In my spare time, I’ve been searching videos on writing. It turns out that there is a wealth of videos online about writing. How did I not know this before now? I thought I’d share a few quick videos from one of my favorite writers.
Here she is talking both about her book “Moral Disorder” but also about being a writer…
And here she is talking about her adventures in the Twitterverse…
In case you are interested, here is the link to the New York Review article about Twitter that Margaret references in the video. Enjoy.
Well, it does appear that the Faber Academy course is legitimate. They contacted me today and they didn’t rescind the offer *phew*. I popped online to see if anyone had blogged about this course and what they thought of it. Even though this is the first time it is being offered in Canada, the course has been available in the UK and France for a few years. I haven’t found one person who has blogged about a negative experience. All have written glowing reviews similar to this one from Antonia Hayes in Trespass Magazine. Another interesting thing, I have a suspicion that one of the guest speakers will be a writer named Stephen J Watson. I’m waiting for the course details in order to confirm. Interestingly enough, he participated this same course with Faber and now, a little over a year later he is publishing his first book called BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP. The rights to the book have been sold in a ridiculous number of countries and the film rights just sold yesterday. Ummm…wow!
A few weeks ago, I stumbled on an article in the Globe and Mail from last February that indicated that Faber Academy had decided to come to Toronto. The details seemed extraordinary to me…it was almost too good to be true. They would offer two different six month courses, one for writers interested in long fiction (novels) and one for those who write poetry. I immediately jumped over to their website to look at the course on writing novels. The course director and primary teacher is Miriam Toews (pronounced Tâves), author of numerous highly successful novels–many of which sit on my own bookshelf. Her most recent being THE FLYING TROUTMANS. I read further, and to my delight, one of the guest speakers will be none other than:
Yes! Margaret Atwood would teach one of the classes. I couldn’t be more excited. There were many other established and award winning authors who would be doing guest sessions over the six months but I was sold based on these two writers, whom I admire. However, I then noticed that the application process closed in two days and required that I submit both a letter of application along with a sample of my writing. I also looked at the price. Wow! Far more expensive then any writing course I’d taken to date. I stewed about this for about 24 hours and then submitted my application. I’d come to the conclusion that one never knows what could happen unless one tries.
I told them outright that I had not been published, the length of manuscripts I had written to date and the reason why I wished to be considered. I then, knowing there wasn’t any hope that an unknown writer without having any publishing credits to her name would ever be accepted, promptly tried to forget it.
Then I got an email from the Academy telling me that they were pleased to offer me a place in the course and that they were impressed with my application. My reaction? Shock and disbelief. How in the world did my writing pass their scrutiny. Yes, I’d worked hard on it and was pretty pleased with that scene, but I’m a total amateur. I began to think it was a hoax. A scam to take money from poor unsuspecting fools like me who want to be published but never will be. Aaaack! So, being me, I began to do my research. The article was in The Globe and Mail, the CBC news website, and in the Arts section of the National Post. All trusted sources of information. So far so good. Then I sent a tweet to Margaret Atwood. If it was a scam, surely she’d be horrified to see her name used for promotion like this. Indeed, she confirmed she would be teaching one of the classes in January. At this point, I started to really get excited. It was time to break the news to my husband that I wanted to take the course and let him know the cost. I will give the man credit, he only flinched slightly when I told him the cost. Then he immediately encouraged me to do it. He’s a good man, my husband.
The course will be held at Massey College in Toronto. I looked it up too.
I don’t know about you, but the dining hall has a flavour of Hogwarts, does it not? It’s a beautiful campus from the pictures I’ve seen. The course runs for two hours on Wednesday nights along with about six Saturday workshops. I’m both thrilled and frightened. A part of me is terrified that they’ll realize they’ve made a horrible mistake, that they intended to make the offer to someone else and that I’m off the list. I’m going to focus myself on positive thoughts and wait for the course details to arrive.
My husband has noticed that I’m happier lately. It was like this for me last year as well. I seem to be benefiting from residual endorphins from the 3 Day Novel Contest. It has caused me to take some time to think about this business of my personal happiness. I read once that the secret to happiness is simply identifying the things that make you feel good and then doing them more often. For some people it’s gardening, or listening to music or reading. I’ll admit, I enjoy all of those things. However, the one thing that gives me the biggest rush of all is writing.
There are times when I feel like the little boy in the picture…as if someone is handing me a gift of something special. It happens when a particularly wonderful turn of phrase comes to me, or a scene that I’ve been struggling comes together with a rush, or when particular good dialogue just seems to flow and I can hear the voices of the characters in my head. For me, that’s a “high”. When I don’t write for months at a time, my mood is different. I loose that connection to the one thing (beyond my family) that I’m truly passionate about.
I’ve made a promise to myself–I will set a weekly word count goal and I will make it a regular part of my routine…a regular part of my happiness routine, to be precise.
