The Best Writing Advice EVER

Over the course of my writing life, I've spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on writing advice. Books, magazines, seminars, conferences - I've listened to it all, and the one thing I've found to be consistently true is that the formula for teaching is this: First they tell you what to do, then they tell you what it looks like when you do it. Sometimes you get a sentence or two of "before" writing, followed by a gleaming, polished bit of "after."

Taken individually, everything makes sense and you can certainly understand things like why passive voice makes a sentence drag, why lack of pronoun reference causes confusion, etc. What's harder to grasp, though, is the effect that ignoring all this sage advice has on a larger body of work. I have yet to see, say, The Eye of Argon dissected and put back together as a readable work, although I have been present at an Eye of Argon reading and have come to appreciate the fact that it is, at least, campy and mockworthy. That's a start.

Not so with Andrew Martin's The Necropolis Railway, although I did give it the old college try. I looked at a few other reviews of this book, and find that if you know absolutely everything about steam railroads, you might actually enjoy this book. However, if you're NOT one of those sixteen people, you won't have clue one what the hell Martin is talking about. I do want to mention that, while the Amazon price for this book is about twelve bucks, I got it out of the remnants bin at a Borders for something like three dollars. At least I'm happy on that score.

Rule #1: Explain your jargon. This book was set in Edwardian London, mostly in and around rail yards. Great. I think I've seen enough BBC productions that I can handle that, right? Wrong. Apparently, men who work in the rail yards spoke an entirely different brand of English than anyone else. For instance, the term "half-link" came up in nearly every conversation, but even after finishing the book I can't tell you whether it refers to a part of a train, the men who work on a part of a train, men of a certain rank in the train company, or the breakfast everyone ate that day. At one point one of the characters says that she doesn't understand what the narrator is talking about, and the writer says that "he explained it" to her. Explained it to her, but sadly, not to us. There was tons of train jargon that seemed put there just because Martin wanted you to know that he knows this stuff and you don't.

Rule #2: Nobody likes Scooby-Doo. The "mystery" part of this (besides "what kind of idiot would publish this") was solved in two parts. The first part was the old "Mr. Jones, the carnival operator!" "Yeah, and I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!" I got to that point in the book and was baffled and a little annoyed that it seemed that I still had about fifty pages to go. But then, Martin pulled a tricky one - he compounded the Scooby-Doo ending with the victim-as-murderer ending.

I have to make one confession: I am not one of those people who reads mysteries carefully, looking for the clues that will allow me to solve the crime along with the fictional detective. I'm much more the kind of person who just allows the story to unfold, appreciating the surprises and disappointments in store for both characters and reader alike. Except that by the time anything happened in this book, I had long since lost interest, so I wasn't taken by surprise when the guy we thought was the bad guy wasn't really the bad guy (although he did kill people) and the guy that we thought was the good guy (although I never thought that because every other character in the story hated and mistrusted him except our "detective") wasn't actually a good guy. Whatever.

Rule #3: Remember your characters' names. The book is billed as "A Jim Stringer Mystery," but we're into chapter 2 before we realize that the narrator himself is Jim Stringer, and I think that the name comes up perhaps four times in the entire book. The only major character whose name is mentioned less often is the boy's landlady. In fact, I just looked through the book to find some reference to her name, but couldn't. It seems that although she is the only major female character and in fact is critical to the narrator's coming through the tale alive, she doesn't merit a name. Even after he makes her "his girl" and shares his dreams with her, he can't bring himself to call her anything more than "my landlady." There is one other female character in the book - a nurse who tends him in the hospital and who never speaks, and she is given a name (Elizabeth Purvis), but no name for the love interest.

Rule #4: Action + Mystery = Tension. Normally in a mystery, there come a few times where, as a reader, I'm tantalized by the fact that I know something the hero/heroine doesn't, and I see them heading into danger. In a well-written thriller, I want to shout out "No, don't go in there!" or "He's got a gun!" Except that in this particular instance, I was having such a hard time envisioning what was happening (thanks to the non-observance of Rule #1) that not only did I not understand that our hero was in danger until it was far too late, but even after he'd gotten out of it I didn't get what had happened.

