Reign Chosen

New Reign! The series is just getting darker!

NaNoWriMo Pep Talk from Marie Lu

So during the month of NaNoWriMo we get emails from published authors. This one that I am posting is one of my favorite pep talks from NaNoWriMo from New York Times best selling author Marie Lu the author of a dystopian series Legend, the books are Legend, Prodigy, and Champion.

Hey Wrimos,

You’re past the halfway mark. Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and you can see the faintest glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. But you can barely breathe. Your brain feels sore. Things might be getting a little rough, right?

I’m not going to give you inspirational words. I’m not going to tell you how hard it is to be a writer or how courageous you are to be doing this (which you are, by the way, didn’t you know that already?). You don’t have time for all that—you’re trying to finish a novel! Today, I’m going to give you some practical tips on how to make it through the third week. The dark swamp. The mines of writer’s block.

Pull your favorite, tattered, dog-eared book off the shelves. Find a chapter that leaves you breathless. Start typing it out in a new document, word for word. Don’t just type blindly; think about what you’re writing. For me, something about this exercise helps me see the genius in the other writer’s storytelling, and will stimulate my own writing and thoughts. Be careful, of course, that you don’t end up plagiarizing it right into your novel… but there’s something to be said for drawing inspiration from another.

Write a long list of all your characters. Then, start drawing random lines connecting random characters to each other. Don’t think—just connect. Afterward, look down at your page. Try to figure out a connection between each of the two random characters you just linked—something scandalous, maybe, or something sweet. Something three-dimensional and unexpected. Some explosive scene that throws the two together.

Turn to a different creative venture. This is the point in NaNoWriMo when you start feeling exhausted, which makes you lazy, which makes your storytelling lazy. Words might not be inspiring you anymore. So turn to writing’s creative cousins. Art. Music. Games. And so on. I personally will draw my characters. You can do the same, even if you don’t usually draw or you don’t want to draw your characters. Take 10 minutes and make a map of your world, even if you’re writing contemporary. Where’s the post office? What’s the layout of this house? What places do your characters love to visit? Draw a random box in the corner. Make that a secret/forbidden/abandoned place. A love hotel. A bar with a hidden basement.

Turn to music: make a playlist of music that matches the mood of your story. Don’t just play it back, either—plug in some good headphones, close your eyes, sit back, crank the volume, and get lost. Play the scenes of your story out in your head. Imagine the lyrics matching your story. Listen to the story arc inherent in the song. Go to where your characters are. Somewhere in the darkness, you might see the spark of a scene.

Of course, none of this can trump the ultimate, time-worn advice:

Just Keep Going.

Write an entire monologue with your main character if you have to. Spend a chapter just exploring the life story of an antagonist. Write a scene with nothing but dialogue between your hero and your villain. Write a steamy love scene between your favorite couple. They don’t have to be scenes in chronological order. They don’t even have to end up in your book. But they will help you to keep going.

So keep going. You’re almost there. Just a little more. You are stubborn. You are exhausted. You are determined. You are a Writer.

Marie

Update

So not including the scenes I typed up in a separate document for me to add into my story later during the revision process, I have so fat typed up approximately 30,000 words. Which is really not bad considering how busy I've been with the amount of work my statistics and anatomy class have been pilling up on my.


While I have been working on that I am also in the process of self publishing two of my trilogies next year. I'm hoping I can maybe get the first book of both of them out by February. I queried both of them to agents and publisher, both with flat out rejections. I even mentioned how on one of the trilogies all the manuscripts were complete because I know how now publishers are looking for authors who can get them more than one book a year. Sadly, all gave me the same responses.

The second trilogy I wrote I completed book one, and got half of book two completed. I worked too hard on these stories to just leave them sitting on my flashdrive for another ten years until the trends died down. It was mostly the elements that got the agents down, but the stories were really unique and like nothing ever seen before. I showed the first five chapters to several of my professors and they really like them. So I'm looking to self publish them. If I do self publish them, I'll keep you posted.

NaNoWriMo Pep Talk from Holly Black

A NaNoWriMo pep talk from one of my favorite authors Holly Black.

Greetings fellow writers,

Here are some things I wish someone had told me when I was writing my first book. I want to say them to you in the hopes they will help and encourage you. Even if you’ve heard them before, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded.

1) No one can tell if the writing was fun or if it was hard. Trust me. I know it seems like writing that pours out of your brain in a passionate flood should be better than writing that comes slowly and miserably, but the only person who will ever know the difference is you. So no excuses—get the word count done.

2) You don’t have to believe you can; you just have to do it. I remember everyone telling me I had to think positive when I was writing my first book. If I believed I could do it, then I could! If I pictured myself published, then it was going to happen! Which sounded great, except…could I do it? If I didn’t think I could, was I doomed to fail? What if I was almost totally sure I would fail? I am here to tell you—what matters is sticking with it. Even if you don’t know if you can make it through NaNoWriMo, just get through today. Then get through tomorrow. Don’t worry about the day after that, until it’s today. Then you know what to do.

3) There aren’t good books and bad books. There are finished books and books that still need more work. Please don’t let wondering if there’s a market for your book or wondering if the book you’re writing is genius or evidence that you should be heavily medicated get in the way of the writing. Remember, right now you are not writing a good book, you are writing a good draft. Later, you will have lots of time to kill your darlings, make the suspense more suspenseful, to add foreshadowing and subplots. Later you will have time to change the beginning or change the ending or change the middle. Later, you will have time to cut and polish and engooden. For now, trust the process and write (that said, if you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and realize what’s wrong with Chapter 7, then by all means, jot that down for later).

4) Figure out what happens next. Some people swear by outlines; other writers are like to find the story along the way. Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, before you quit for the day, write a little bit of the next scene or a couple of lines on what you think will happen next. That way, you are never looking at a blank page.

5) Write for your reader self, not your writer self. You are the best audience for your own work. If you would absolutely love a character like the one you are writing about, if you adore books like the one you are working on, then you are going to know how to make the book appealing—write it like you were the person who was going to read it. Remember the fun bits, the juicy bits, the stuff you linger over in other books—the good stuff.

6) Talk it through. When you get stuck, sometimes it helps to talk through the book out loud—even if only your cat is listening. Sometimes hearing the plot is enough to engage a different part of your brain in solving the problem.

7) Give yourself regular rewards. A fresh cup of coffee (even if it is your 353rd) when you get to the end of a scene, an episode of your favorite show, a snack, a couple of minutes rearranging your My Book is Awesome mix—if you give yourself regular motivational rewards, you will have small goals to work toward.

Over the course of this November, you are going to feel frustrated, despairing, elated and exhausted. You will walk around in a foggy haze at your job or the bank or the supermarket. People will talk to you for twenty minutes and you won’t have heard a word they said because you just thought of a fantastic new subplot. You will look up things on the internet that make you look like a serial killer. But it’s good practice—just think, once you become a professional writer, that’s how you’ll behave all the time!

Holly Black