I used this advice last year, when I was slogging along with my adventure. I had a prince and a princess searching unsuccessfully for each other, and while I knew they needed to go through a lot before they finally met, I ran out of ideas and patience long before they had suffered enough. So I stopped waiting and jumped ahead, putting them both in the same place at last while ignoring little details like how they got there and what happened in between. All sorts of exciting things came from writing that moment, resulting in energy, new ideas, and enough words to get me to 50K before the month ran out.

When I had the idea of involving M.T.’s weird roommate in an artnapping, I was tempted to jump right to the police searching Poe’s room and finding the painting. Her arrest would be a big dramatic moment, and cause plenty of trouble for M.T.

But I didn’t do that. I was afraid that the arrest might turn out to be my novel’s climax, mainly because I don’t have any other big crisis scenes planned at the moment. (OK, you got me. I don’t have anything planned at all. But I do keep trying.) Since I was afraid to squander the coming drama, I promised myself I would only write scenes that upped the ante. My goal was to maximize the impact of the arrest on M.T. by increasing her anxiety about the rent.

I started with a strange conversation between M.T. and Poe about the theft as foreshadowing that Poe might be involved. Then I forced M.T. to have a lunch with her mother. Their discussion makes M.T. wonder if Poe will be able to pay her share of the rent. Her mother also reminds her what will happen if Poe can’t pay; M.T. will have to move back in with her parents, a situation she wants to avoid at all costs. As a result, M.T. starts spying on Poe to make sure she really does have a job. She is led to believe that Poe lied about where she works and is frantic at the thought her roommate is actually unemployed.

Of course, Poe does have a job, and when she realizes M.T. has been stalking her, there will be a fight. While they may not be on the best of terms afterwards, M.T. will at least know that they can cover the rent. Of course, the police will arrest Poe before she can write her rent check, and M.T. will be digging through the sofa for loose change while Poe’s pet monkey is trashing the apartment.

Making myself work towards my big scene is paying off in spades. Not only is it generating some great scenes and unexpected surprises, but I’m even more excited about writing the arrest scene than I was before. I could have jumped ahead, but I think when I get there (probably in another day or so), Poe’s arrest is going to be much more powerful than I thought. And with luck, it will help me to figure out what happens next.

My temporary reminder of how many words to write each day.

Time for a NaNoWriMo update. My current word count is 21699, which is 1695 words ahead of schedule. I’ve managed to keep up by adding whatever I can think of to the story. In the last few days, the novel has acquired a writing student with a sex obsession, a playwright who lets slip that Action Man helped him with his new play, a writing “superhero” named Point of View who doesn’t actually help with point of view, and a monkey named Tanguy*. Today I put M.T. through another unpleasant writing class, in which her teacher suggests she should think deeper thoughts and otherwise makes her miserable.

But I still feel like not much is happening, and once again, my ideas are thin on the ground. I’ve been getting the feeling it’s time to shake things up. Make some serious trouble for my main character. Either that, or punt kick this boring story out the window and start over. Experienced NaNoWriMo participants will recognize this as the doldrums of Week 2, where the excitement and new-car smell has worn off and suddenly our shiny new story seems dull and lifeless. Pathetic even.

I mentioned my problem to my writing friend Judy. She gave me her screen-writing teacher’s advice: Blow something up.

I resisted at first. My book is not an explosion sort of book, I thought.

Of course, it’s hardly a refined work. How can it be with characters named Action Man and Dialogue Dog, and, of course, a monkey? The one thing I’ve really done so far with this novel is stick like glue to my plan to Keep It Silly.

Still, I thought that my parody of a world where art is so important that medical professionals encourage their daughter to become a painter instead of following in their footsteps isn’t exactly a car-chase, things-blowing-up sort of world. Until I realized that artnappers, who steal famous art works and hold them for ransom, might need to blow up an especially tricky door to get at a well-protected collection.

For the last day I’ve been wondering how to use that single idea of an artnapping, and today I’ve figured it out. I can make M.T.’s strange roommate who just happened to be very interested in the roof of the building next door an artnapper. She can get caught, giving M.T. two huge problems at once. Not only will M.T. be without a roommate and trying to avoid moving in with her pushy parents, but she will also get saddled with the monkey.

