NaNoWriMo ...

November has become globally known as National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, as it is affectionately called in many scribe-circles. I have participated in this November writing challenge on and off since its inception in 1999.

It wasn’t always a popular wordsmith thing to do and I recall many years back posting NaNoWriMo info to a members’ listserv of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, PWAC, and getting some flack feedback on it being considered ‘unprofessional’.  (Interesting perhaps unrelated side note here that my dictionary defines “bookish” as forming opinions through reading rather than experience.)  Well now … fast forward a decade plus later and it seems all the ‘cool kids’ are doin’ it.

The NaNoWriMo concept is that of a total honour system, one sets out to write daily, hammering out a month long 50,000 word draft novel manuscript. Now 50,000 words hardly constitutes a full on literary long-written tome by scholar standards, but as the site FAQ points out … “Our experiences since 1999 show that 50,000 is a difficult but doable goal, even for people with full-time jobs and children. The length makes it a short novel (about the length of The Great Gatsby). We don’t use the word “novella” because it doesn’t seem to impress people the way “novel” does.”

Much tongue-in-cheek type of humour abounds in the NaNoWriMo FAQ’s and info on the site giving the impression to take this experience lightly and enjoy the writing focused month. But nothing could be more of a juxtaposition than the droll Nano backgrounder info and the overly-enthusiastic member forums. This is a seriously serious month for many posting with little regard to children or full-time jobs. November for the dedicated wrimo is about nothing outside of late-night writing, self-deprivation and the dreams of a best-seller over-night (one-month) success (and the occasional use of too many hyphens).

Writer regions exist world-wide for those who want to dial-in and connect, launch the month, spend countless hours on-line chatting about what they are writing and given the volume of some postings, assuming taking valuable time away from the actual writing. Come to NaNoWriMo for personal reasons, take from it what you want, connect or not connect, post your word count daily if you want. At month end the goal is to spool in your 50,000 word document for a scramble and a word count and delete, earning the writer a virtual badge prize to proudly display. No editing required, no outlines or pre-thought pre-requisites just show up and write.

This 'hobby' writer site is not to be taken lightly, unless you wish to, as many heavy hitters have nailed great success including a reported over 250 NaNoWriMo novels that have been traditionally published. One of my all time favourite reads is a wrimo success story, Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. Visit the website and check out the press page and other cool details. Yes there is a greater cause, yes there are things you could purchase and support, but not a requirement to register, hang out as much or as little as you want and above all no rules to writing other than simply just do it! Set a personal goal, a vision of sorts, grab a pen or open a file, and start writing.

NaNoWriMo is not to be confused with Movember … although I am certain there are many unshaven cross over personal goals being met between these two very worthy global month long occasions in what used to be a sleeper of a month. November you are making a real name for yourself!

Enjoy the month no matter what your cause.

Write often, write always … and in November write daily!

Michelle

(ps … yes I am using my real name at Nano (check out my profile) and am shooting for a 50,000 word first draft of a short story series in development, no I am realistically NOT thinking instant bestseller … but then one can dream …)

A Passion for writing ...

“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or eternal fever..."  Letters and Journals of Lord Byron 

Passion instills creative self-energy of unique qualities. To be passionate about what one does, be it writing, painting, cooking, accounting, engineering, or whatever the task, one has to be one with the doing part of being. It is not simply enough to be the writer but one has to ‘do’ writing, and do it in a passionate way.

Writing comes from deep within, some would argue that it might even come from with-out, a beyond, from some energetic interruption from the universe gifted on to the page merely passing through the writer. However one discovers their words, the lack of desire in doing so makes the job of writing just that, a job. Any professional who is passionate about what they do will relay the same message, the lesson of being in the moment and being alive in what one sets out to accomplish on a daily basis. Drone is a negative low energy term that can be the calm opposite of passion if one allows a routine process to overtake the energy flow. Wandering one’s way through a job, meandering and biding time, is not invoking nor engaging your mind with your spirit. Your mind is a powerful tool, arguably your best tool regardless of your profession. For a writer it is everything. Our minds become our go-to-place on a moment by moment, word by word basis to get the writing job done.

The energy that comes from creating one’s work from inside your own head is indescribable to a non-writer and shadows a mystery and romance around the world of a writing lifestyle. That energy when coupled with passion creates a powerful obsessive-like process and when the two are in sync writing becomes a very crazed way to make a living.