For instance: he climbed into a furnace and fell asleep? And then was surprised that someone had shut the door on him and lit the fire and run away? What? How the hell did he get into a furnace in the first place? And why? What sort of idiot crawls into the fireplace to sleep? And since that particular "prank" never comes up again, we have no idea whether it's his hostile co-workers trying to school him or whether it's a bad guy trying to off him. Either way, if he'd died there, it would have been Darwinian justice.

I finished the book early this morning and spent the rest of the day doing some editing to the book I'm currently working on, and found that as I read my own work, I was looking at it with a much more critical eye. As I read, I was asking myself whether I could picture what was happening - where the characters were in relation to each other, how the action flowed from one scene to the next, etc. The relationships between them were clear, and I took out any ambiguity that would leave a reader thinking "what just happened?"

I want to thank Andrew Martin for having written his book, a valuable object lesson for someone like me who needs to know exactly what happens when you don't listen to all that good advice given you in all those other books on writing.

At The Movies

The Pirate and I sat down to watch a movie last night, and here's what happened in the first ten minutes:

1. The very pregnant wife of the school music teacher tells him that the baby she's carrying isn't his.


2. The wife and child disappear and the music teacher is now a carpenter making furniture and lacking in personality.


3. The politician is asked whether, if the syndicate financially backs him for office, he can guarantee that he's “clean.” He lies and says yes.


4. The music teacher goes to the down antique store to buy a gold coin.


5. The politician gives his younger drunkard brother money to give to the heroin addict who's the mother of his baby. The one nobody knows about.


6. The music teacher goes home, drinks and entire bottle of tequila, then looks at his secret stash of gold coins amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gold.


7. The politician's brother takes the politician's car, goes to a roadhouse and gets drunk and stoned, then crashes the car into a tree, killing the girl he's with. He runs away from the scene.

At this point, the Pirate and I turn it off. We decide that not only is it one stereotype after another, but we're too damned old to want to watch anything that depressing – especially if we haven't been given a reason to care about anyone in the movie. And the fact that each of these scenes took about two minutes meant that we had no time to know any of these people well enough to care about them. I felt pretty curmudgeonly for having given it so little time to prove itself, but I'm getting used to it.

We started talking about our taste in movies. We both hated the first episode of Battlestar Galactica and have never watched the series for one reason: nobody has a sense of humor. If they have one later in the show, it's a late development because they're all positively grim in the first episode. I told the Pirate that I don't like shows where the villain is sexy and cool and the good guy is brooding and dark. I don't like them because shows like that can't have humor in them – humor would just show how ridiculous that entire setup is.

When I was in college, I dated an artist. This guy and I used to watch horrible, depressing art films and then drank too much and talked about how meaningful they were and what they said about the human condition (a term that makes me throw up a little just typing it). For a long time, ours was a long-distance relationship. We'd see each other every second or third weekend and the time we spent together was intense. By the time he'd gotten a scholarship to Otis Parsons School of Design and moved out to southern California where I was going to school, things were pretty much over. I hadn't exactly been faithful, and although he never said anything outright, I'm pretty sure he hadn't either.

More importantly, though, I realized that in the few years that we'd been together, I'd changed. All that pretension about art had morphed into a pragmatism about making a living and how I was going to get through school and support myself. I realized that art films were only interesting when you were young enough not to have had any life experiences of your own. Once you've had a few ugly relationships, spent a few sleepless nights, lost a few friends, it lost some of its luster. At the time we broke up, he was on the verge of being evicted for not paying his rent, all the while railing about how his landlord should understand that he was an artist. It was just too much for me to stomach (I was going to UCLA and working two jobs), and I spent years feeling embarrassed about it.

I stopped thinking that art was the be-all and end-all of existence. That romance was the same thing as love and affection. That just because someone in a movie was unhappy, the movie was dramatic. That all laughter was equivalent, even the kind that came at the expense of someone's dignity. That people I loved should be able to read my mind. I realized that I don't have time to participate in things that aren't affirming in some way. Laughter is affirming, as is recognizing the value in others and celebrating things that are beautiful. If that makes me a curmudgeon, like I said, I'm getting used to it.

Accidental Poetry

Everyone at my office was recently given a sheet of cardstock on which is printed "emergency procedures." They're all common-sensical enough, but the way in which the whole is written with some things called out in bold, some in a different color ink, three different fonts - everything you're told not to do if you want to make something readable. And yet, it's oddly compelling. There's a sort of poetry to the words they've chosen to capitalize.

