice for me, as well.

The Family That Reading Saved

 (This is a photo from Humans of New York. It melts my heart!)

My teenage son and I were standing outside an audition room earlier this month with another mom and son, waiting for orchestra placement. My boy was talking up a blue streak about what the audition had been like, what they'd asked him to do and how he'd bumbled through some parts and aced the others, and what he'd do if he made it and what he'd do if he didn't, and his words came out like this sentence, in long, unstopped, unpaused thoughts, and the mom looked over at me and said, "Does he always talk this much?"

I had to laugh, because the answer to that is yes. And I have two other kids that do the same. Talking on top of each other sometimes, so that I have to hold my hands up and say, "I know I have two ears but I can only make out one of you at a time!" There is a constant stream of conversation in our house that doesn't even end when I turn out the lights and say, "Goodnight! I'm going downstairs now!" Sometimes they keep talking, even louder, so I have to yell up the stairs, "I'm downstairs. I can't hear you anymore. Go to sleep!"

The mom sighed a bit and looked over at her not-a-word-said-yet son. "I can barely get anything but one word answers from him."

It's a blessing, I know. This conversation overload in our house from two teenagers and a pre-teen is not the usual fare in a lot of homes, and I soak up every minute of it.

There was a period where that wasn't as true. When my son was in fourth grade, something shifted in our relationship. It was no longer cool to be close to your mom, to hang out with her and act like you liked her. He developed more commonalities with my husband, and I could see the guy thing edging me out. While I knew that was normal, was indeed preferable, I didn't want to lose him altogether. So I handed him a Harry Potter book.

Harry Potter is my thing. My husband has kindly gone to the movie with me as they came out, but that was really an act of selfless love. He didn't read the books. He didn't care about the movies. When I gave my son the books, and he devoured them like I did, we had something in common no one else in the family did.

While I made dinner, he sat at the counter and talked about the books with me, excited about the triumphs, sad about the losses, in awe of the magic of it all. By the time the sixth movie came out, he'd finished the series and went to the movies with me in place of my husband. When the last movie came out, he was invited by a friend to go to the midnight opening show, and I heard him say on the phone to his friend, "That sounds awesome, but I want to see the last one with my mom. It's kind of our thing."

We've had lot of other books since. He skipped the YA books altogether and jumped into my old reading list: early Michael Crichton, the entirety of John Grisham, the Left Behind series, Animal Farm. Ender's Game. Fahrenheit 451. With each book, he sat at the counter at dinner and talked to me. When carpooling got quiet, I'd ask about what he was reading, and that would start a flood of conversations.We talk about the stories, but also the issues they bring up. Justice and politics and faith and science.

In middle school, my daughter entered that phase of "I don't really have much to say." I handed her Harry Potter. Then, The Hunger Games. To Kill a Mockingbird. Animal Farm. The Princess Bride. A Wrinkle in Time. And the same phenomenon happened. We talked. All the time. And even now, when she gets quiet and withdrawn into that 13-year-old self-conscious world, all I have to do is talk about a book, and she is back.

Once, in the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I sat in a college room full of students from all over Virginia discussing why we read. And one person said something I'll never forget: "We all come from different backgrounds, different schools. We love different things. But we ALL read Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade. That is something we all have in common."

There are a lot of reasons why we should read, but this is my favorite. To connect to others.

I worry sometimes that if I take time to just sit and read, I am neglecting more important things that need to be done. The laundry, the dishes, meals, shopping, volunteering at the schools, cleaning. But then I remember how books saved my relationship with my growing kids, and I think, What could be more important than that?

When Words Are Dangerous

It is banned book week. I'm not sure how widely this is known outside the writing/library circles, but within that community, it is definitely shouted about. Which is why, even as an author, I tend to stay quiet on the issue. It occurs to me that when there is a lot of shouting, there is not a lot of listening.

Lately I've been listening more. And thinking.

This is what I think: we have become a society in which we scream a lot about free-speech and tolerance and acceptance, but in reality, we only want free-speech and tolerance and acceptance for the things for which we agree.

People like to throw the word censorship around because it is a heavily-loaded word. It reeks of Nazi Germany and book burnings and the red-scare McCarthyism that kept so many Americans from speaking what might be controversial. We pride ourselves on freedom; that is what this country was founded on - what our flag stands for - and to say that there is somewhere here a censorship on books seems entirely un-American.

But censorship, really, is just drawing a line in the sand. It is saying there are things that are right - either beneficial or neutral, and things that are detrimental or dangerous. I think nearly everyone draws a line somewhere. The problem is that we don't all draw it in the same place.

The thing is, words are powerful. They can be dangerous. They can offend. They can enlighten. They can rouse a person to do something he never thought of doing before, to say things they might not otherwise have said. People don't like to admit this, but it's true. The power of words is both good and bad. Let's be mature enough to at least admit this. This is why books and authors and poets are banned in other countries - because their words are powerful enough to cause others to rise up against the government, against the status-quo. This is why teens are committing suicide after posts on social media become reality in their heads.

Words matter, and no one should know this more than writers.

I've read two article this week that have been banging around in my head. The first was this one about an author whose YA book Eleanor & Park has received some pushback by parents over the language and content that they called "pornographic" and "sexually explicit." I haven't read the book, so all I know is what the article said.The author of the article says that the real profanity in the book is the B-word and P-word: Bullies and Poverty, that we need to read these themes, even if they are ugly, because they are real.

The other article is this one, written by the author of the American Girl of the Year books in 2005. He wrote, without the language and the "sexually explicit" content, about a family living in what is a well-known, dangerous neighborhood that wants to move to give their daughter a better place to grow up. This author was hounded by journalists and politicians because he shed a light on the more unsavory side of Chicago inner-city.

Both of these articles are well worth reading. And thinking about. And comparing.

In the meantime, I think it's also good advice to stop the screaming just a minute and listen to someone else. Really listen. And think about where they've drawn their line, and why. And maybe, just maybe, if you listen to them, they'll listen to you. And then there might actually be a conversation.

Sometimes You Just Need a Marriage Counselor

"We are like a married couple who has been through the gauntlet and need to return to simpler times to fall back in love. That's us with writing. We must fall back in love. We were in love before for a reason....let's find it again." (an email from Brit Lary)


Brit was one of the first writers I ever "met." She was in an online writing group I joined right after I began writing in earnest, and I knew right away she had a gift far above the average level of talent in that group. We eventually broke off and created our own group with a few other fabulous writers we met online, and have been together as both writers and friends through the last six years.

Those six years have brought a lot of changes in our lives. Our writing has ebbed and flowed, other pressing needs have crowded in, personal tragedy and huge life challenges have carved new paths for both of us, but we have remained steady friends. 

And this week, when I was struggling with writing and melancholy and the ever-cliched writer's block, Brit was there to listen. When I wrote to her and said, "I don't know if I can keep doing this... Maybe this has just been a hobby all along," she reminded me that writing is suppose to be a love affair. That I need to stop listening to the voices in my head telling me to do it this way or do it that way, that the market is looking for one thing and publishers are demanding another. Just... fall back in love with writing the way it was when we both started.

I have been considering "stripping" my writing....instead of worrying about what sales, what doesn't, who are less talented and successful ... and just write. Strip the rest away. 

Get our groove back. Don't study statistics, or the latest trends, or the Amazon rankings or NY Bestselling list......just write what you love to write. You, and I, will find ourselves happier...looser.....relaxed.....and that is when the best stuff happens.  

She isn't the first to tell me that. It probably isn't even the first time she's told me that. But it was what I needed to hear at exactly the time I needed to hear it.  

And she is right. I've been "married" to writing for a long time now, and I've lost that loving feeling. I've gotten tangled up in the hows and whys and technicalities of it, and I've forgotten how to just "be" with it.

She offered me a challenge - a 30-day, write-and-read-a-thon for both of us, to find our love with writing again. To write without thinking about how awful or cliched or crappy or hackneyed the writing is. To write without wondering if it will sell or how it will be critiqued. Just to fall back in love with writing.

Both of us writing, reading, keeping each other accountable day after day.

2 pages a day until the end of October (we revised it to a 51-day challenge), 20 minutes of reading a day (the kind that's just for fun), and - as an extra incentive to our mental-health - a bit of exercise thrown in for good measure.

Phew!!

I'm excited, actually. It all feels possible again. Write the words. All of them. Make them better later.

I am so incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by so many great people - friends and readers and fellow writers. I have a gigantic support group if I'd reach out and ask, and I am so grateful for that. Yesterday, it was Brit who was the one who saved me, who brought me from the brink of giving up, who has, as she always has, believed in my writing, believed I should not give up. She is like my writing marriage counselor. :)

You know how Wikipedia defines challenge? A thing that is "imbued with a sense of difficulty and victory."  I love that! 

What are you challenged by these days? And are you seeing how victory is there waiting for you at the end?