It is not always simple but all writing be it journalism, research, technical, non-fiction, poetry, novel, script and many many kinds, all come back to one thing – that of the words that must come together on the paper. Those words must filter through the mind of the writer, process themselves onto the page and then carry a reader’s attention. The most banal newspaper article to the most complex big-screen script must all go through the same process. Without a passion the writer does not only the reader a disservice, but also one to themselves. Without the intensity of passion, the homework and research, the writing process and the final outcome are lack luster and one might as well trade in your pencils and stand behind a counter asking ‘do you want fries with that?”

Why write if you don’t bring a fire to the page? Always pack along your passion when you gather up your tools to write. Carry that ardent passion through the entire experience of creating and it will magically find its way onto the page every single time.

Write always (with passion),

Michelle

Hallway commute …

There are so many good reasons to love working from a home office. There are an equal number of bad reasons to not love working from a home office. Depending on the day and the project one will outweigh the other. One plus of a home office lifestyle is the near clothing optional benefit of the job and no big budget required to be fashion ready every morning, but what is a benefit to you is not always one to your friends or house mate who might come to wish that you remember to shower and dress on a regular basis. No rush hour traffic another plus as you wander your way down the hall in your fuzzy robe and slippers with a coffee in hand to arrive at the office, but again the down fall is that the more you stay in the more you hate to tackle traffic or long drives and totally see how being a recluse shut in is not all that bad, and maybe that is not a good thing.

Even though you deal with people all day, virtual people and virtual colleagues it does get to feel much like having a string of imaginary friends and again not necessarily a socially healthy trait and offers little to connect with face to face later when cocktailing with real humans after hours. Your pets will love you home all day but again not always a plus for you as you tend to come to like them better than humans over time and can communicate on a pet-mind-meld level better than vocally to most.

home office perks

One would think that being a professional communicator, a word wizard of sorts, would make you a vibrant chatty social being but the downside is that you have quiet isolation all day and the more you write the less you want to speak. An introverted writer becomes almost a self-fulfilling oxymoron and one quickly imagines in those all too quiet times of desperate word block and harsh self discipline how writer angst can arrive in the form of wanting to have their ashes fired out of a cannon when all is passed, Hunter S Thompson style.

 Lots of alone time to think can be a blessing and a curse all at the same time. Solitary confinement is a form of punishment in some (prison) circles but for a writer it is a welcomed fact of life most days and a horrible cruel fate on others. I tend to like it when I have no real schedule and merrily follow inspiration but give me the pressure of a deadline and I quickly resent that I am alone in my office trying to self-brainstorm to come up with a good idea.

There are no celebrated little perks such as casual Friday or pizza day, although there is often a waft of microwave popcorn in the air.  No little office antics or shenanigans and no sleeping with the boss rumors. Little interaction makes for a tad bit of crazy making some days and singing out loud or skipping to the laundry room are just some of the small pleasures you incorporate into your work day office-party of one. Knocking off early to catch happy hour can also have its downfalls and a total new writer-appreciation of the alcohol genius of Hemmingway.

The juxtaposition of the free flowing words and no one to listen seems a cruel hoax on a writer isolated from the buzz of the world they seclude themselves away from to write about. Just know in your isolated writer lifestyle that you are not alone.

Write always,

Michelle

A place to write ...

    “A women must have money and
        a room of her own if she is to write”
 
                ... Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own

A writer is always writing even when there is no pen or paper in sight. In the grocery, driving, sitting at a movie, an evening out with friends, lying awake in the wee hours, walking the dog, cooking a great meal and just about everywhere else. The creative mind is always churning and processing some thought that would make a great story.

The discipline comes into play when one can take those constant inspirations onto a piece of paper. For me that does not mean simply scribbling them somewhere, jotting an idea or a character sketch into a notebook when the idea hits, or making mental notes to someday use an enlightening scenario in a future story, but rather it means truly writing the words. Not the kind of writing on the fly onto loose pages, but the process of sitting down to gather the scribbles and notes and begin creating the whole from the parts.

The place from which a writer writes is as important as what they write. The private personal space where the surroundings are inspirational, where the surface feels right, where thoughts can flow unedited and safely to the page without judgement or a second eye constantly peering into the process is key. It is the place from which you create and you need it to be as right as any other profession needs a workplace, an artist and a studio, a mechanic and a garage, a doctor and a clinic, a writer and a desk.

It does not have to be an elaborate antique desk oozing in history, or a sanitized industrial-like clean surface from which to create, but it does have to be private, your own, and tucked away from the distractions of the world. Perhaps you don’t even have a desk and instead an old leather valise full of your rambling pages which you cart to your favourite spot in the world to sit and write. Maybe for you your desk is under a tree somewhere in a quiet park. What will work is that you create your place where you go to write every chance you get.