Sounds like trouble to me.

*He’s named after the surrealist Yves Tanguy, and his name is pronounced Tawn-gee.

In the appendix of their book, they describe the Letter Game: two players take turns writing each other letters “in persona”, as if they were the character they are writing about. The only rule is that the players cannot discuss their plot ideas with each other. Each person responds to the last person’s letter until the story has been told.

Kelleen and I agreed we were not writing a book for publication. We were out to have fun, so we made up our own rules. Instead of writing letters, our characters would be together for the story. We would write alternate chapters of narration using first person from the point of view of our “persona” characters. We agreed that we were not allowed to do anything irrevocable to the other person’s character. We promised not to use the fast-fix cop-out of waking from a dream to cancel out events that we didn’t like from the other person’s chapters. And we would follow Wrede and Stevermer’s rule; we were not allowed to discuss the plot.

We each wrote up a short backstory resume for our characters for reference purposes. Kelleen wrote the first chapter to get us started. My Samantha was visiting Kelleen’s Jennifer in Texas and they were at the Renaissance Festival. We took turns and wrote 14 chapters in all. Before we were done, Sam and Jen were transported to a medieval world where they had magical powers and dragons. Princes helped them and wizards chased them. In the midst of it all, they had to figure out how to get home again.

Our first two chapters were each about eight pages long. By the time we reached the end of our story, our chapters had tripled in length. For one of them I wrote 146 draft pages by hand, considering five different plots and writing material for two of them in the process, all to produce a typed chapter twenty pages long.

What inspired me to put so much effort into a story I was writing for fun?

The unexpected.

While we might not have been talking about the plot, both Kelleen and I had our ideas of what kind of story we were writing, what kind of things might happen. Our general ideas about our story matched well, but the specifics as detailed in the chapters we wrote constantly surprised one another.

For example, in chapter three, Kelleen had our characters meet conveniently unmarried princes. Then Sam and Jen were arrested and locked in a dungeon to await their executions. I didn’t mind the princes, but I had not planned on a dungeon. In accordance with the rules, we didn’t talk about what we thought might happen next. I did my best to get our modern American characters out of the dungeon realistically, even though dragons and magic were involved.

In the next chapter I received, Sam had been kidnapped by a terrifying stranger. There was no explanation of who he was and minimal explanation of what he wanted. I wasn’t planning on a kidnapping, but I had to find a way to get my character out of this horrible situation, right after I figured out how she’d gotten there in the first place.

This pattern became the norm. A new chapter would arrive. I’d read it, be surprised, shocked, stumped. Once I got over the novelty of all the unexpected material that had been handed to me, I thought hard about what came next. Eventually I’d have an idea of how to solve the current problem and I would do my best to come up with a devil of a plot twist to end with so Kelleen could sweat for a bit.

At first all I could think was how hard it was to try to write this way. But with time I came to enjoy it. We were two animals harnessed together and trying to reach different destinations. The story lurched along as a result, first going this way, then going that way, constantly getting dragged back to a sort of middle road that wasn’t what either of us was actually aiming for. We had to work like crazy to squeeze in the moments we had dreamt up for our characters while also dealing with all the things we hadn’t planned on that had been dumped on us by our co-author.

We got really good at this. Our later chapters are amazing. We created dramatic moments, interesting characters, funky magic, and a fairly coherent story without once discussing the actual plot. Our story even had a happy ending, although that was one thing we would definitely have agreed on if we’d been allowed to talk about it ahead of time.

It was a glorious, hair-pulling, that’s-the-ticket, how-can-I-make-things-worse?, I-did-it ride. And absolutely the most fun I have ever ever ever had writing. Thanks, Kelleen.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best thing for me to do when I don’t know where my story is going and I feel lost is to write about it. My project journal is full of complaints about being stuck and clueless, which helps relieve some of my angst (and with any luck spares my friends at least some of my griping that “I don’t know what to write!”).

But what really helps is thinking on paper: making lists of things that might happen, exploring the motivations of each character, trying to explain how something I want to have a certain way got that way. Even diving into a scene that I don’t really know much about tends to lead to ideas, although I have my share of dead end, bore-you-to-death scenes that were written this way.