I’ve had a few days to recover from the contest and time to digest what I’ve learned. I’m going to attempt to create my own survival guide here. My list can’t compare to the excellent guide on the 3 Day Novel website, but here are my thoughts:
For The Writer
Make an Outline! Some people can write without one, most will fail. When you are under pressure and you can’t get the words to flow, your outline will save you. If you don’t have an outline you’ll spend FAR too much time thinking and not enough time writing. Either your word count or your story will suffer…possibly both. I know this from experience. Further, an outline will give you the freedom to write scenes out of sequence if you get stuck. This can help free up the creative flow.
Do your research BEFORE you start writing: If you have an outline, you should know what research you need to do before you start. The same thing goes for characters. Know them and their motivations before you sit down to write.
Get into the writing and stay there! Don’t stop to look up the spelling of a word or to search for a synonym in your thesaurus. Highlight the word, or underline it, and come back to it after the story is done. Once you are finished, you can back track and fix it. Trust me, every time you leave the story, it will be harder to get your flow back. Stay with the characters as much as you possibly can. At the end of the weekend, you shouldn’t remember what happened on twitter, or on-line, or in your house, or with your friends. You should only remember the story.
Shut off the Internet! Set yourself goals of specific periods of time that you will write without stopping. Some set a goal of 5 hours, others as little as 1 hour at a stretch. My magic number is 3 hours. I set an alarm and write without stopping until it goes off. I then allow myself 30 minutes for a break to eat, pee, check twitter, and do research (if something has come up that I didn’t catch in the outline)
Sleep! Get at least 5 hours of sleep each night or you will crash and burn on Day 3. There may be times where you keep going into the night because the muse is with you and it must be written. That’s fine…go for it! However, if you stay awake for 72 hours, what you write in the last 24 hours will be ridiculous and incoherent. I know this from experience too.
Stop half way through your sentence when you take a break! When you return to your work, it will be easier to get the flow going again. For some reason, a period is like a stop sign to me. If I come back and try to start writing, it’s almost as bad as starting with the first sentence all over again.
Eat! In particular, have quick easy meals that can be cooked in under 10 minutes. My favorites were of the frozen bagged meals in minutes kind. That doesn’t mean you have to eat crap. I had portobello mushroom and asparagus tortellini and the like. Delicious and nutritious. For snacks, keep some high energy low glycemic snacks close by and eat every 2 hours or so…even if it’s just a small handful of almonds. Bananas…another great food. Sweet and full of potassium!
Have a private space to write! This is critical. If you are in the living room with your family, there will be too many distractions. I have an office at home with a door I can close. On Labour Day weekend when I’m writing, they may only come into that room to bring me food and water. That’s it. It’s not important where you write…just that you be alone and relatively comfortable when you do it.
Set goals! The 3 Day Novel Contest has a great breakdown of where you should be at the end of each day. Read it. Then set reasonable goals for yourself. Set a minimum goal and a maximum goal. Shoot for the maximum goal but be happy if you can only get to the minimum. Submissions for this contest can run from 12,000 words to 50,000 words. The average submission is 100 pages or about 25,000 words. Your minimum goal should be close to that…though 20,000 words will get you that 100 pages if you write lots of dialogue. I recommend setting your low goal at 8,000 words per day and your high goal at 15,000 words per day based on what was being tweeted during the contest. This seems to be a reasonable target. Don’t give up if you miss a target, either keep writing until you hit it or get some sleep and increase your goal for the next day. Set a goal to finish by 6pm on Sunday. You will want some editing time to go back and fix those highlighted words and re-read for plot holes before midnight if you can.
Do what works for you! If all else fails, throw all these tips out of the window and just do what works for you.
For Friends and Spouses
Please don’t make plans or invite people over to visit. Please also divert any well-wishers who show up unexpectedly. Time is precious while we are writing and every interruption will make it exponentially harder for us to finish.
Please slip food under the door on a regular basis so we don’t starve.
Please don’t comment on how bad we smell. We don’t have time to shower (see point #1 above)
Please don’t come in to kiss us, hug us, or otherwise tell us how proud you are that we are doing something so amazing (see point #1). We’ll be happy to accept your accolades after the contest is over.
When we wander aimlessly about the house looking for something we’ve lost but don’t recall what it was…just put us to bed and set the alarm for say…4am. Also, please put us to bed if we start talking to inanimate objects…even more important if they start to talk back.
Please don’t plan any activity for yourself between 6pm and 10pm on Day 3. We need you to read the manuscript and point out an gaping plot holes, spelling mistakes and so forth.
Please remember that this is a first draft written in 3 days. Be nice. Do not say ANYTHING other than how wonderful the manuscript is. You can of course, provide us with the information requested (see point #6)…just be REALLY nice about it. The manuscript is supposed to be crappy. That’s what re-writes and edits are for.
Don’t ask us if we think we will win. We don’t have a magic 8 ball. However, it goes without saying that we WANT to win.
Spouses: don’t ask where the children’s (socks, pants, books, toys, games, cell phones, etc) are. Keep looking, you’ll find them. Refer to point #1.
