Page A Day: It's scientifically proven to work

I am now half-way through the page-a-day challenge and I'm so excited about how far I've come. In the last 16 days I've added 39 pages and 11,000 words!!  I've discovered that the crazy scientist I had to learn about in middle school was right: an object in motion stays in motion. Or in writer's terms, a writer in momentum stays in momentum.

The more I write, the more I want to write.

On the other hand, the blogging has suffered. One can't conquer in all arenas at the same time.

If you've been with me on this blog longer than a few months, you might remember that I started a story well over a year ago... one that I struggled with on and off for a year until finally, in March, giving up and diving into the one I'm writing now.

The thing was, I couldn't get all the pieces of the story to fit. I had these characters, great, fantastic characters that I totally and completely knew and loved. But I didn't have a story for them. I tried. I tried hard to get them a decent plot. But every part felt forced.

Today, suddenly, having not thought of these characters in a long while, the plot fell into place. The entire, whole of it. And suddenly now I am anxious to start that story all over.

But first I need to give my current characters an end, and instead of wanting to rush over and change allegiances, I actually want to stick it out and finish this one before starting the other.  I take that as a good sign.

This past year and a half has been rough, writing-wise. Of course, I did sell my book, go through edits and revisions, and get it published, but there was plenty of time in there to get another one written, and I didn't. Not for lack of trying, but somehow I just struggled settling into a new story. And I think part of that was the pressure to write a lot. Every day. 1,000 words or 1,800 words. 2,000 if I thought I had nothing else to do during the school hours.

This page-a-day challenge has been freeing. A page isn't always easy, but it's not overwhelming by any stretch, and when I feel like going to bed or clicking to check my social media friends, I think, "Just one page. That's it." And when I do it, it feels triumphant.

I've stopped beating myself up over small successes and started saying, "A small success is a success no matter."  The little things really do add up to something big.

It took 3 months to get 15,000 words down. Painful months. If you'd have told me in March that I would've reached 40,000 by May, and 60,000 by June, I would have laughed at you.

The bucket is filling. Little by little word, it's filling. And it feels good.

The Dialogue Is Taking Over!

First off, can I just say that bloggers are the best community of encouragers one could ask for?  Thank you so much for your personal notes empathizing with my aqueduct dam of writer's block, sharing your own stories, and telling me it wouldn't last.

I'm so glad to say it didn't. I woke up yesterday with a million errands to run and no time to write. When I finally hit the swimming pool for my daughter's swim team practice at 5:00, I opened my computer for the first time and in 45 minutes, I managed to write somewhere along the lines of 1500 words. Which is pretty good for me. I focused on one of the scenes I'd started and couldn't move forward on, and finally the dam burst. Today I'm hoping to finish that scene.

I tried to figure out what the problem was with writing. Or the not writing, as the case happened to be. I'd spent Tuesday off in a beautiful place with a great friend taking pictures. There's nothing more cathartic and freeing than that for me. I thought I'd come back refreshed.

And I started another book, which I let go of my interior editor and just let myself read and enjoy, and usually that inspires me to write.

Instead, I felt like someone had put a wall between my brain and my fingers. The story was there, it just couldn't escape.

I think part of my problem was that the dialogue has started taking over the book. Every nice little paragraph of narrative leads to pages of dialogue. This book has the most chatty characters in history. I try to get them to shut up, but they won't. Talk talk talk talk talk.

It's driving me crazy.

And to heap guilt upon guilt, I read a quip from an editor that said nothing kills a good book faster than using dialogue as exposition.

And I went through the book I've been reading and it's nearly all exposition and narrative. Dialogue sprinkled lightly as needed, but mostly narrative.

And I began to panic.

I felt like donning a 16th century wig and riding through Boston on a horse screaming, "The dialogue is taking over! The dialogue is taking over!"

(I don't know where that came from. My 2nd grade lunch box I think, where there were comic strips about 1776 and the British redcoats and cartoon Paul Revere in a wig screaming "The British are coming...")

I digress...