I don’t understand why just thinking about these things isn’t enough, but it isn’t. I can spend hours turning things over in my head, trying to get somewhere, and have nothing to show for it. Maybe it’s because most of my thoughts are about the problem and not the solution. When I decide to use paper and pen, I tell myself “Make a list” or ask myself “What could happen next?”, and I write down anything that comes to mind. I don’t find the answer right away. Most of what I come up with is junk. But hidden in my lists are usually one or two things that make me go “Hey. What if…?” and that give me new ideas. Those are the things I usually go after, because they are actions with consequences, which result in more action.  I look for the ideas that open doors instead of closing them and then I play with them, asking more questions, making more lists.

Once I’ve actually got my teeth into an idea, then thinking can be productive. But finding that idea to begin with comes with the writing.

Here’s one example of how writing solves my problems and reveals my hidden plot to me. I eked out this weekend’s word count for my novel by writing: a tearful good-bye; a humiliating search for a roommate; a description of the eccentric new roommate; and a day at work with my main character. While some of it was funny (to me at least), and some of it was a pleasant surprise (the new roommate is really odd), nothing was moving the story along significantly.

Last night, I got out my notebook and asked myself what could happen next. I thought of outside forces that could come in and disrupt things for my rather insular character. How might her parents make her life more difficult? What about that new bizarro roommate? And what about the whole premise of my book — that she is inadvertently creating superheroes who help writers?

I started writing about all of this, first as fragmented sentences, then as rambling paragraphs, in my project notebook. Some of the things I wrote down seemed both obvious and boring to me. Others got me asking more questions. The big one turned out to be: now that Action Man and Dialogue Dog exist, who else are they helping? Does M.T. hear about it? How?

And that opened the door to the struggling playwright, whose play is about to open, and who is nearly sick with dread because it is not the Thing of Beauty he envisioned. Enter Action Man and Dialogue Dog, who will help him to spruce up that script in time for the final rehearsals and opening night. Once he has a hit on his hands, he can let slip that he had superhero help in a TV interview. M.T. will hear about it. She thought she made up these writing heroes, but if other people are seeing them, too, then what exactly is going on? So far, I’ve only written the first bit about the playwright, his despair and the arrival of our heroes. I can look forward to writing the TV interview sometime in the next few days.

I also started writing about M.T.’s creative writing class today and am I glad I did. Beyond a vague idea that M.T. would be unhappy there, embarrassed by the teacher and feeling inferior to the other students, I had no specific plans for the scene. But things started bubbling up as soon as I sat M.T. down in her chair. Apparently, I have a head full of crazy student writers, plus a vivid prissy writing teacher that I swear isn’t based on anyone I’ve ever known, yet she seems very real to me. They took up most of today’s session. I stopped writing mid-scene, so I can pick up where I left off.

It’s a relief to know that I have specific ideas, like the playwright’s story, to work with tomorrow. It’s so much easier to sit down to write when there is something in my head to write about. It’s harder to have faith in that treasure chest of material I accidentally opened regarding the writing class, but I’m pretty sure there’s plenty more where that came from, even if I don’t know exactly what it looks like just yet.

As often as I go through this not-knowing/drowning-in-ideas creative cycle, it never gets any easier. The not-knowing is always scary and frustrating. The drowning-in-ideas phase is energizing and laugh-out-loud fun. I’m glad that the fun  outweighs the frustration, because I really want to write.

Where are you?!?

I know it’s only Day 3 of NaNoWriMo. I know you’re shy. But I won’t hurt you. Please, take off the Cloak of Invisibility and come out of hiding, because I really need your help. I can’t just keep sending my main character through her day without anything interesting happening

Sure, having superheroes show up to help when she was struggling with a hard writing assignment was cute. Having the solution to her problems be making the scene center on a kosher dill was even cuter. But dinner with the parents? It did introduce some frustration and humor, but it’s hardly a major plot point.  It would be nice if something dramatic happened, oh, sometime in the next 45,000 words. Feel free to throw a wrench in the works and mess everything up. Just please throw something.