Understand that we truly appreciate everything you do for us while we sequester ourselves over the weekend. We’ll thank you afterwards (refer to point #1)
Overall, it’s the most gruelling weekend I spend each year. I don’t know how many more years I’ll do it. I suspect I’ll keep doing it until I’m in a position to write full time (or at least more than I can right now). This is because it provides me with a piece of writing that I can continue to work on over the coming year. I would love to hit the short list this year, but even if I don’t, just having a manuscript I can expand is well worth the $50 and the crazy weekend!
Relief is setting in. I’m at 23,044 with only the Epilogue left to write. This has been the craziest 3 Day Novel contest yet. Wow!
I’m tired…but not as tired as I thought I’d be at this point. I’m excited because I’m only about an hour away from the end. My eyes are exhausted and keep twitching across the computer screen. The tips of my fingers are numb and keep hitting the wrong keys. The desire to puke that I had last night, has not hit me yet today. In fact, I think a bit of euphoria is setting in because I’m so close…
I have managed to fit in the “baby’s arm with an apple”. Finally. Challenges are all covered and completed. Actually, it was kind of fun and I might let my friends torture me again next year. I can’t imagine what the 3 day people will think when they read this manuscript. LOL!
I’m going to push to the end and then take a break. I think I’ll print it and walk away from it for an hour and give my eyes a rest. Maybe a nice hot bath. Then I’ll come back to edit with, hopefully, a clear head. This will be the first time I’ve actually had time to edit. The past few years I’ve been writing until the very end trying to just get the bare bones of the story down.
I’m tired this morning but am hoping the almonds (brain food) I ate will kick in soon and make me sharp. Hope is a commonly used word at this point of the contest, as in: I hope I make my word count today (I missed yesterday’s word count of 20,000 by a little over 1,000), I hope my plot will make sense, I hope I can actually finish this thing, I hope my eyes don’t fall out of my head, I hope I don’t pass out from exhaustion, I hope I don’t puke. You know…the usual.
I stayed up late trying to push for my word count and am not sure if I’ll pay for it today in edits and deletes. At a certain point, the tree outside my window started giving me story tips. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to turn out to be a good thing.
I have a lot to write. I’m going to ignore the Internet more than usual and go back to writing in 3 hour increments. I had a kajillion interruptions yesterday, but I’m locking down in the cave today. I hope to write at least 7,000 and hopefully 12,000 words by 6pm. that would leave me 6 hours to fill in details, edit and clean up any issues with plot. Oh. And I still need to add a baby’s arm holding an apple. I just googled it. Yep, ewwwww. This might be tricky.
Just a quick update for now. My word count is lower than I’d like again, but I’m not discouraged. It’s primarily because of interruptions. My hubby rode 40K for Cancer today in honour of his Mom and Dad who both died of Cancer. I wasn’t going to miss him ride across that finish line today–not even for this contest. I’m so proud of him. He finished the race in 1 hour and 21 minutes despite the fact that he was riding into a 25km/hr head wind.
I feel great right now. I just finished eating and warming up my coffee. The writing I have done today is stuff that I’m really happy with. I’ve hit that spot where the story is truly coming alive for me and I have a hard time leaving it. That’s a good sign and, barring another interruption this afternoon of friends who are in the area for a couple of hours on their way home, the word count should start to compound. I hope I don’t have to write too late tonight to make up for lost ground.
Here are the things that I’m finding are working for me so far:
Ignoring my word count as much as possible and just staying with the story. The word count becomes more important to me later in the day when I know I need to hit a target before I can sleep.
Stopping mid-sentence when I get up to have a break. Surprisingly, this is making it so much easier to start again afterwards. Yep, I’ve resorted to psychological tricks.
Full screen mode…it’s a god send. It makes all the difference for me.
Having a good outline. This rocks and is the reason I’m already doing so much better than prior years. In past years, I’ve only had a few notes on characters and setting and I let the story go from there. It works for some people but it doesn’t work for me.
Writing in chunks. This is the first year I’ve truly disconnected from Twitter and the internet for hours at a time to write. It doesn’t feel painful because I allow myself a half hour after each 3 hour chunk to catch up with Twitter and the chat room. I can’t imagine disconnecting for the weekend, so this has been a good compromise.
As an update on my challenges…nope, I haven’t yet been able to incorporate a baby’s arm holding and apple (remember, there can be no baby, just a baby’s arm per Simon’s challenge)–but I think I’ll get that done soon. I’m thinking it may be part of cover art the MC sees in a bookstore that is one of the settings in the book…or perhaps she’ll see only part of a tattoo…I’m not sure yet. I’m still hoping I’ll come up with something a bit more clever than that.
Random musings about writing fiction, reading fiction and living (in reality).
"The older we get, the more...you realize there's a whole range of things you will never do, of things and people you will never be. As life becomes more and more limiting, there is something wonderful about being able to get inside the skin of people unlike yourself." ~Lee Smith
