Verdict from the Jury

Students' responses to the questions:

What did you like about the novel project?	What did you not like about the novel project?
It is interesting I like the old times in Europe, I put them in my story.	It takes days to finish it.
It made me feel more confident about my writing. Helped me shorten my time in ESL class in my school.	Going too fast. It is hard for me.
Practicing writing Know how hard it is to write a novel.
I liked how it was really fun we had dare machines to make our stories funny and goofy. I liked how our story could be as random as we wanted to.	I didn’t like how i had way too much homework from school to make my novel better. I didn’t like how I didn’t use my time wisely si could improve my story and I couldn’t make it as long as I could.
How it was really sad but good and how my characters came out to be.
I could use my imagination to create a story. I learned that a story can come with many lessons if it’s not meant to be	It took a lot of my time.. sometimes I got stuck on wha to write.
It was fun writing a story. I liked using the dare machine.	There was a lot to write. I don’t have a 2nd one.
One is the gut and another one is the theme.	Too long, no special stuff.
Writing the story.  It was very fun and interesting.	You had to write a novel in a certain time. It was a bit tiring, because sometimes I would stay up late writing it.
I liked doing the preplanning, and actually typing it down.	I didn’t like figuring out what my characters should say, and I didn’t like figuring out the enxt scene.
I liked it when we can create our own things, also getting tickets.	I didn’t like it when we had to write, and I didn’t like to write paragraphs.
I liked it because it was fun and a good experience.	I didn’t like it because I didn’t have much time to do other things.
I liked creating my characters and my world. I liked making my characters do what they did.	I didn’t like it when I got stumped.  Also, I hated not knowing how to spell a word when needed.
I always had something to do when I was bored. I had fun making up stuff.	Too much typing. Hard to think sometimes.
the two things I liked about the novel project is you get to experience writing your own story without having to follow rules also it lets you create your own story.	There was a time limit which made it o hard to manage writing the entire novel while writing other things.
I liked getting to create and write my own story without my mom yelling at me to do my homework. I also liked the prizes.	I really wish we had more time to finish and the pace was tiring.
Well, you had an extra challenge in doing wriitng.	Writer’s block and staying on topic.

Fanfiction...

This takes much more thought than I've got the time to give it right this instant, but I wanted to share this NaNoWriMo pep talk from Mercedes Lackey on the benefits of writing fanfiction.  It's usually a knee-jerk rejected thing, but it's always been interesting to me as a writer (good place to experiment with character and dialogue and prose without getting bogged down in world-building), as an academic (communal writing, the-author-is-dead, textual ownership), and as a teacher. Four of my students did fan novel this year or last.  One has now written something like 200 pages of "Magical Starsign," a DS game, and the character development she's adding to this game and the description she's pouring into it are impressive, and I've definitely seen her confidence in her own writing grow, or so it seems.  She's putting out great work for any new writer, let alone a twelve-year-old writing in her second or third language, and is that really diminished because her jumping-off point was a video game?

NaNoWriMo Pep Talk

Three NaNoWriMey tricks...

I've been so bad about posting!  Mostly because I've been terribly behind on my own wordcount, heh, and now I'm down with the flu to boot. However, after a marathon session during a very quiet night shift (almost 8000 words in seven hours), I'm all caught up.

I have two lesson plans to share that I'll get up tomorrow after I've reflected on them a bit.  But I wanted to share three tricks that have been immensely helpful to me over the last few days as I've struggled to catch up to my story.

1) Read a good book.
   I know, I know.  Thoroughly counter-intuitive.  This is Novel WRITING Month, not Reading.  Sure, most of us are dedicated fans of some form of literature or another, and especially those who do NaNoWriMo, and/or teach it, must be pretty dedicated to Story with a capital S or they wouldn't be intrigued by this little adventure in creative masochism.  But I'm a big believer in the idea that your output is only ever going to be as good as your input.  Over the last two days, as I've surged back from a big hole in my wordcount and gotten the story to a place where I feel much more confident about my ability to write all the way to the end, I've also been doing more reading.  Not a lot, not the curl-under-the-covers-for-three-hours kind of reading.  But I have Robin Mckinley's Dragonhaven and Connie Willis' Passage, both books I love that have significant narrative and thematic connections to my story, sitting next to my computer.  And every thousand words, if I want to, I'll take a fifteen minute break and just read a little.  I'm always more energized and more full of words when I come back.

2) Write the good stuff first.
   I want to stress that this works FOR ME.  For many people, almost all NaNoWriMoers, it doesn't.  The idea of NaNoWriMo is that, as the King says in Alice In Wonderland, "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end, then stop." And in previous years I've done that, with mixed results.  It's too early to say what my results are now, but I've already written the last 200 or so words of the book, as well as a few choice bits of dialogue from an important scene near the end and I've written the actual moment of the climax (as in, the moment the Ring falls into Mount Doom kind of thing, nothing before or after.) I have these in white text so I don't see them, but they're there, at the end of my document, adding to my wordcount and giving me something very clear to shoot for.  This also means that when I'm -- inevitably -- scrambling to get to the end at 11:00 on my last day, I'll hopefully feel a little less tragic about how I can't remember what exactly my protagonist was going to say or what that brilliant metaphor was that I know I had, because that text is already there, written in the (relative) calm of late Week 3, just waiting for me to highlight it and turn it visible again.  Which brings me to the third thing that's been working for me...

3) Hide your text.
I'm a pretty decent touch-typer, and so if you're the hunt-and-peck type, this might not work for you, although nothing says you can't keep your eyes on the keyboard.  I was trying to get some words in last weekend during a long bus ride back from Bellevue, and, terribly paranoid about someone reading my poor deformed first draft of a novel over my shoulder, I pulled up a new document and changed the text color to ivory.  It showed up just enough on the page for me to know where to put my cursor; then I turned my eyes out the window, and proceeded to write about 1500 words that I could not see. This was GREAT for me. It was like Write Or Die (http://writeordie.drwicked.com) without the annoying sounds and panic.   My eyes, my mind, all of it were on the scene of the story unfolding inside my imagination, and my fingers were just doing the necessary transcription work.  No spellchecking, no grammar fretting, no rereading, no going back to add a better adjective or vary dialogue tags. At the end of my bus ride, I highlighted the whole thing, changed the text to black, and scrupulously saved. Day's wordcount all but done in forty minutes, and I felt good about it too.  Of course it was riddled with typos and little red lines and it still wasn't the flawless recreation of the scene in my head I wanted -- but it's NaNoWriMo.  And the text was THERE.

Now me and my flu -- and my novel -- are going back to bed.  And to end on a joyous note, emails have been pouring in from my weekend students as they finish their novels.  You guys unquestionably and definitively rock. Soon I'll have so much to read!

My favorite dare

I've been signing into and off of the Young Writers' Program website the last few days as only a expert procrastinator can do (and this despite the fact that I have the kind of schedule this week that, for example, just now I got out of bed and will not have an opportunity to get back INTO bed or indeed enter my house at all until 33 hours from now), and so every time I see the welcome page the Dare Machine challenges me to new heights of absurdity.

Many of the dares are random and relatively silly, though definitely a good trick to get you jumpstarted if you're stuck.  One of them, however, has come up a few times and I really like it:

"We dare you to devote a chapter to your villain's morning routine."

Unless you're writing a first-person narration where this kind of information would be EXTREMELY tricky to wedge in, I think this is an awesome idea. (And even in a first-person narration, I imagine you could have someone give them the information for some plausible reason.)   I've been doing it for my villain as a prewriting exercise.  If you're writing a modern-day story with an antagonist in the form of a sibling, classmate or mean adult, this exercise will help you keep them human in your mind's eye.  How much can you REALLY hate someone who's still using Winnie the Pooh toothpaste, after all?

And if you're writing a sweeping fantasy epic, the morning routine can be either a great chance for lightness and humor (Xokor, Lord of a Thousand Hells, squinted into the obsidian mirror and frowned.  There was no doubt about it.  His hairline was definitely receding.  He'd need to order AT LEAST four executions before he'd feel better about this.)  or a chance to infuse more horror and terror into the situation by showing that the villain is even more powerful, evil, or heartless than your heroes thought.  Maybe his morning routine involves killing the servant who brought him his breakfast, just because.  Maybe his morning routine involves looking in his crystal ball -- where he can see and hear EXACTLY what the heroes are up to.  

Happy writing!

On Variety

One of my classes is already noveling.  The next class starts next weekend.  The rest of the insane noveling world starts in two weeks, on November 1st. I'm doing my own novel in pace with my second class, which means my 50,000 words need to happen between Saturday, October 23rd and Saturday, November 20th. (Not even a full month!)  And, just like (I hope) my students, I am filled with equal parts excitement and terror.  This is my third year doing NaNoWriMo, and while I've always "won" by hitting my required word count, I've never come CLOSE to the end of the story.  This year, with a tighter plot than usual and a modern-day setting so I won't need to spend so much time world-building, I'm hoping it actually happens.

In what is perhaps slightly inimical to the  spirit of NaNoWriMo, I'm doing some prewriting today, as my students did last week. I appreciate the thrill of setting forth on November 1st, or whenever you start, without so much as a chart, a compass, or even a back-up keg of drinking water on your metaphorical novelling boat. But for me, at least, it's never worked.  I posted a list of prewriting exercises in the previous post on NaNoWriMo lesson plans, and I'm sitting and grading my way now through a big pile of them.  And it's absolutely thrilling, the fantasies and the mysteries and the slice-of-life novels and the romances and all the rest of it that my students are hopefully writing right now.

The really interesting thing is the combination of similarity and variety.  I've come across three or four "young teenager goes to a fantasy world and has a quest" plots, for example.  Hey, it's a tried-and-true formula for everyone from C.S. Lewis to Neil Gaiman.  And yet, even just in utero, I can see differences in character, in tone, and certainly in events that are going to make each of these novels completely its own.  Last NaNo, one of my close friends and I retold the same fairy tale.  We've known each other over ten years, lived together for four years before her marriage, read, watch and listen to much of the same media, and even got our English degrees at the same college, so it'd be hard to find two people more likely to write similar stories.  There is NOTHING beyond the bare bones of the story similar between her book and mine. (Hers is closer to finished, for one thing.)

It's such a cliche, but everyone really does have their own story to write, and that book will never exist if they don't write it.

And now I'm off to finish grading and then do MY homework -- namely, my plot rollercoaster and my annotated NaNo playlist!

Let's start at the very beginning...

Or, you know, not.  However you want to start your novel.

A few handouts on ways to begin a novel, courtesy of Orson Scott Card's "How To Write Fantasy & Science Fiction" and the NaNoWriMo middle school workbook: Available here.



Also, first class started their  novels today, hooray!  I started grading some of their prewriting exercises on the way home on the bus.  Lots of great characters and exciting plots.  If you're reading this, think good thoughts for them!