While I’m being needy, I’d also like to ask you to please, if at all possible, keep the pug-eyed art teacher from becoming a main character. Except for his funky eyes and the way he doesn’t look at you, there is nothing interesting about him. Considering this story is proving so devoid of interest already, the last thing I need is a boring teacher taking over the show.

I also need you to protect me from the negative talk the super villain is using to demoralize M.T., my struggling writer. I didn’t expect Conversation Cat’s comments about the stupidity of what was being written to cut to the bone like that. So I could use a little distance, maybe some extreme humor, to keep her harsh words from undermining this entire project. If necessary, send Action Man and Dialogue Dog to my house to give me a hand.

I hope you can hear the desperation in my voice, because I am feeling really desperate! If you will just come out, I promise to do everything in my power to love and cherish you. I don’t care what you look like. I don’t care how silly things get, as long as something happens so I don’t die of boredom. You can even include the pug-eyed teacher if you want. Only please, please show up and help me out.

27 days is a long time to write without you.

Hoping you have a kind heart and will take pity on me,
Your frightened author

Digging through my notebooks last month, I was reminded how hard writing used to be for me. Back in the 1990s, I took writing classes and belonged to a writer’s group. The same notebooks that hold my drafts of exercises and stories are also full of entries about not being able to write. A typical comment: “My fear is numbing. I am so afraid of writing that my mind goes blank.”

I know now that my problem wasn’t lack of ideas or even fear of writing. My problem was stage fright. The very classes and meetings I thought would motivate me to write by giving me assignments and deadlines were freezing me in my tracks. Faced with an exercise or story prompt, I would fight to get anything on paper because I could feel the teacher, my class mates, and the other writers in my group hovering over my shoulder. I was constantly aware that what I was putting on the paper was going to be seen by someone else and that knowledge always got in my way.

Over the years, I’ve gotten much better at just putting down the words and forgetting about the rest of the world. I know I can burn or delete anything that really is too awful for human consumption, although I rarely do. And I make a point of trying not to have ambitions for what I am working on, at least not when I’m actually writing it. I can’t let myself think “when I’m done, I’m publishing this,” because if I do, I am in danger of freezing up.

Of course, I can still stall out if I’m not careful. Even if I have successfully banished the slightest hint of an external audience of any kind, my own internal Critic can show up and whisper acidic comments and undermining doubts in my ear while I am trying to write. If I pay attention to anything he says, I’m dead in the water.

So how did I get from being unable to write a word to 1,500 and more words per hour despite my fear of my audience? By taking the good advice from books I’ve read and using it. Here are the practices that have helped me the most.

From Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande: Write first thing in the morning, as soon as you wake up. I’ve done this off and on over the years, and it’s a great way to generate flow in writing. You may be familiar with a related concept called Morning Pages, but I didn’t come across Julia Cameron‘s Artist’s Way books until much later.

From Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott: Write a shitty first draft. While I adore this book as a whole, this is the piece of advice I use most. The key to writing my first draft is to forget about quality and write down everything I can: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I constantly come back to this slogan whenever I find myself hesitating to write.

From Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg: Write fast. Really really fast. The author recommends writing for a set period of time and writing as fast as possible until the time is up. I’ve found this enables me to outrun every audience, even my inner one, because there’s no time to think about what I’m doing.

Thank goodness these generous authors were willing to share their experiences and tools with others, because I don’t think I could have found my way to writing fluidly without them.

Why is this here? A symbol of inspiration? An allusion to playing God? Actually, because the painting is by Michelangelo.

This morning I followed Hemingway’s advice to stop in the middle by leaving off before I finished the scene I was writing. I only know the next three lines of what is going to happen, and then I’ll be into the Unknown, but at least I have a few lines for getting started again. Between now and then, I need to come up with something more to work with. I can just write whatever pops up, but that usually results in writing I trash later. It’s a lot easier for me to write if I have ideas bouncing around in my head to pull from. They don’t have to be fully formed or even good, but they have to be there.

My greatest pleasure in this morning’s writing was perverse, but a common writer’s joy — I made my character miserable. For reasons I do not understand, I just love heaping coals on the head of my characters. It’s an unexpected perk to playing God. I laugh gleefully when I think of trouble to make for them. In this case, I did something I often do when I’m getting started. I burdened my character with a horrific name, in this case, one so terrible she doesn’t want to tell anyone else what it is.

Her name is M.T. Blue, which isn’t so bad (although M.T. can sound like “empty”). It’s what the M and the T stand for that is the problem. While she dreams of being a writer, her parents wanted her to be a famous painter. So they named her Michelangelo Titian, even after they discovered the little boy they were expecting was actually a little girl.

I adore the fact that M.T.’s parents are so lacking in creativity that they couldn’t come up with a last-minute change for their baby’s name and instead saddled her with this horrific moniker. It’s especially ironic that they dream of having an amazingly creative child. And I reveled in M.T.’s attempts today to wriggle out of telling someone her real name.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my characters. I’m not sure why I enjoy making their lives a misery. At least I can promise them that things will improve eventually, because I know I have a happy ending waiting for them.  I intend from the start to improve their lives, even if they don’t always get what they think they need.

But I need to think of more problems to throw M.T.’s way so that I have something to write tomorrow, or she’ll get the last laugh. Time to go make some lists and see what I can come up with.

I’ve had lots of different ideas about what story to tell.  I’ve decided to focus on the writer who creates these guys (and lots of other characters, good and bad) as she struggles with her novel, rather than on the super characters themselves. I could write a Becoming-Action-Man story full of angst and sacrifice, but that seems a little heavy for a guy who has a talking Schnauzer for a side kick.

Besides, it would be breaking a cardinal rule for my NaNoWriMo projects: keep it silly.

Keep it silly doesn’t mean write about funny or ludicrous things, although it has included that these last few years. It’s a tag for a broader concept that helps me to hit my word count every year.

Keep it silly reminds me to lower my expectations of my writing. You would think that trying to write an entire book in thirty days would be screwy enough to keep me from having visions of grandeur for my NaNo novel, but it’s not. It’s way too easy to start thinking “I should publish this” which leads to “It needs to be really good. My writing must be excellent or else”, which is dangerous territory. Once I start thinking about the quality of the writing, I slow way down and might even stop completely. So I keep it silly to help myself stop worrying about writing deathless prose. Since I can’t possibly write a Pulitzer prize winner about a librarian who is basically a superhero mime, I don’t have to sweat over every word. I can just let it rip, and that’s key to getting to achieving my word count goal.

In his book No Plot? No Problem!, NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty talks about a related concept, literature-as-bran-flakes, where we think that for a book to be good, it must be full of things we find dry and tasteless. To counteract this problem, he makes two lists, one of things he loves in novels, and one of things he hates. He says it’s a definite sign that he is trying to get some substance into his novel if he starts putting the things he hates in his book, but that the minute that he does, the writing gets harder, because he doesn’t like any of those supposedly worthy things.

My shorthand for this is: Skip the bran flakes and eat the Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries. Cram the stuff you love with guilty pleasure into your novel every chance you get and not only will you not take it too seriously, but you will have loads of fun at the same time.

I can’t top Chris Baty’s final advice on this topic: “…remember, above all else, that your novel is not a self-improvement campaign. Your novel is a spastic, jubilant hoe-down set to your favorite music, a thirty-day visit to a candy store where everything is free and nothing is fattening.”

This is why NaNoWriMo is so much fun, and also how I have managed to get to 50,000 words five years running. Simply by keeping it silly.

Usually, November catches me by surprise, and I only have a few days to cook up an idea. This year, I started thinking about my NaNoWriMo novel early in October. Since I enjoy NaNoWriMo so much, I thought I’d treat myself to a little anticipation. On October 3rd, I started making a list of story ideas from scraps and notes and fragments I have lying around in notebooks and stuffed in my filing cabinet. My list is currently 21 items long, with everything from ideas that are a single phrase to stories I’ve already spent months working on.