Anyhoo - I was trying so hard to write narrative without dialogue that I couldn't move forward. I was trying to add in reflection and observation when the characters just wanting to keep moving forward.

In short, I was trying to force the story to be something it wasn't ready yet to be.

I've given over to the whims of the characters.... for now. What I've learned is that I'm pretty darn good at revisions, and adding in details and reflections after the scene is done, and it's a lot easier to revise if there's something on the page to begin with.

What about you? Is there something that keeps you from writing? And how do you feel about a lot of dialogue?

(and why does blogger and my email program not recognize dialogue as the correct spelling??)

An aqueduct dam: a dam built by ducks instead of beavers?

Well, it couldn't last forever - those pouring of words that piled up day after day, making the end of the book look inevitable. They gushed onto the page with such force and power I thought I'd surely have enough momentum to see me through that final page with relative painlessness.

Ah....silly me.

Wherever there is a flood, drought is soon to follow.

Today was that drought. Or maybe more aptly a dam, because the story is there. Beautifully crafted scenes and characters with hope and challenges and relationship all right there, so close I can see them dance through my head.

And yet... and yet...

I spent hours today staring at the computer screen getting nothing. I wrote, I deleted, I wrote a few more words, I deleted those as well. I think, in the end, I might possibly have come out with a negative word count today, and I wasn't even revising!

I have no idea how much I wrote because I had three documents open, working on four different scenes. I could see each one so clearly. I knew what I wanted to happen. And yet I couldn't get the words down. It was as if I'd had a writer's stroke. From my head to my fingers, the book would not come out.

I cannot even begin to explain how frustrating that was.

So I'm shutting the computer down and hoping tomorrow is better. Tomorrow there will be a crack in the dam and the words, like all that water in the photo above, will come crashing through. Fingers crossed, anyway.

(And the title of this post? When I came back from Great Falls where I took the above photo, I told my son, "You can hike trails all the way up the river to the aqueduct dam!" To which he replied: "Is that a dam made by ducks instead of beavers?"  I laughed my head off!)

Good Book, Bad Book

I've discovered something in the last few years, the years that I've been purposely pursuing writing and publishing. I've discovered that I enjoy books much less than I used to.

That probably isn't exactly right. I still enjoy reading. I get obsessive about it, really. You can ask my husband and kids, who often deal with burned dinners and missed buses and late appointments because I'm unable to get my nose out of a book until I finish it.

No, I still enjoy reading. I just "enjoy" it in a different way.

I complain.

I complain about the overuse of similes. I complain about stilted dialog. I complain about flat characters and pointless plots. I complain about predictability and repetitive words. Even if I am the only one in a room, I complain. Even if I am so drawn in by something in the story and cannot put the book down, I complain.



Studying writing, working at developing my own, has made me so much more critical. Critical to the point that I don't find many books anymore that I love and can rave about. I've nearly stopped doing reviews, because I find so many more things I think are wrong with a book than things I love about them.


In the past year I've read maybe three or four published books I would qualify as really great books: the total package of great writing and great plotting. The rest have somewhat disappointed me.


But I've found myself lately thinking about stories I've read that I complained about the writing, but somehow, for some reason, have stuck with me. And I've discovered that some of the beautifully written books are ones I enjoy while reading, and then put on a shelf and never feel anything about again except for a warm glow.

Others, though... ones that I complained bitterly about...ones that I literally threw the book in frustration... something in them has crept into me and burrowed in my heart. At random times I think about them. I remember a character that suddenly I connect with. I think about an issue - social, political, romantic - that was highlighted in the book that suddenly seems relate-able to my own life. Over time, with distance from the actual words on the page, some of these books I hated have become some of the stories I've loved.


I'm not sure what that means, except that perhaps the value of a book isn't immediately understood. And that a great story is more than just the way words are strung together, and yes, even sometimes great despite the way the words are strung together.


Have you read books like that?

