Day Seven: Beginning...Muddle...Ending

Congratulations to all of my fellow NaNo writing companions, all 150,000+ of you! Today concludes the first week of National Novel Writing Month. If you began last Sunday, and faithfully treated your computer as another body appendage all week, you should have reached at least 11,669 words and have a pretty good start on your novel. Some have already far exceeded that, and at least one person has already passed the 50,000 word finish line! The rest of us can only stare in awe as we bravely jog along wiping their dust from our eyes. Others have had life intrude and are struggling to catch up, and more than a few have yet to begin. If you fall into this last category, Paige and I would like to encourage you to take heart, take a deep breath, renew your commitment, grab your pen and notebook or place your fingers firmly on the keyboard, and write. Get something, anything, on paper or on your word processor. You can't hope to finish, if you don't start. If you don't have any ideas, or have too many vying for your attention, try ten to twenty minutes of free writing where you write whatever comes to mind without judging it. This simple exercise may help move you from thinking to doing.

If you are in the group that has been writing all week, and everything is going great, and the words are flowing almost faster than you can write them down, fantastic! Run with it! But for some, the first flush of excitement may be waning as you suddenly hit a snag in the story line. You may have the beginning down, and know where you want to end up, but aren't quite sure how to get there. In other words, the middle is a muddle.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the king tells the white rabbit, "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop." That sounds like very sensible advice. But when you're writing, the process isn't always orderly, especially when you're trying to meet a word count deadline in a short period of time and are feeling the effects of sleep deprivation. Ideas dart around your conscious mind like kids playing keep-away. They don't line up in an orderly queue like well-disciplined British school children. How do you push through? What if you're drawing a blank and don't know what should come next?

If you already know the ending of your story, go ahead and write it. When making a movie, scenes are rarely shot in the order in which they appear in the final cut. Sometimes, the last scene of the film is the first scene shot. There's no reason why you can't do this in your novel, too. Perhaps once the ending is written, it will be easier to work backward to the beginning. Another idea is to look at your outline. (If you haven't done one yet, and you're stuck, now's a good time to do it). Decide what needs to take place in each chapter to get your characters from point A to point B. Then decide what scenes within each chapter will tell that part of the story. Once you have these main ideas and supporting ideas down, you can begin to craft descriptions and dialog to flesh them out. It may also help to write each chapter's main idea on an index card. Then write each supporting idea on a separate index card, and lay them out under the chapter in which they will best fit to tell the story. Doing this will take a little time, but it's worth it if it gets things moving again.

If all else fails, and you're starting to panic, go to the NaNo Forums page, look under the section titled "NaNo Tips and Strategies" for a thread called "Plot Doctoring." People there may be able to help you with such things as character names, coming up with a conflict or obstacle, plot twists, setting, dialog, or whatever your specific needs are. Don't be afraid to ask for help. The reason that thread is there is because we've all been, at one time or another, where you are now. With some fresh ideas, you can take your great beginning and your fantastic finish and unite them with a middle that's not a muddle.

Day Three: Do Horror/Thriller Writers Ever Scare Themselves?

A few days ago we celebrated Halloween which is rooted in Celtic traditions having to do with dead spirits returning to the land of the living, causing mischief, and scaring people. The Celts used sacred bonfires and sacrifices to try to keep these spirits at bay, and disguised themselves by dressing in animal costumes. Another tradition, the jack-o-lantern, came from Ireland and was originally a carved out turnip, not a pumpkin. Over the years, costumes and traditions evolved, but the "scare factor" remained an integral part of the celebration--especially when featured in films and books. Today, many people throw Halloween parties, like the one in my novel, turn off the lights, and sit around telling ghost stories to scare their friends.

Even apart from Halloween, we seem to like to scare ourselves -- as long as we know we're really safe. Whether the old Dracula, Mummy, and Wolfman movies of the early 1900s, or more recent offerings such as "The Blair Witch Project," the "Friday the 13th" series, "Paranormal Activity," and many others, people like to experience the fight or flight response without actually having to do either. And then there are the scary novels by master horror/thriller writers Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Jeffrey Deaver, and Nate Kenyon.

