My Bellevue class's total word count (23 students): 102,557
My Seattle class's total word count (8 students): 29,102
Total Northwest-Chinese School Related Noveling In November of 2010: 183,447 words of novel rough drafts.
WHEE!!!
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
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!
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!
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
On Books That Are Short
Two weeks ago, working my way through a gift certificate to a used bookstore on University Way (Twice Sold Tales), I picked up all five of Lloyd Alexander's "Prydain Chronicles": The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, & The High King.
I read these in the third or fourth grade and remember adoring them, though I didn't get, at the time, any of the references to Welsh legends (many characters are covert homages or open imports from Welsh mythology) or many of the archetypes at work in general. This was the first fantasy epic I remember reading, even though "epic" might seem a strong word for a series with no installment over 300 pages, especially in the age of Harry Potter. Before rereading them this past week, my strongest memories of this series were the completely awesome bard with the polygraphic harp (it breaks every time he exaggerates, and he exaggerates, as one would expect of a storyteller, all the time) and the fact that one of the chapters in the first installment ends with the bonechilling line "Before Taran could reach for his sword, the animal sprang." Because I'm a loving older sister, I stopped the book THERE for the night when I was reading it to my six year old brother. I'm pretty sure I also hissed "The animal sprang!" at him periodically throughout the next two or three days before finally relenting and reading him the next bit in the story. Miraculously, we're still talking to each other as adults.
Going over them this time, I appreciated an element that I missed entirely the first time around. These are books filled with archetypes, not to say stereotypes: the callow farm boy with dreams of shining armor and gallant charges, the slightly airheaded rebellious princess whom he hates on sight and who's clearly destined for him, the strong, silent warrior, doubtless older than he looks, who lingers on the sidelines of his quests to mentor, reprimand and generally save his rear end when required. There's even a sort-of-animal sidekick in Gurgi, whose catchphrase "Crunching and munchings?", as delivered by my fifth grade teacher, could send us all into stitches.
The story is more predictable and the language simpler than a lot of what's exploded into Young Adult Lit over the past ten years, especially in the fantasy department. But I was still giggling at snarky exchanges and weeping at the finale, and it's because there's an economy of expression in these books that's been almost abolished from modern literature. I'm much more of a Les Miserables than a The Old Man and the Sea reader myself; I appreciate those big sprawling stories that you can lose yourself in for days, make into four-hour-long movies, and, in a pinch, use as a footstool to reach the top shelf. By thirty pages into The Book of Three, the first installment, we've already introduced our hero, established his main predicament, removed him from his comfortable, if boring, home and plunged him headlong into danger accompanied by a heroic mentor whose own mission lies parallel to the hero's and will be compromised if he turns aside to help. Just for comparison's sake, this takes Tolkien about a sixth of The Lord of the Rings.
(For the record, this is comparing apples and oranges. I have actually written papers arguing that the entire structure of Tolkien's epic falls apart if you don't pay attention to those interminable first chapters that introduce the Shire, establish the Hobbit friendships and take our four diminutive heroes through a sort of Basic Training. But Alexander certainly gets the job done faster.)
The thing is, while moving the plot at such a rapid pace, Alexander isn't sacrificing character development or world-building; he's just doing it in clear, broad strokes, letting the reader's imagination do a lot. He's not using ten words where two will do. And he's taking advantage of the fact that his audience, children and young teenagers, are storytellers at their core and will create the story's world with only minimal input from him. The language is spare and the emotions of the characters are put out bluntly, but the story unfolded in my mind as vividly as any other. Maybe even more so!
There's a number of shorter young adult series and trilogies that I read in my childhood which I'd like to see enjoy some of the benefits of the explosion of the genre: Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea trilogy, for one, and John Christopher's The White Mountains and its sequels. Some of the tomes my students have read last year and this year didn't actually seem to have enough story to justify their great weight of words. And especially this month, with my students (and me!) frantically throwing pages at our wordcount goals, I'm thinking about the importance of a good story at the core.
Lloyd Alexander's shorter books not be much more than 50,000 words. But every word is a crucial part of the story he's telling. Just something to think about.
And now, back to my own word count -- far behind where I should be today! Time for Write Or Die!
I read these in the third or fourth grade and remember adoring them, though I didn't get, at the time, any of the references to Welsh legends (many characters are covert homages or open imports from Welsh mythology) or many of the archetypes at work in general. This was the first fantasy epic I remember reading, even though "epic" might seem a strong word for a series with no installment over 300 pages, especially in the age of Harry Potter. Before rereading them this past week, my strongest memories of this series were the completely awesome bard with the polygraphic harp (it breaks every time he exaggerates, and he exaggerates, as one would expect of a storyteller, all the time) and the fact that one of the chapters in the first installment ends with the bonechilling line "Before Taran could reach for his sword, the animal sprang." Because I'm a loving older sister, I stopped the book THERE for the night when I was reading it to my six year old brother. I'm pretty sure I also hissed "The animal sprang!" at him periodically throughout the next two or three days before finally relenting and reading him the next bit in the story. Miraculously, we're still talking to each other as adults.
Going over them this time, I appreciated an element that I missed entirely the first time around. These are books filled with archetypes, not to say stereotypes: the callow farm boy with dreams of shining armor and gallant charges, the slightly airheaded rebellious princess whom he hates on sight and who's clearly destined for him, the strong, silent warrior, doubtless older than he looks, who lingers on the sidelines of his quests to mentor, reprimand and generally save his rear end when required. There's even a sort-of-animal sidekick in Gurgi, whose catchphrase "Crunching and munchings?", as delivered by my fifth grade teacher, could send us all into stitches.
The story is more predictable and the language simpler than a lot of what's exploded into Young Adult Lit over the past ten years, especially in the fantasy department. But I was still giggling at snarky exchanges and weeping at the finale, and it's because there's an economy of expression in these books that's been almost abolished from modern literature. I'm much more of a Les Miserables than a The Old Man and the Sea reader myself; I appreciate those big sprawling stories that you can lose yourself in for days, make into four-hour-long movies, and, in a pinch, use as a footstool to reach the top shelf. By thirty pages into The Book of Three, the first installment, we've already introduced our hero, established his main predicament, removed him from his comfortable, if boring, home and plunged him headlong into danger accompanied by a heroic mentor whose own mission lies parallel to the hero's and will be compromised if he turns aside to help. Just for comparison's sake, this takes Tolkien about a sixth of The Lord of the Rings.
(For the record, this is comparing apples and oranges. I have actually written papers arguing that the entire structure of Tolkien's epic falls apart if you don't pay attention to those interminable first chapters that introduce the Shire, establish the Hobbit friendships and take our four diminutive heroes through a sort of Basic Training. But Alexander certainly gets the job done faster.)
The thing is, while moving the plot at such a rapid pace, Alexander isn't sacrificing character development or world-building; he's just doing it in clear, broad strokes, letting the reader's imagination do a lot. He's not using ten words where two will do. And he's taking advantage of the fact that his audience, children and young teenagers, are storytellers at their core and will create the story's world with only minimal input from him. The language is spare and the emotions of the characters are put out bluntly, but the story unfolded in my mind as vividly as any other. Maybe even more so!
There's a number of shorter young adult series and trilogies that I read in my childhood which I'd like to see enjoy some of the benefits of the explosion of the genre: Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea trilogy, for one, and John Christopher's The White Mountains and its sequels. Some of the tomes my students have read last year and this year didn't actually seem to have enough story to justify their great weight of words. And especially this month, with my students (and me!) frantically throwing pages at our wordcount goals, I'm thinking about the importance of a good story at the core.
Lloyd Alexander's shorter books not be much more than 50,000 words. But every word is a crucial part of the story he's telling. Just something to think about.
And now, back to my own word count -- far behind where I should be today! Time for Write Or Die!
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
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!
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!
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Just to say...
....so many of my students have great friend groups in their stories with tight relationships and sudden betrayals, at least according to their plot outlines. This makes me happy for two reasons:
1. It confirms my sense that young adult literature in general is becoming more and more peer-group focused, or perhaps this is something that's always been great about YA lit, come to think of it, as things like 'The Book of Three" and "The White Mountains" and even "Redwall," come to mind. I haven't read "The Hunger Games" yet, but the summary of that one as given me by one of my tutees was that, while there's a principal romance at work in the stories, the book itself is at least as concerned with the main character and her friends, not just the boy she loves. And since I think solid friend groups and "fellowships" are both more interesting to read and harder to write well than straight romance, I like this trend.
2. *I* get to read all these stories! And I LOVE friendships, fellowships and and gasp-oh-no-what-now?! betrayals! Whee!
1. It confirms my sense that young adult literature in general is becoming more and more peer-group focused, or perhaps this is something that's always been great about YA lit, come to think of it, as things like 'The Book of Three" and "The White Mountains" and even "Redwall," come to mind. I haven't read "The Hunger Games" yet, but the summary of that one as given me by one of my tutees was that, while there's a principal romance at work in the stories, the book itself is at least as concerned with the main character and her friends, not just the boy she loves. And since I think solid friend groups and "fellowships" are both more interesting to read and harder to write well than straight romance, I like this trend.
2. *I* get to read all these stories! And I LOVE friendships, fellowships and and gasp-oh-no-what-now?! betrayals! Whee!
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!
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!
Saturday, October 16, 2010
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!
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!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)