It's 3:22pm

I have eight minutes until I walk out my front door into the not-quite blazing sun and walk my puppy up to the corner to welcome my son off the bus. In eight minutes, the part of the day where I get things done ends, and the part of the day where the house explodes in a fountain of papers and books and endless chatting and defrosted meat begins. By 3:30, I already have to surrender getting anything else for myself done.

It's now 3:24. I have my Word document open and my story has been buzzing along. I like it. I'm not having trouble writing. There are, of course, the niggling doubts that seem to hover when I get going too well on something. After all, if I'm writing, it must be bad, right? The only good writing I do is in my head.

But nevertheless, I ignore the voice that tells me my main character is swinging wildly from love to hate like a woman in menopause. I like her. I like the way she is changing. I know whatever is wrong with the mood swings can be fixed on revisions.

I have made notes as I go about what I want to write but don't want to break from the chapter to do. Conversations I realize I need in the last chapter. Details in the next. For the last fifteen minutes I've been typing well, and am half-way to my goal for the day.

Now it is 3:28 and I stare at the page where I know what I want to write, where I like what I am writing, and find my fingers gradually grazing the mouse button, switching screens to check email, to re-read a blog, update a twitter. I check Amazon. I watch the clock on my laptop tick another minute off.

I'm down to one minute. I could still eek out a few words. Words which would come easily if I just stayed on the document.

I want to write, but my mind is floating elsewhere, as though it knows the end is coming anyway and I should just surrender now. I had eight minutes and I squandered every one of them. Though I like the book, though I love writing, though I like this scene and know where it's going...

still my mind wandered off into a different screen, out into the vast internet, meandering lazily.

And now the precious minutes are gone.

The Need for Grace

(Page a day challenge Sunday: 1 page) 

When I started my current novel, I gave it the working title of Grace Like Rain. The first chapter I wrote was one of the last in the book. I have a tendency to do that, maybe because I need to see how the journey ends before I begin.

In any case, the book had more false starts than the Olympic short track speedskating finals, and when it finally took off again after a long, long hiatus on the back burner, I changed the working title to something that fit a little better.

Still, I find this book, and I, need our share of grace.

For instance, several weeks ago I signed up for the page-a-day challenge. Usually when I challenge myself, I am pretty ruthless on myself. But this time, I knew there might be a few days I wouldn't make it. I'm a mom. There's always that chance as a mom. Someone throws up. Someone spills their science project all over their clothes at school and needs a new set of clothes. Another kid gets sick. The piano teacher's husband has a brain aneurism and I'm needed to take over organizing all of the students for piano guild competition. A husband has a birthday. Another kid gets sick. A class needs a supervisor for a field trip. One child discovers the soles of their school shoes have completely broken in half. The second kid who got sick and then got better suddenly spikes a temperature of well over 100.

This was my last week.

So knowing this, I got a head start on that page-a-day challenge, not to substitute pages not done this month for pages done last month, but just so that I would know, if I failed in the month, that it wasn't a pattern of failure. In the last two weeks, I have not missed one day of writing, and not had one day where I have written less than six pages.

Which is good, because yesterday, the first day of the challenge, I racked up ZERO pages.

ZERO.

You see, yesterday was the Joint Services Air Show at Andrews Air Force Base near where we live. We try to go every year, but last year it rained and the year before that we couldn't get on base and had to watch from a field across the highway.

So this year it was 80 degrees, sunny, light breeze, and we had passes to park on base. So bright and early we were up and out, and not to get home before late, utterly exhausted, sunburned, and with a daughter who somewhere between leaving the base and getting home developed a fever and nasty cough.

So no writing.

But you know what? I'm giving myself a little grace here. Today, I only managed one good page, but it was good, and that was the goal. So instead of feeling frustrated, I'm feeling proud that even though events today and yesterday conspired against me, I made it priority to write just one good page.

And I stopped in the middle of a scene I can't wait to finish, with all of Monday stretched out in front of me. Even with one of my little ones home sick, I'm sure I can manage at least one more good one.

And anything else is icing on the cake, so to speak.

Did I mention how much I love this contest?  :)

Oh - and this is what I missed the goal for: