Excerpt

Introduction

A NaNoWriMo Every Month

Over the next thirty days (give or take), this book will walk you through writing a novel, from start to finish, with an eye toward making this daily discipline and monthly productivity a normal, attainable baseline in your creative life. That's fifty to one hundred thousand words in a month, from your mind onto the printed page, forming a story that will pull your audience through from Once upon a time... to ...and they died happily ever after (you can tell what kind of novels I write, can't you?).

And, if this book does its job correctly, it won't help you do it just once—or even just once a year—but over and over again, every month.

You know, like the pros do. The reason they can do it, and you can't (yet)?

They know something that you don't.

Here it is:

Words are not the difficult part. Words are easy. Between email, chats, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and [insert your favorite social networking venue here], we all write thousands of words per day—many of them spinning yarns, relating anecdotes, and fabricating excuses (all of which are forms of storytelling).

The problem is not the words, but the way you think about them.

This book is about head games, since almost everything that obstructs a writer resides between the ears: dogmas, illusions, misapprehensions, phobias, paranoias, delusions, and other inhibitions that separate you from your creativity.

Conquer those—and marry that determination to a passion for learning, experimentation, and a touch of business sense—and you've got the recipe for a career as a novelist (or, indeed, any creative artist).

This book contains a series of exercises, lessons, and meditations to help you build the skills to level up your productivity until you're producing like a professional. Some of them I've developed myself by cross-applying training I received for previous careers. The vast majority of them I've collected from mentors, friends, and others further down the course than I am.

So, Dan, how far along are you, exactly?

You should ask that of of anyone you're looking to learn from. If you want to master something, you need to learn from people who are further along the road you want to travel. Self-help gurus are about a penny-per-gross (and a lot of them really are gross). Someone selling you a program for improving in area X had better have some demonstrated expertise in area X—otherwise, you've got nothing other than slick marketing and warm-and-fuzzy feelings upon which to base your decision to invest your time and money.

So, here's my experience:

At the time of this writing, in my adult career I have released seventeen novels, three nonfiction books (not including this one), two short story collections and a further twenty-three short story singles, published nearly three dozen articles (most of them on computer geekery, a couple of them philosophical treatises for a popular audiences, and a further few on cinematic storytelling and neurocognition), and have a further six novels and fifteen short stories at various stages in the publication process. I've also written a number of screenplays (even got paid for one of them), a slew of poetry, and, at one point, a philosophy book that mercifully never made it to publication.

Before my days as a professional novelist, I was an independent filmmaker, an audio/video producer, a network and security consultant, a member of several startups in silicon valley, and the CEO of two (ultimately unsuccessful) companies—one in the entertainment business, the other in the computer security field.

I do not currently make a living from my fiction—but I do make a comfortable and growing secondary income from it. My primary income, at the time of this writing, comes from producing audiobooks.

I am approaching middle-age, and in the early middle-stages of my writing and publishing career. I'm close enough to the beginning to remember (with great vividness and terror) the struggles of the early novelist. I'm far enough past those struggles to appreciate why they happen, how to manage them, and how they develop as a career develops. This book is intended for writers with between zero and five professional-level books under their belts, who want to transition from being a hobbyist (or artist) to being a professional.

A Novel In A Month

The "write a novel in a month" notion underpinning this book is one I've shamelessly lifted from NaNoWriMo (the NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth), an Internet-driven social phenomenon whereby, every November, people around the world attempt to do the "impossible" job of writing a novel in a month.

Many of them succeed.

And most of those that succeed never use that success as a springboard into a career as a novelist. Frankly, most of them have no desire to.

There are a number of reasons to do NaNoWriMo: the value of a challenge, the desire to check something off one's bucket list, the opportunity to use social solidarity to conquer a fear or fulfill a dream, or to see if you might have it in you to be a novelist after all.

I did my first NaNoWriMo in 2006. I had written books before: nonfiction books, which were well received, fiction books which stayed in the drawer, screenplays (three of which were produced, one of which sold to a Canadian studio and was never produced, and others which never found a home), and articles for major tech magazines. I was familiar with the notion of writing fast and to deadline, but the thought of applying that ethos to my fiction terrified me. It seemed impossible.

But it wasn't.

I didn't "win" that first NaNoWriMo, but I did get farther than I expected. I failed upwards, and it is not a coincidence that my first professional novel was finished the following year. It wasn't until 2010 that I did my first novel-in-a-month, and that year I did three.

NaNoWriMo taught me how. The arbitrary goal of "do a novel in a month" meant that, for that month, I had to somehow get my butt planted to a chair every day, in front of a keyboard, and produce 1700 words or more each day.

What no one told me at the time, and what it took me a few more years to discover, was that this is a professional pace. 1700 words per day is in the middle-low end of the spectrum of what it takes to make a living as an undiscovered, unknown genre fiction author in today's world.

And it's only two or three hours of work per day.

It also taught me that all the excuses that writers bandy about when discussing writing amongst themselves ("I'm too busy," "I can't find time with my day job," "I'm just not feeling the story," "I'm not in the right head space for this one," "Inspiration just isn't coming for me today," etc.) are different ways of saying "I've let my fear and stress get in the way of my creativity."

And living by its ethic—the ethic of writing every day—taught me very quickly that many of the other fears we all harbor ("What if I run out of ideas?" "What if I'm not original enough?" "What if I suck?" "What if I'm too boring to tell a good story?" "Won't I start repeating myself if I write too much?" "Doesn't it take care and many drafts to craft a great novel?") are not only wrong, they're exactly wrong.

Over the course of this book, I hope to show you how they're wrong, and why, in a way that will open up your creative world to a future limited only by your timidity.

So let's get started...

with the preface.

A Novel In A Month

The "write a novel in a month" notion underpinning this book is one I've shamelessly lifted from NaNoWriMo (the NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth), an internet-driven social phenomenon whereby, every November, people around the world attempt to do the "impossible" job of writing a novel in a month.

Many of them succeed.

And most of those that succeed never use that success as a springboard into a career as a novelist. Frankly, most of them have no desire to. There are a number of reasons to do NaNoWriMo: the value of a challenge, the desire to check something off one's bucket list, the opportunity to use social solidarity to conquer a fear or fulfill a dream, or to see if you might have it in you to be a novelist after all.

I did my first NaNoWriMo in 2006. I had written books before—nonfiction books, which were well received, and fiction books which stayed in the drawer—and screenplays (three of which were produced, one of which sold to a Canadian studio and was never produced, and others which never found a home), and articles for major tech magazines, so I was familiar with the notion of writing fast and to deadline, but the thought of applying that ethos to my fiction terrified me. It seemed impossible.

But it wasn't.

I didn't "win" that first NaNoWriMo, but I did get farther than I expected. I failed upwards, and it is not a coincidence that my first professional novel was finished the following year. It wasn't until 2010 that I did my first novel-in-a-month, and that year I did three.

NaNoWriMo taught me how. The arbitrary goal of "do a novel in a month" meant that, for that month, I had to somehow get my butt planted to a chair every day, in front of a keyboard, and produce 1700 words or more, each day.

What no one told me at the time, and what it took me a few more years to discover, was that that's a professional pace. 1700 words per day is in the middle-low end of the spectrum of what it takes to make a living as an undiscovered, unknown genre fiction author in today's world.

And it's only two or three hours of work per day.

It also taught me that all the excuses that writers bandy about when discussing writing amongst themselves, from "I'm too busy," "I can't find time with my day job," "I'm just not feeling the story," "I'm not in the right headspace for this one," "Inspiration just isn't coming for me today," etc. are different ways of saying "I've let my fear and stress get in the way of my creativity."

And living by its ethic—the ethic of writing every day—taught me very quickly that many of the other fears we all harbor ("What if I run out of ideas?" "What if I'm not original enough?" "What if I suck?" "What if I'm too boring to tell a good story?" "Won't I start repeating myself if I write too much?" "Doesn't it take care and many drafts to craft a great novel?") are not only wrong, they're exactly wrong.

Over the course of this book, I hope to show you how they're wrong, and why, in a way that will open up your creative world to a future limited only by your timidity.

So let's get started.

With the preface...

Preface

Before You Start Your Novel-in-a-Month

Tomorrow you're going to begin your novel-in-a-month, and if you've been contemplating a challenge like this, you may already have something in mind. You may, in fact, have vast outlines and character sketches of a kind of depth that would cause FBI snoops to run in terror and make role-playing gamers hide their heads in shame.

This chapter is a personal plea, from me to you, to ignore all of that glorious pre-production you've spent so much time, energy, and creativity on. Throw them out.

With creative endeavors, the first idea—the one that gets you to start a project—is rarely your best idea. It's the second and third ideas, the ones you stumble across in your journey from the dugout to the batter's box, that make you come alive and sparkle.

More than that, though, is the fact that the idea that you've invested so much time in pre-planning is stale. You've savored it, explored it from every angle, and now all that's left to do is to put the words down. It doesn't hold a promise of joy for you. There's no anticipation of discovery, of novelty or frisson. All you can hope to do is to cast your perfectly-planned sculpture into marble.