Even though the list was rich (to me, anyway), it wasn’t until last week that I finally got excited about using one of the ideas for this November. My sister  reminded me of Action Man and Dialogue Dog, superheroes who help struggling writers. We came up with them together, back in 1997, when I was frustrated with an assignment I had been given in my creative writing class: Write a scene with two characters that uses action and dialogue. I tend to be rebellious when it comes to writing exercises anyway, but the pointlessness of this one was so great that I wanted to scream. Cleo helped me to laugh about it and we wound up creating these two superheroes who live in a alley next to a library and help people to write. As a story idea, it seemed like a natural choice for NaNoWriMo –  completely silly and guaranteed fun.

As we talked about it, I came up with some additional characters like Critic and Critique, a married couple who pick at each other when they don’t have someone creative to abuse.  I thought about bad writing advice, and the myriad of books on how to write. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a character who is a personification of Strunk & White’s famous style book? A story that combines the playful banter of superheroes with bitching about all the writing “rules”, that has guys in tights show up when a writer is struggling with writer’s block or trying to find the right word? Hilarious, amusing, and entertaining. A perfect choice for NaNoWriMo.

Within 24 hours, I was frozen. Paralyzed. Terrified of the very idea that had seemed so juicy and exciting the day before. I had realized there wasn’t any plot there, and that I wouldn’t be able to sustain 50,000 words of nonsense without having something Happen. I had a single scene, and maybe a couple of funny lines. And that was all.

So I am now filled with Doubt. I know I run into doubt with my projects all the time. In fact, last year’s NaNoWriMo blogging (starting here) was full of posts about how I was lost and then found my way and then got lost again. Over and over and over. It’s part of the process. But I’ve never been scared of NaNoWriMo before. I’ve always felt that I could do it, even when I didn’t know for sure what was coming next.

Was it a mistake for me to start so far in advance?, my Inner Procrastinator wonders. Heck, I have nine whole days until November. What I am I doing playing with an idea five days before I normally do? By starting early, I’ve opened the door to Doubt and have lost trust in my ability to come up with ideas under the gun, even though I’ve done it during the last five Novembers. The people who like to plan and outline before they write say it is key to having a good story when you are done. I’ve never actually managed to plan ahead before.

So maybe this is my year to do something different with my writing for NaNoWriMo.

Or maybe I’ll prep my superhero story and on October 31st  have a crazy new idea that I write about instead.

But, despite my Doubt and Fear (and let’s not even mention The Critic, who isn’t just a character for the book and thinks this whole thing will be a huge waste of time), I have a tiny bit of hope. Whenever I talk about them, I get excited about Action Man, Dialogue Dog, and the others. So maybe I can write 50,000 words about them if I just spend enough time daydreaming. I’ve got nine more days to find out.

I got pink and black crayons, colors I rarely use, and my word was “embellish”.

As with most quilts, my initial ideas were very different from the final product. At first, I though of making animals that were either pink or black and then adding an embellishment-worthy accessory in the opposite color, such as a pink pig in a black top hat or a penguin in a tutu. The animals would be cute, simplified shapes, and the overall effect would be whimsical. I would make four separate blocks, each with a different animal on it.

Once I started sketching, the plan changed completely. I found some Adélie penguin pictures (a very cute, round penguin species) and made some drawings, thinking that I would like to try using the piecing techniques I learned from Ruth McDowell in a class I took with her over 10 years ago.  But I had to enlarge my penguin to about one foot tall so that the smallest pattern pieces wouldn’t be too hard to work with, and I needed the finished quilt to be a manageable size if I was going to meet the deadline we’d set for ourselves. So I went from four animals to one.

My paper pattern for Pink-guin

My pattern has turned the original drawing into straight lines, but you should be able to tell that the drawing I came up with was rather realistic. My tutu idea no longer worked, so I decided to use pink fabrics for the white I would need for the penguin and the snow/ice behind him in order to meet the color requirements of the challenge. I auditioned fabrics and started putting the quilt together.

Fabrics selected and ironed onto my pattern pieces, and construction has begun.

About halfway through the construction

Quilt top is finished (just needs a border)

Once the entire quilt was completed, including the quilting and the binding, I added beads for an eye and then decorated the pink frame with beads in order to include a little more embellishment.  Here’s the finished piece:

Pink-guin, an art quilt by Kit Dunsmore