National Novel Writing Month

Pep Talk from Alexander Chee wrote:Dear Writer,
I am thinking of a student of mine from many years ago, who, when she started out with me, was not my favorite writer. She took my class three times in a row, which surprised me. By the third class, she was one of my favorite writers. “What have you been doing, besides taking this class?” I asked her.


“Every day, I get up an hour earlier for work,” she said. “I’m unmarried, I have a good job, and I live alone. So I write for an hour and then go to work.”


What makes a writer a writer? Writing. A lot of people would say ‘talent’, but talent is really just the ability to do something well that most people have to work hard at. If you don’t think you have ‘talent’, just work hard instead—the talent often comes with a cost, anyway: a lack of good work habits. The talented ones often never had to learn to work hard; so many of them don’t finish their work because they never had to—it was enough to be talented, to offer people a glimpse of what you could be. So don’t be that person—don’t be the person that everyone believes could have done something. Be the person who tried.


The way our economy is structured, it’s never been so hard to get time off to write as it is now. If you’ve managed to clear this month, then, great. But you really only need a half hour a day, maybe an hour, to do this. The first thing to do is to locate that time. Many people do this writing before they do anything else—before they talk to anyone, before they tweet, check email, Facebook. If you can find this writing time before you do the rest of the work you have to do, you’ll find yourself feeling easier with people. You won’t have that awful feeling, like being stuck over the drain at the bottom of the pool.


The page-number count is important but it isn’t enough to just go HAM on the keyboard. Maybe take one of the days for drafting and make yourself a Character Bible—a list of the characters with the role each plays in the story. Make a list of the locations for the story. What do you know about them—and do you know enough? Can you research them, can you find them through Flickr or Instagram tags and look at them that way, if you can’t manage a research trip? What do you know about your characters’ jobs? What is their financial life like—where does their money come from and what do they spend it on?


If you get stuck, take time out and think of the unmade decisions in the draft. Make a list, and begin making those decisions. And if you don’t know enough to make them yet, do the research, even if it is just emailing a list of questions to a friend you think might know these things. You may even want to make lists at the end of each writing session: what needs to be researched, and what decisions need making?
The decisions of a novel are where the life of the novel touches ground. If you haven’t made them, that answering spirit may hesitate, unsure it is welcome. Keep track of the decisions you’ve made for your novel in a journal that is just for the novel. I keep mine like a private blog—the most recent entry is at the top, and it goes back in time to the oldest at the back, the end of the document. I write entries for each day of work—what needs doing, what I’m unhappy with, what I like—and I refer to it when I begin work the next day, so I can just drop back down into the mind of the novel.


If you have a paragraph or two that is just how you want the novel to sound, print it up and put it somewhere you can see it. Read it before you begin writing to put the tone in your head. There’s what Sigrid Nuñez calls “the tone that makes everything possible.” The tone that seems to make the writing come all on its own. When you find that tone, keep it handy. Somewhere you can read it easily to get it back.
And, if you’re distracted easily by the internet, use pen and paper. You can always type it up at the end, or you can use the device that turns your handwriting into word docs—though typing it all up, if you have time in the afternoon, can count as a revision.


One more habit: if someone asks you to do something during your writing time, say no. Protect your writing time at all costs. If this is something you’ve wanted to do for years, chances are there’s a part of you that feels like a friend who gets ditched every time. That part of you is waiting to do this. They are also afraid you’ll ditch. Don’t do it. Not this month. Show up and write.

Alaya Dawn Johnson wrote:Dear Writer,

So you’ve been working intensely on your novel for the last couple weeks. You’ve probably got a lot of words on the page. Maybe you feel amazing, energized, ready to head into the second half of the month. But a lot of you probably feel like I so often do when I write: a mess. I have published six novels (and written a bunch more) and every single time I reach a point where I sit down and stare at my computer and wonder why I ever thought this was possible. Who ever told me I could write something as sprawling and complicated and unwieldy as a novel? What is my art worth in this blip of time allotted to me in an infinitely expanding universe?

But it’s precisely when I find myself looking at the totality of the work and its imperfect representation of my own imperfect existence that I’m getting somewhere. It’s during that dark night of the writer’s soul that I can make magic. Because I’m being honest. I’m struggling to be myself, to create the art that only I can create, and it is my awareness of its fragile, transitory, flawed beauty that scares me. If you think that writing is easy (and chances are, after two weeks of high word count days, you don’t think so), then you aren’t being honest enough.

You don’t do this kind of work without something deep inside of you that has stood up and demanded expression. Probably for a long time. Probably in the face of many people who have told you that your voice doesn’t matter, that your experiences don’t have value, that you’re only good for how well you can shut up and smile and buy what they’re selling you. And I know, I know: this world is deeply unjust, with huge barriers in place for the vast majority of humans striving on the planet. Telling stories can seem like not just a luxury, but an indulgence that’s shameful for you to even desire.

And yet, it is so important to respect that part of you, the storyteller who still, despite everything, decided to sit down and write this month. Respect your bravery for even starting. You’ve been working hard this November. You’ve been trying—and screw Yoda, trying is doing, it is the most fundamental action, because it acknowledges the possibility of failure. Believe in your deep, true voice and what you’re aiming for. And in order for you believe that, you have to stare into the mess. You have to acknowledge to yourself that you will fail—we all fail— and you will try again because you are the only person who can tell your own story. Maybe you haven’t reached your word count goals from the beginning of November. Maybe you’re dealing with shame on top of the self-doubt and confusion of drafting. But the writing is the thing. Write a novel in November, or write a novel in six months, or write it in six years. But write. Stare into the messiness and the loneliness and hold on to that part of you that will not stop demanding expression.

You are going to doubt yourself sometimes. You might even stare into an infinite universe and wonder how your stories could possibly be of value. But they’re of value to you. After all these years, that’s what I keep coming back to. Just look honestly at your beautiful, fleeting mess of a self, and take a deep breath, and write.