Except, stories don't work that way. Stories unfold in the telling. The best stories, the most memorable ones, are not the ones that are planned out from the beginning. There may be high notes the teller wants to hit on the way from point A to point Z, but the journey between those high points is unmapped, and the tale may change radically in the telling.

It's always been this way. Stories of all sorts—jokes, legends, campfire tales, anecdotes, and memories always change a little every time they're told. Sometimes they change a lot. The story emerges from the interaction of the teller with his world, whether that world is a live audience, or the printed page, or a rock'n'roll band.

Because yes, even songs change in the singing. Anyone who's ever been to a live show by their favorite band can attest, the venue alters the sound of the music, the guitarist uses different licks, the drummer improvises different fills, and the vocalist will sometimes riff off whole new verses on the spot, just for that audience, just for that night, in a version of the top-ten hit that nobody will ever hear again, unless they've thought to record it on their cell phone from their place in the audience.

Story is a living thing. And the more fully you map a territory around a story, the more staid and static the story will become in your mind—and that means it will be more difficult to stick with through the process of writing it all down.

When you finish your book, whether you start from scratch or work from that mountain of pre-prep you've done, nobody on the other end will know. It won't make the slightest bit of difference to your readers which way you did it, because all they care about is whether it's a story that moves them.

That's all.

Everything else that you associate with your love of literature—the geeking out over your favorite author's writing process, the fawning over language, the little jolt of pleasure at a perfectly timed plot twist, the deep rapture at the unexpected confluence of theme and character and plot and mood and phrasing to create the unforgettable moments that haunt you in your dreams—those are mostly the attitudes and desires and joys you take as a wanna-be writer, rather than as a reader.

Readers who don't secretly wish they were writers tend to remember stories in macroscope, not in microscope, just like moviegoers remember how much fun they had watching Star Wars, not how many chills they got because the medals ceremony was a shot-for-shot parroting of a particular sequence in Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will.

If you didn't get that reference, it's because you're not a film geek (which proves my point).

Going with your second idea, and doing it before you really understand what you've got your hands on or have had any chance to develop it, is what Dean Wesley Smith calls "Writing Into The Dark" (he has a book on the topic by that title, in fact—I recommend it). It's the place most professional writers end up, because it almost always yields quicker, fresher, better-quality results than arduously pre-planning and endlessly revising a story.

Some Tricks To Getting There

Of course, jumping straight into a story blindly and then writing off into the dark can be downright terrifying, because you don't know how to do that yet. Trust me, I've had Sensible-Me scream at me, many times over the years, "You don't know how to do this! You need to plan this out!"

Sensible-Me didn't think to consider that, not knowing how to write the books I was trying to write might mean that I also didn't know how to plan the books I was trying to write—but, then, Sensible-Me doesn't always think things through as often as he thinks he does.

Nonetheless, Sensible-You might need some scaffolding to feel secure enough to risk building your first few cathedrals. Sensible-Me certainly did. So, in that spirit, here are a couple forms of scaffolding that have proved quite useful to me at times when I was having trouble trusting the process.

The Elevator Pitch

The first one is the "elevator pitch," so named because it's what producers use when caught in an elevator with a financier in order to try to interest that financier in the amazing new movie the producer wants to make.

For example, the elevator pitch for my novel Suave Rob's Double-X Derring-Do might be:

"A far-future transsexual Evel Knievel tries to surf a supernova."

A similar pitch for Jurassic Park might be:

"An amusement park kingpin uses cloned dinosaurs to create the ultimate tourist attraction."

Your elevator pitch is your one-sentence premise. Everything else about the story is optional. You hold on to the premise—the thing your story is about—and let everything else spin out of it as you explore it through all the tools in your writerly toolkit.

The Slug Line

Another screenwriting tool that I've found works great for scaffolding is called the "slug line." This is the line in the film script that quickly sets the scene—"Ext. Swamp, Day" for example. I actually wound up liking this one so much I've used it as a narrative device in two of my long-running novel series. For example, in my mystery series, chapters are named for the time they start. For example:

"2:30 AM, Thursday"

Or, in my science fiction spy novel series,

"Luna City, Luna

0900 GMT

15 November, 2129"

It not only helps me keep my timelines straight as I write, but in those two series it's genre-appropriate—being, as they are, tightly plotted, time-dependent thrillers and espionage tales—and it also serves as a suspense device (it would not work well in the other books I write, and so it doesn't show up in them).

The Title

Writing from a title presents endless possibilities—even if you don't wind up keeping that title once your book is done. I've written several novels and two dozen short stories starting with nothing more than a title, because I get phrases popping into my head all the time that might make good ones.

I actually keep a file of titles I like enough to try finding a story for, and when I'm really tapped out, I'll troll that file for anything that tickles my synapses.

You can make titles from anything—mashing two other titles together, grabbing a partial quote from another novel (or story, or myth, or anything really), riffing on the title of another novel (my own And Then She Was Gone is a riff on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, though the two books have nothing else in common whatsoever). Be creative—be outrageous! And when you find a title that tickles you, try sticking it at the top of your manuscript and see what it suggests to you.

The First Line

Borrowing a first line from a classic book can also get you going in interesting directions, the same way a title can. Nathan Lowell, for example, begins each of his books with the first line of a classic novel, and then follows them in directions undreamt-of by their original authors. His Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series starts with "Call me Ishmael," which my might recognize as the first line from Moby Dick, and he uses it to launch an epic six book science fiction series that follows the adventures of one Ishmael Wang and his journey from destitute orphan to merchant marine to owner of his own shipping line. What Herman Melville saw as the start of a whaling-ship revenge tale, Nathan Lowell saw as an unselfconscious introduction by a narrator who begins with owning nothing but his name.

Connect-The-Dots

Here's a final bit of scaffolding that might help you get the confidence to let go of that hardcore outlining impulse. I call it the Connect-The-Dots Method—and it's another one I adapted from screenwriting (I later learned that other people have been doing it for years in novels, so I can't claim that it's original to me. I just happened to re-discover an obvious writerly brain-hack).

The Connect-The-Dots Method:

1. Start with two or three scenes that you can see clearly

2. Write those scenes first. Do not worry about how they fit together.

3. Then write the novel, and, over the course of the novel, when one of those scenes fits, drop it in and re-touch it so it flows with what you've written so far.

4. If you get to the end of the novel, and you haven't connected all the dots, save the other dots for another novel.

Final Thoughts

All of the forms of scaffolding above are story prompts. Story prompts are everywhere, they are always available for the taking from almost any source around you, and it's an idea I'll revisit a couple times again later on in this book, in different guises. When you're stuck for an idea, reaching for one can make the difference between a blank page and a good, solid daily word count. They're useful because they stimulate creativity without using it up.

As you progress in your carreer, and gain confidence in your abilities as a storyteller, you will probably find yourself working with less and less scaffolding. That's a good thing. It gives you more creative freedom, and lets more light shine on that wonderful creative genius in your subconscious—the stories that brew there are the stories that you will be remembered for, and the fewer filters they go through, the more vibrant and distinctive your voice will eventually be.

If you've only noodled as writing as a hobby, you will have trouble trusting your process. But what we with more than a handful of stories under our belt have learned (often to our surprise) is that ideas are easy. Execution is a difficult art to learn, but the ideas themselves are easy and come unbidden.

And, sometimes, the more you poke at, interrogate, sketch out, and ossify an idea, the more difficult it gets to execute that idea on paper. The more firmly you get that idea fixed in your head, the more you wind up trying to live up to it, so to speak. You get in your mind an imaginary standard. It becomse a shape in your head that you want to pour the story into.

But this ideal form is an illusion. It doesn't really exist, not even in your own mind—as you'll discover if you try to make your story perfect (writers have wasted entire careers this way—learn from their error!).

The perverse reality is, sometimes stories have their own ideas about what they should be. Even when you try your best to contain them, they break out of their oringal boxes and go directions you couldn't possibly anticipate. Even stories like Lord of the Rings, which was pre-planned within an inch of its life, wound up bearing very little resemblance to those initial plans once Tolkien had written the last word.

So whether you work with an outline, or a middling amount of scaffolding, or write completely into the dark, leave yourself the elbow room to follow the story where it wants to go. It has a better idea of what it wants to be than you do, and following it lets you play that wonderful positive-sum-game where ideas multiply instead of getting mined out.

We all experience that hard wall where it's impossible to think of what comes next. When that happens to you, don't worry about it. Much of the rest of this book is dedicated to techniques that will help you work your way around it, and it will also mention resources by other writers far more advanced that I am that will be helpful to you.

One other thing:

You may find that some—or most—of what I have to say is unhelpful to you. If that's the case, don't fret. Every writer's process is different. Every one of you reading this will be able to take some of the things I say and make them useful, and every one of you will look at other things I say and think "This guy is nuts, I'm not listening to that." That's as it should be. A major part of this journey for you over the next thirty-some days is going to be learning your own process. Learning your own process is the single most important thing you can do as a creative person—because your art comes from you, through processes that fit with your brain, lifestyle, and personality. If something I say threatens to derail you, please ignore it.

Now, get your butt in that chair, fire up that word processor, and engage your determination. You're about to embark on the grandest thing that a human can do—the one activity that is fundamental to human nature, an activity that is distinct to human beings and is, quite literally, more natural to us than language itself:

Storytelling.