As I was working on my novel last night, a scene in which ghost stories were being shared, I found myself becoming slightly uneasy and it made me wonder: Do horror or thriller writers ever scare themselves? Did Stephen King lie awake nights because he felt like he'd made one of his characters too real -- like his protagonist, writer Thad Beaumont, in The Dark Half? Did he have nightmares about Ronald McDonald after he wrote It? Did he hesitate, if only for a moment, before taking a bite of pie after he wrote Thinner? Was Dean Koontz afraid to fall asleep, while writing The Bad Place, like his main character Frank Pollard? And how well did Nate Kenyon sleep after a decomposed corpse attacked one of his characters in his newest work, Sparrow Rock?

I didn't have the opportunity to ask Mr. King or Mr. Koontz, but I met Mr. Kenyon a few months ago online through Suzanne Beecher's Dear Reader online book clubs; so I sent him an e-mail, and he was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to respond.

Donna: Nate, have you ever given yourself nightmares from something you've written?

Nate*: Sure. I've had nightmares from something I've written--and I've written about my nightmares, too. In fact, my most recent thriller, THE BONE FACTORY, was sparked by a particularly creepy dream about a man totally alone in the deep woods at night, wading through thigh-deep drifts of snow and looking for a dead body. It was so vivid and unsettling, I woke up at about 3 a.m.,

got right up out of bed and wrote that scene. The entire novel sprouted from there.

My upcoming novel, SPARROW ROCK (May 2010) gave me nightmares one night. I wrote a scene where the resurrected body of a long-dead friend returns to the bomb shelter where a group of teens are holed up to pay them a visit. That scene really creeped me out, and that night after I'd finished it, I had a dream about a high school friend of mine who died and then came back to life. Didn't sleep much for the rest of the night!

So, apparently it works both ways: nightmares can generate stories, and stories can generate nightmares--even when you're the author. Now I don't feel so bad about not being able to sleep last night after I finished the ghost story scene. It seems I'm in good company.

*My thanks to Nate Kenyon for answering my blog question. To find out more about him and his novels, visit his website: http://natekenyon.com/

Day Two -- Using Real Places in Your Story

When writing fiction, sometimes it's fun to create the setting out of thin air. You are the founding father of your city or town: you get to name it, decide what buildings are there, who will populate it, who will visit your town and how they'll arrive, what kind of work people will do, whether or not they are married and have children -- and pets, who their friends are, and their relatives. You are in control of their waking and sleeping, their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and expirations. You decorate their houses, pick out their clothing, and even determine their personalities and character traits, and how they will talk. In short, you control everyone and everything in your book.

But what happens when you decide to introduce real people or real places into your fictionalized novel? Suddenly, the rules change. For example, if I decided to use George Washington as a character in my story, I can't call his wife Sally or have him reside in a twentieth century apartment in New York City. I might be able to write an account of a fictional event in his life, but family names and geographical locations would have to line up with what is historically accurate, and the fictional event would have to occur at a logical place in his life's timeline.

As I began writing chapter two of this year's NaNo book, I realized I needed to do a bit more research before I could proceed. Although my story is fiction, there are elements in it that are based on something that may or may not have really happened, but are definitely tied to a real place. Some of my fictional characters are college students at the very real University of Vermont. So, I had to do a bit of research about the dorm names and locations, what the library was like at the time in which the story is set, how long it would take them to drive from their dorm in Burlington to a friend's family home in Stowe (another real place), and where in Stowe that home would be located. The legend on which the story is based also takes place at a certain time of the year, so that, too, had to be accurate.

Had I known I'd be writing this particular story, I could have done my research in advance. But if you read my blog yesterday, you'll know that I switched plots at the last minute. And, although I had done a rudimentary outline for this particular story two or three years ago, I had not yet researched the historical elements.

Normally, that wouldn't create a problem. But when you're trying to write a novel in thirty days, you don't have a lot of time for anything other than writing. Time spent on research translates into less writing time, which translates into a lower word count, which translates into more pressure to meet the daily goal. So, how did I do today, you ask? Actually, not bad. Since I exceeded the 1167 word count minimum yesterday, it gave me a buffer for today. When I combined yesterday's 2425 words (a slight revision added one word to yesterday's original total) with today's 1268 words (a shortfall), I still had a two-day total of 3693 which leaves me with a buffer of 359 words heading into day three. It's not a lot, but at least I'm not lagging behind. And, who knows -- I might be able to work on it later in the day and get that word count even higher.