Updates or building status following any significant incident
Do not use the elevator
Do not
Do not return
Do not leave
Follow evacuation instructions
Do not move
Try not
Do not become a moving target
Do not evacuate
Do not return
Do not leave
Do not discuss
Leave it alone

It's just no wonder so many people are paralyzed in an emergency.

On other fronts, I've been busy. Just so you know. Almost finished with the edits on November's novel, and I'm quite pleased with it. And, another sort of FYI, I'm working on getting a new, improved website up.

I miss you. Let's talk soon!

Music as Language

I'm not going to tell you about the beauty of opera or about how a well-written country song can break your heart just as surely as your freshman year sweetheart did. As I so often do, I'm going to tell you about a dream I had. More specifically, I'm going to tell you about a series of dreams I've been having on and off for the last 20 years.

What makes these dreams unusual is the fact that they're nearly always accompanied by physical symptoms. Although the dreams themselves have nothing to do with my physical body (as in most dreams, I can't see myself), they are frequently accompanied by abdominal pain so severe that I can't move, and often my belly button is full of blood. These dreams are the source of enmity between my navel and myself, and if I could have it surgically removed, I'd do it.

Anyway, here is the story of those dreams:

Since I was 23, I've had the same recurring dream. Well, not really the same - but the theme is the same: music as language.

When the dreams first started, they centered around indistinct forms gathered around me, speaking not to me, but to each other. Their speech was brief, staccato and had nothing like vowels or consonants. It was only "music" in the sense that there were separate tones of varying lengths, but they didn't exactly form a melody the same way that a random collection of words do not necessarily form a coherent sentence. Only one being talked at a time, and the same series of notes in the same pattern could be heard over and over.

Over the years, the music has gotten more complex, and I've realized that the initial noises I heard were the musical equivalent of baby talk, or a grocery list. First, the increased complexity was just the running together of notes, like full sentences instead of individual words and phrases. The next step was multiple notes at once - not really harmony or chords, because the notes didn't always sound pleasant. I realize that this represented layers of meaning: jokes, puns, double entendres. The next step were concerted symphonies. They sounded beautiful and impressive - rhetoric. Musical language meant to pursuade or influence.

I think that what is pleasing is pretty universal (with the exception of television and movie producers of the 1970s, who seemed to find discord pleasing and who were an anomaly). Certain vibrations (tones) have wavelengths that are compatible with other vibrations, and they can resonate together without divergence or degredation for a long time. Other combinations of tones have wavelengths that in a very short time disrupt each other and degrade into noise.

The fact of the musical language makes me wonder what kind of beings would use it as language. The obvious answer is whales - beings who live in a sound-conducting medium (air is a horrible sound conductor) with enormous lung capacity and no voice box as such, who don't use their mouths to speak or who perhaps don't have mouths at all. I suppose that plants could be using music to speak, since the entire outside of a given plant is a lung. However, most plants lack a focusing mechanism for the sound. Whales have a blowhole - a tube with a variable opening connecting the lungs with the outside. By varying the size and shape of the blowhole and the force of the expelled air, they create notes. How would plants create notes given their physiology? And why don't anteaters or tapirs sing? Elephants trumpet, a slightly gravellier cousin of a whale song. It makes me wonder - elephants are good swimmers. If an elephant were swimming in the ocean and stuck his trunk underwater and trumpeted, would it sound like a whale? Or would it sound like a Brit trying to speak Spanish (which always makes me cringe)?

At the end of the day, I have no idea what these dreams mean, represent, are trying to tell me, etc. All I know for certain is that it's a lovely idea, and it's hard for me to imagine things like marital spats in a language like that (maybe it would sound like the soundtrack from Psycho), or lies. What would lies sound like? Political double-speak? Marketing? Music to me is pure. It's just vibrations. I want to believe that in a medium so pure, it would be difficult to say things that weren't true.

Strange and Wilde

I've been listening to a couple of Oscar Wilde books (Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories and The Picture of Dorian Gray, both originally published in 1891), and I've noticed a striking similarity of tone between it and Susanna Clarke's book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell.

On the surface, it's as obvious as the curiously formal manner of speech between all the characters - a sort of English delicacy and indirectness. Everyone wears a tie and carries a stick and has servants who keep track of ones' shirt fronts, collar studs and stickpins. I found it slightly odd because Oscar Wilde was presumably writing about his own period (late-19th century England), while Clarke writes about a period roughly a hundred years before. One would think that the social landscape would have changed a bit more.