In this place, at your ‘desk’, you must respect and honour your platform, your easel, your palate from where your work flows. If you are inspired by personal items in your life surround yourself with them, your family pictures, your good-luck charms, your totems and mementos, your collections which bring you passion. Do not clutter the surface with distractions or negatives, leave your household bills and to do lists in another room away from the creative process and positive space of your writing. No emailing friends in between writing paragraphs and turn off your phone. Don’t play music if it distracts you, but blast it if it inspires you.
Create your ‘room of one’s own’ and an inspirational space for the words to flow.
Give yourself the gift of a place to write.

Write always,

Michelle

Write what you know ...

I struggle often with balance. Okay there I said it out loud, I admit it. Not that kind of stand on your tip toes, close your eyes and don’t fall over balance, but worse the kind where life gets in the way of what you know you should be doing. I should be writing. You know that feeling when tomorrow is going to be so great that you are too excited to sleep? Sometimes, some nights, that is how my own writing-imagination can keep me awake. My writer-self is too excited to sleep. The words that want out will not let me rest because that day has brought me so many great ideas to write about.
It is that passion that becomes a drive so forceful that it can get in the way of actually sitting down and writing. Harnessing that almost superpower to create and balancing the desire-to-write and the reality of finding a creative time and place can be as hard as learning to physically juggle. It takes practice. A juggler will tell you to just pick up any object and start – juggle your morning orange and apples, juggle your pencils, juggle the dog biscuits and your hair brushes, just do it.

MichelleGreysen dot com

The same has come to be true for me and words. I juggle a paid assignment, a magazine feature, blogging, copyright work, non-fiction book projects, fiction novels to short stories, poetry and the business writing side of researching and marketing all those avenues of revenue streams and creative outlets of a writing life. The subject matter in my writing projects and assignments covers a huge spectrum and I am often asked how do you decide what to write about? I usually jokingly quip that

stories find me but in actuality there is a lot of truth to that.

I truly believe that nurturing your will to write will be fed by what life brings you to write about. Jung aptly described it, as “That which is most personal is most common”.  Write what you know, write what is in your life and you will feed your passion for words with your life experiences. When I find I am struggling with writing it is often because I am not personally balancing who I am with what I do.
One of the best reads on writing I continue to enjoy over and over, is Stephen King’s bestseller, On Writing. King sets out to describe the ups and downs of the writing life by simply telling us not how he writes but rather how he lives and in those simplistic insights in some round-about way he offers endless valuable lessons on how to write. King unknowingly backs up my belief that there is some positive harmony in life and writing. A hundred pages into the book he speaks of his office space, his own desk, about the job and what he came to know:

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room.  Life isn’t a support system for art.  It’s the other way around.”   Stephen King

Just write ... and write and write and write and write and ...

When one writes for a living, and one writes for love, and one writes like others breathe, there comes a time when you must shut out all that is not writing and take stock. I truly can say then when I am not able to write, or at least be in a mental state of writing, that I feel as if I am suffocating as I gulp, gasp, and choke my very soul to steal away some writing time in my day. There is never enough of both time and words.  I have thought a lot lately of all that gets in the way of my now too many writing projects piling up around me, a distraction all in themselves from the actually writing.  I see where the time has now come to hone it all into one focus, one goal, one single task. I simply need to write. I want to write it all, poetry, fiction, script, novel, short story, non-fiction, magazine freelance, book projects, corporate content development writing and oh so much more. The reality is I simply am a word junkie with obsessive compulsive a-holic-like tendencies and a desire to play with words on all levels. Not unlike a math scholar driven by formulas, or a musician that can’t leave the notes, or an archaeologist on an endless dig. The quest for words and the drive for the right words is a passion and a life’s’ work that now, for me, must be addressed.

Vintage Typewriters at Inktiques

Time has become my guide and is constantly butting in to remind my muse to hurry it along. I have to remind time that we are in a dance or sorts and that I am in the lead. But I also have to constantly remind myself of that and not get swept away on other tasks that interrupt my words. I know for me in order to write well I must write often, every day and sometimes all day and night. I must constantly move the words along, zero in on my many word projects and bring them to completion and beyond. Words can bury a writer but good words can free a writer. I deeply desire lately to write freely.

I will check back here often, daily perhaps, weekly other times, but enough to report back that my words are on task and to share the journey of writing. I welcome hearing from others who, like me, struggle with life getting in the way of the words.

Writing always,

Michelle