getting on the bus

Camp NaNoWriMo starts tonight at midnight. I've prepped my scene board, written some character studies, figured out where in my day I can write "bites." Tonight I explained to my kids that I'm doing a contest, trying to write a whole lot of words in August. My five-year-old said, "Mom, winning the contest isn't the most important thing. Contests are about having fun." This got me thinking. . .

One summer when I was fourteen or fifteen, my best friend and I had a series of sleepovers where we cooked up a story. In between sleepovers, I wrote the scenes we had planned in our lengthy way-after-midnight conversations. Eventually I pulled out my mom's Smith-Corona and pounded it all out. The plot isn't so important (it involved our meeting and marrying movie stars, and wild horses could not compel me now to reveal which ones). The point was, we had a total blast doing it. I was driven to write it. My BF was a great plotter and wonderful collaborator (and is such a good friend, she recently told me she rereads her copy of the story--there were only two ever produced--every few years just for fun). It was pure play.

Somewhere along the way, writing got too serious. As a kid, all I needed for entertainment was paper and a pen. Then I majored in creative writing in college--at one point in time I was willing enough to declare as a writer that I repeatedly faced the blank page and suffered the excruciation of reading aloud to people for four years. Some aspects of that exercise killed my joy and convinced me I wasn't "supposed" to write. What really happened was that I lost my ability to connect to the part of me that loved the play of writing. I looked for awhile, and never found a writer's home--not with my blank pages, not with other writers. I stopped writing, and I stopped thinking of myself as a writer.

I've learned some things since then. It's supposed to be hard. It's also supposed to be essential. No one will ever again make me believe I'm not a writer, as long as I'm writing. And ultimately, when all the gears are moving, it can be play.

My son is right--this contest is not about "winning," and getting the camp badge or even proving I can write 50,000 words in one month. It's about making the time and space to remind myself that once, this was the most fun I could imagine having. I'm going to camp--I'm so very excited!

survival guides

Preparing for camp, I've found a bunch of great resources for writers, to get us started writing and to help keep us going. Here are some of my favorites so far:

Bob & Jack's Writing Blog: a writing master class in a single blog. This quote is going on my Post-It Quotes wall: "Start a story now before your mouth talks it away."

Write or Die: I learned about this one from a coworker who is also a poet. This tool will get you writing for sure (but if you set the consequences to Kamikaze, you might also pee your pants if you pause too long and your words begin to delete themselves)

Doyce Testerman's series on NaNoWriMo: a great series of blog articles that follow the progression of the month, with tips for making it through each stage. Favorite quote: "Moods are for sex. Writing isn't sex."

The Plot Whisperer's YouTube series: another writing master class on that inscrutable beast of plot.

Dispatches from Utopia's Writer With Kids series: a writer interviews other writers who are also parents, on how they keep all the balls in the air with a creative life and fine parenting.

The Writer's Portable Mentor by Priscilla Long, a Seattle writer and teacher of writing:

The Writers With Kids series in particular blew my mind: is it possible for reasonably normal human beings to parent and write productively and creatively? (The answer seems to be yes, but so far my kids haven't read the memo.) There's a gazillion more of these resources out there, these are just the ones that have given me the boost to start writing again.


Has all this generosity and abundance been here all along, just waiting for me to search for help? 

There's a life lesson in there somewhere.

going to camp!

I'm all signed up for the August trip to Camp NaNoWriMo. Na(tional) No(vel) Wri(ting) Mo(nth) usually occurs in November, but there's also a camp-themed reprise in June and August. Here's the scoop: between midnight on August 1 and August 31, I (and a buncha other people) will write 50,000 words.

I mentioned this to a friend, and she said, "It seems if you are writing thoughtfully and with literary merit, about 500 words per day is the most one could manage." I said, yes, it is. I will not be writing with literary merit. The goal is to write an average of 1,667 words per day. This is crank-it-out-city.

The whole point of this exercise is to blow past that nasty little editor whispering in our ear, "Eeep! I can't believe you would write that! That's just awful! Who would be interested in that muck? Why don't you clean it up just a little before going on?"

And before you know it, you have novelis paralysis. Or even novelis rigor mortis.

I attempted NaNoWriMo several years ago. I had a bare wisp of an idea that truthfully didn't overly excite me, and around about day 8, I was seriously in the weeds. Not only was I so terribly behind in word count I would have to write around the clock for a week to catch up, my idea choked. If I'd known my characters better, I might have been able to listen to where they wanted to go. If I'd really understood that being in the weeds is a completely normal place to be on day 8 or almost any other,  it might not have been fatal.

As I've started writing again in the last few months, part of my practice has been to read a lot of good writers on writing, and they all agree on one thing: bad is the pathway to good. You have to produce something, even something truly heinous, before you can produce anything really good. So for the month of August--and the days leading up to my departure for camp--I'm embracing "in the weeds." I'm going to own that patch before we're done.