But there's a deeper resemblance that I like very much, and that's in the categorization of magical objects. When Wilde lists Gray's manias in order, he talks about the necromantic associations of many things, such as his categorization of jewels: "...the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her colour. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids." This list goes on and on, but is echoed by the spells that Clarke uses, most notably the spell that Jonathan Strange uses to protect King George from the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. "Place the moon at his eyes and her whiteness shall devour the false sights the deceiver has placed there. / Place a swarm of bees at his ears. Bees love truth and will destroy the deceiver's lies. / Place salt in his mouth lest the deceiver attempt to delight him with the taste of honey or disgust him with the taste of ashes. / Nail his hand with an iron nail so that he shall not raise it to do the deceiver's bidding. / Place his heart in a secret place so that all his desires shall be his own and the deceiver shall find no hold there. / Memorandum: The colour red may be found beneficial."

Back during the beginning of the industrial revolution, there was a surge of scientific categorization - scientists like Darwin tried to categorize the entire natural world, searching for the key to the mind of God. Nobody was trying to disprove God, rather, they were trying to get closer to God by understanding the logic behind creation. Most of these means of categorization built on earlier works - Galileo, Newton, Linneus - but they remain the solid foundation of modern science.

But there were other lists of associations, less clear and logical. These are the foundations of magic. You can be sure that wherever you see a list of things associated with other things where the relationships are neither clear nor provable by ordinary observation, you're treading in necromantic (or at least suspectly metaphysical) waters.

All of which brings us back to Clarke and Wilde's writings. I think it's the convincing nature of their magical lists that makes me love them. Being an inveterate lister, I'm always charmed by other people's good use of them.

But now I'm off. I have a list of my own, and it's time I started ticking some things off it.

Dream Anthology

I have exceedingly vivid dreams that I use as the basis for a lot of my fiction. We all know this.

A few years back, my dreams tended to revolve around military and spy technology, and I wrote a great deal of that kind of thing. It's still coming into some kind of final form, but I'm not sure what that form should be.

I'm now having the same problem with the series of occult dreams I've been having. Thus far, there are some ghost dreams and some vampire dreams, and they're all complete and lovely and cool.

Here's the crux of the issue: they're not really consistent. My first vampire dream had vampires as beings made of smoke. If you put a wooden stake into one, the smoke was absorbed into the wood and as long as the wood was never burnt, it stayed there forever. These vampires are manipulative and calculating because they must use human beings as their hiding places during the day.

The most recent had vampires as being self-sustaining beings who never needed food or sleep but whose need to drink blood came about because it was the only way they could feel physical sensation. These vampires are creatures of enormous longing and emotion, wishing for new sights and sounds and ultimately being disappointed by everything. They don't wish to kill or hurt anyone, but they must, and it torments them.

The question is how to present these stories. The Pirate says "Just write each one up as a short and get them out." I think he's likely right. As always. What I'd love is an anthology of vampire species, but I'm just not sure.

Show and Tell

I've got a heinous commute that I make a little more palatable by listening to audio books. I've managed to get through the biggies (Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Iliad) and indulged myself with crappy fantasy series (Song of Ice and Fire, Wheel of Time). But right now, I'm going through a streak of true crime, and I'm finding something bothersome.

If the events in question actually happened, it doesn't matter how horrible the writing is, someone will publish it. It seems unbelievable, but it's true. I understand that the story doesn't have to make sense - we all know that the truth is often stranger than fiction (that's why we have a trite saying for that) - but the fact that you don't have to do any character development, maintain any narrative flow or attempt to put events in some kind of understandable order seems unfair.

In the book I'm currently ploughing through (I don't even want to mention the name of the book, it's that bad), we get horrible, horrible language usage (the most glaring: use of the words "fetus" and "newborn" interchangeably in a story where the legal issue is whether the found bodies were those of stillborn babies or babies killed after birth - the difference is material!), cutting back and forth through time in a way that makes it impossible for the reader to understand what's happening, and the author's obvious bias against his subject.

I've read a good many true-crime novels written by people who weren't journalists or authors before they wrote the book in question, but were moved to tell the story of a crime that had touched them or their families. Most took great pains to lay out the story in a way that made some sequence of events clear to the reader. All of them were clear about their position on the guilt or innocence of their main antagonist.

Just before reading this current offering, I read Mikal Gilmore's "Shot Through the Heart," an account of his family and his brother Gary Gilmore's life. I was bothered that we didn't get much of Gary's personality throughout the book, but by the end I could understand that it was the very lack of understanding that haunted Mikal, Gary's youngest brother. His narrative started with his grandparents, progressed to his parents' relationship, then covered his own family life right up to the execution of his brother. There were family secrets to which he refers, but because he never knew them, we don't know them either. It's a haunting, beautiful book that makes Gary Gilmore's life and death seem both tragic and inevitable.

It's a stark contrast with a story that seems no less tragic, but I can't be sure because it's author plainly doesn't believe anything its subject has to say about the issue. The subject is a woman who had given birth to four children whose decomposing bodies were found in a storage locker in Arizona. They were full-term babies, but they had been dead so long that it was impossible to tell whether they had been born alive or not.

The woman claimed that she'd been raped repeatedly, and that her mother had killed her children because she'd been single when she'd given birth. Apart from those facts that are hammered into our heads by the author's repeating them ad nauseum, it's hard to tell what really happened, or even what the author thinks happened. The author talks about her "alleged" rapes and says that she "claims" this or that happened. It reads as though he wrote a very different story and was pressured into adding or deleting things until it made no sense.

He does say that the woman's own confessions were confused and contradictory, but isn't the author's job to help us make sense of it? To somehow put the confessions in context so that they help establish the person's guilt or innocence? Instead, confessions that cut back and forth between the births of four children over several years are themselves cut with a narrative of the events over those years until it's all a confusing soup and it's easy to stop caring, despite the authors harpy cry of "Dead babies! Dead babies!" It's heartbreaking that a story with some pretty deep issues at its heart has been so shabbily treated.

On the other hand, this is unlikely to stop me from reading more true crime. The surest sign of addiction, isn't it?

Antisocial Networking

Now is not a good time to be unmotivated. I've just finished two novels and have put together a new crit group whose first meeting is January 15th. I've committed to myself to get a certain amount of editing done so that the submission process can start.

I know what it is, though. I'm allowing myself to be deluged by other people's process. Many of my friends are writers, I'm part of several online groups and I get a few writing magazines, every one of which is deeply involved in their own process and is not just willing but EAGER to tell me about it in depth.

At some point, I have to stop listening to anybody else and figure it out for myself. It's great to get advice when you need it, but being deluged by stuff you didn't ask for can be downright destructive. So, I know what I need to do to get motivated. Stop reading my email. Turn off Twitter. Ignore Facebook.

I've got places to go and things to do, and nobody can drive the unicycle of authorship for me, can they? Well, they could, but then I wouldn't be on it. And there's nothing that sucks worse than sitting by the side of the road watching someone else ride off on your unicycle.

Writing and Reading

I'm not talking here about the kind of reading that you do as a writer. I'm talking about what your third-grade teacher would have called "reading aloud." I have a special place in my heart for reading aloud and do it every chance that I get. If I'm at a party where there are children present, I'll sit down and read them a book. That way I'm doing something I love, interacting with the most-ignored party guests and avoiding the grownups who are normally more boring anyway. I volunteer to read my work at open mic events and workshops. When I get the chance to read on the radio or on someone else's podcast I'll take it.

You should seriously considering working more reading aloud into your routine as a writer, and I'll tell you why.

Here are my Top 5 Reasons to Read Aloud:

1. Reading your work-in-progress alound is the best way to find where it needs tightening up or smoothing out. If, as you're reading, the words don't flow easily from your mouth - if you find yourself correcting the words on the page to what your mouth thinks they should be - you've found a place in your writing that needs editing. You might find that even as you're reading, your attention is drifting. There's another spot that needs editing.

2. Reading to others (especially others who are significantly shorter than you) helps invest them in reading. Both my children are now avid readers, and they came by it honestly. I have a three-pronged approach: we have no television at our house (we live in the mountains without television reception and don't have cable), I read for pleasure and so have mountains of books and magazines of all descriptions littering the house, and lastly, I read to my children every day. Bedtime's sacred ritual is snuggling up and playing "You read to me and I'll read to you." The more children love to read, the more adult readers there will be later.

3. Reading your work on a podcast opens up an entirely new audience. I would never have "read" Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Iliad or any of the other weighty classics if not for audio books. My commute is pretty huge, and it's great to know that I'm not just wasting an entire hour - I'm spending it wisely by investing it in great literature. You can do that with your own work. If you record yourself and offer it up as a podcast, those people who normally don't have the time to sit down with a paper book or magazine will suddenly be able to listen to your work while they jog or do the dishes or drive to work.

4. Reading aloud gives you the opportunity to be the actor you've always wanted to be. Or the mug, the clown, the goofball, the Victor Borge, whatever. When you read, even if you're only reading to yourself, invest in the voices. See how giving each character its distinctive voice lends nuance and richness to a reading. Be loud! Be expressive! And don't forget to bow once you've finished reading.

5. Nobody can tell your story like you can. Have you ever heard David Sedaris misread a word? Probably not. Because he's not cold reading words that he's never seen before, or memorizing lines. He's giving voice to the story he gave birth to - putting the emphasis where he heard it in his mind as he wrote it. It's the same with all authors who read their own work aloud. Every time I've listened to an audio book, if the author doesn't read his own work, there are always errors. They're mostly small, but they pull me out of the flow of the story and make me remember that it's all an illusion. But when the author him/herself is reading, I'm caught up in the flow of the thing and listening to the story the way the author heard it while it was being written. It's an amazing thing.

The next time you're sitting somewhere in public with a book in your hand, put your mouth where your words are. Read your book out loud. Someone will listen, and be happy.

My 34 Minutes of Fame

I've posted yesterday's interview, which you can find here. In it, I talk about my process, read from the first chapter of my new book, discuss my next work, and reveal where on my body I keep my tattoos. Anyone who's seen me already knows. Enjoy!

I'm On the Radio!!

Tomorrow morning at 7:20am, I'll be on KFJC radio (89.7 FM in the Bay Area) reading from my new Nanovel, "Two Women and a Boat, to Say Nothing of Cthulhu." Feel free to listen in via their netcast. Ann Arbor has graciously invited the Nano gang back for another year, and I'm taking full advantage of it!

Fact vs. Fiction: Holiday Style

You know, normally I've got a schedule to keep. I check over the address list from the year before and make any necessary corrections on Thanksgiving weekend. I put the cards together and get everyone to sign them in the days between Thanksgiving and December 1. This year - it's mid-December and I have done NOTHING. I am looking at the blank page facing me and thinking "I have no idea what to say. Many things happened this year, but most of them are things I don't want to talk about.

Writing fact is so much harder than writing fiction, yet I write fact for a living. I get paid a whole bucket of money to write facts all day long. Something is wrong, here.

I think I've hit on it. I'm constraining myself to what *actually* happened, rather than what I *wish* happened. Problem solved!!

Fizzle Fizzle Fizzle

Now that November is drawing to a close, it's always hard for me to maintain focus. When it comes to certain things, I am NOT a procrastinator. I normally finish my 50,000 words for Nanowrimo in the first couple weeks (a little more if I've had to take days off). The problem is that once I've set my goal at a certain number of words and I achieve that, it's hard for me to maintain the focus to keep going until the project itself is finished. Even moreso if I've identified parts back at the beginning that I want to change.

I think that my second takeaway for Nano this year is that my goal needs to be bigger. I can write fifty thousand words in thirty days. I can write fifty thousand words in ten days if I need to. What I need is to challenge myself in a bigger, more fundamental way. I need to FINISH A STORY from "Once upon a time" to "The End." That's a little more difficult for people who start out with no plot, but I rarely have that problem.

Okay, got it? Next year, the idea isn't to get to 50k. The idea is to FINISH THE STORY.

Go Away!

We're coming up on the first part of the bingeing season, and one of the things that Thanksgiving affords is a FOUR DAY WEEKEND. How is gorging going to help your writing? It's not. BUT, the extra two days off that most of us are granted this time of year ARE.

One of the best ways to boost your productivity is to get out of your own environment for a significant period of time. It's tough to write in your natural habitat, either at home where there are always chores to be done or family, pets or plants demanding your attention, or at work where your inbox is stacked up to your very eyebrows.

Leave your natural habitat! Go to your local library or park. Go to an aquarium or zoo. Even going to your local coffee shop is fine, although for many people this is not so far out of your natural habitat. At least one isn't tempted to get up and do all the dishes.

I went on a retreat last week and wrote ~17,000 words in the time I was there, and still had time to do a little sight-seeing and take more hot baths than my skin was strictly happy with. I mentioned to my husband that the key to really productive writing and overall happiness was having no other responsibilities whatsoever. He mentioned that it didn't sound sustainable.

I'd love to find out.

Thinking: Enough vs. Too Much

Writers and artists pride themselves on the fact that their pursuit is wholly intellectual. It takes a certain amount of brains to sit down and spin out a scenario that doesn't, and in many cases couldn't, exist in real life. But a lot of writers sit in front of their computers and just stare. And stare. And stare. How do I get Maude and her sister from the party to the castle? I've just locked Throckmorton in a room with a hyena - what next?

For these occasions, I find it tremendously helpful to take off my writer hat (while keeping my writer gloves on) and just watching the action, taking dictation as it unfolds. In real life, most things happen fairly quickly. It takes a split second to run a red light, hit another car, and kill your family. It takes less than a minute for piranhas to rip apart and devour a frog.

When closing off your brain and just writing words as fast as you possibly can, you do two things: you allow events to come up naturally without overthinking or second guessing, and you move your plot forward by leaps and bounds. I have to say that my own experience has been that my plot and characters came together in a more realistic, more satisfying way than they would have if I'd sat down and planned it all out. And again, isn't that more like real life? You sit down and plan your day, but the minute you walk out the door, all bets are off. Anything could happen and sometimes, it's just a matter of time before your plan falls apart.

In real life, we don't spend a lot of time thinking and planning our every move. We tend to plan things in broad swaths and allow for the inevitable chaos that follows. Let your writing be more like your real life!

My Life Does Not Have a Rockin' Bass Track

Those were the words of my third ex-husband. He saw the soundtrack of my life being much more akin to the soundtrack from "The Little Rascals," rather than the soundtrack to "Fight Club."

What's your soundtrack? A recent study has shown that listening to happy music not only elevates your own mood, but can be good for you. My gut feeling is that it's true. I can be moved to tears of joy by music. I can also be moved to tears of grief, rage and hopelessness. And I listen to that kind of music far more than I should. My family knows exactly what I've been listening to in the car by the look on my face when I get out.

With the widespread availability of iPods and other devices that put enormous musical libraries into containers the size of cigarette packs, it's a common sight nowadays to see people plugged in everywhere - at work, at the gym, walking down the street, at the grocery store. In effect, everyone's life now has a sound track.

I have put my sound track to work for me. Each story I write has its own soundtrack so that if I'm interrupted in the middle of something, I can slip right back into the mood I was in when I wrote it. Normally it's music from the area or era of my story, but it can also be techno or country, or whatever it is that made me think of that story in the first place. It's sad to think that many of my characters have lives that are utterly governed by a rockin' bass track, but I myself am tootling along.

Read Vs. Write

I have heard a zillion times the advice that if you want to be a good writer, you have to read a lot. Various published authors have published their lists of recommended books (here's Philip Pullman's, and Nicholas Sparks', and here is a whole list of author's lists). I find most of these lists to be pretentious, saying not just "see how much better taste I have than you?" but also "see how, because I am a successful author and you are not, I have all the time in the world to track down and read obscure books?"

I don't need to be reminded of what a precious commodity my time is, and of the fact that every time I sit down with a sudoku instead of picking up Okot p'Bitek's White Teeth, I'm squandering what little time I have.

My advice for writing is not necessarily "write what you know," but "write something that you would like to read." Before you started writing, you probably read a lot. I know I did. And there's some stuff that I really like (military history, cheesy fantasy, non-fiction humor) and a lot of stuff I can't stand (romance, finely sliced histories of a single commodity or object, "chick lit"). Keep reading what you like, and don't let someone else tell you what you "should" read.

I'm off. I have many, many back copies of the Enquirer to get through. Deal with it.

Your Hat Collection

During November, I get lots of complaints to the effect that the writer has a day job and children and can't "fit it all in," and that I'm somehow unreasonable for scheduling writing events during the day or too late at night or on the weekends.

The first thing I think is that I can't please everybody, so I don't even try anymore. But the fact of the matter is that I have a day job. And a long commute. And a husband. And two children. And pets and a house with dirty laundry and plants that need watering and all of those things that everyone else has. AND I have writing that needs doing.

But even that can be broken out a little further. I have actual writing that I'm doing. And once something is written, it needs EXTENSIVE editing (I re-wrote this very sentence four times). When I've gotten something ready for publication, I have to research markets and prepare submission packets and send things off. I have to keep track of what I've submitted and where.

Everyone plays multiple roles in life every day, and the difficulty is switching effectively between those roles. Yes, you're being asked to wear a different hat for every hour of the day - now you're a parent, now you're a boss, now you're a customer, now you're a spouse - and it can take a little time to make that mental switch. The important thing is that YOU are the only one who can make it. While I have the greatest appreciation in the world for people with busy lives who are trying to fit everything in, I am considerably less understanding of those people who use their busy lives as an excuse. If you don't want to do something, don't do it. Please don't use the excuse "I can't find the time," because I am here to tell you that each and every one of us is granted the same number of hours per day.

To those people who find themselves buckling under the burden, I would respectfully suggest looking at your hat collection and seeing if there aren't a few that could be thrown out. That faded, fraying "reality tv" ballcap with the warped brim? Could that go? How about your Worlds of Warcraft battle helmet with the leather straps and metal studs and horns? Could that go? The jaunty little cap you wear when compulsively updating Facebook or Twitter? Look at all the hats you wear and make the hard choice about where you believe your writing hat fits in that collection. And then, having made that choice, act on it!

Who knows? After November, you might find that you like how you look in your writer's hat better than some of the other hats you've been wearing. Personally, I think it makes you look smart. And a little sexy.

They're Not Drinking

While my own November efforts are coming along swimmingly, it never ceases to affect me when others around me aren't going at it with the same enthusiasm. It makes me feel as though I've somehow failed.

Then I think of my harp. I took harp for a number of years (a very small number involving a decimal point) from a woman who makes her entire living playing and teaching harp. This woman spends hours every day sitting with a harp in her lap perfecting her technique, composing new pieces, thinking about new arrangements of old pieces. I'm sure that she was frustrated with my seeming lack of application - I'm not great at sight reading music, my fingers never seemed nimble enough to make the shifts from one chord to another in mid-song, and I wasn't properly apologetic when I'd gone from one lesson to another without having practiced at all.

It wasn't that I don't like the harp. On the contrary - I love it and think it's the best thing in the world. I just don't see myself ever becoming a performer on the instrument. I think it's fine if I spend five whole years trying to perfect "Garten Mother's Lullabye" and never play it for anyone who doesn't live in my house.

There are plenty of people who have no interest in writing a novel for publication. They couldn't care less about making their prose sing or seeing their books in the windows of bookstores. Those people have other things in their lives that they're striving for. They're excited about writing, but it's not their sole passion.

Each November, when I work on my new novel, I'm carried away by its possibility, and that passion informs not just the words themselves, but the speed at which I write them, but that's not the most important thing I do every November. The most important thing is learning more about myself and my own place in the world. Learning not to judge every person I see by my own standards and therefore find them wanting when they're not me. I'd like to think that the act of writing provides me one sort of view into my own heart, but that all of the work I do in accepting and being happy for the other writers with whom I surround myself gives me an even more valuable view into the parts of myself that need even more work than my first draft will.

Inspiring Others

My own personal challenge this month is not just writing my own novel - hardly a challenge anymore. It's being the guiding and inspiring force for others who are trying to do the same.

I have a dear friend, another writer, who has been active in many Bay Area writing groups for as long as I've known him. Wherever he goes, he attracts other writers to him by the force of his very positive personality. He is always encouraging and full of confidence not just in himself, but in the entire group. Being around him, it's hard to imagine that we won't all be rich and famous in no time at all.

My own attempts at inspiration seem feeble in comparison. I know that a large part of it is my own introversion. I love talking to people one-on-one, but I can't sustain that level of energy and enthusiasm for people in groups of more than three. I am deeply jealous of people like my friend who love meeting new people and can step with happiness and confidence into whole roomsful of people they don't know and act like they're all about to be best friends.

I guess what I can do is lead by example. I am a get up early, stay up late, keep working until it's done, do everything all the time sort of person, and yet, I think of myself as basically lazy and unmotivated. My trick is not thinking about it too much. I make my list of things and think neither of how many things there are on the list nor of the scope of any one of them. I just look at the next thing on the list, do it, and check it off.

"Write 2000 words." Check.

See? Wasn't that easy? Okay, now it's your turn.