You Win Some, You Lose Some – An IWSG Post

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, which means it’s time for Insecure Writer’s Support Group. Thanks to our host, the Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh, and his awesome co-hosts for July: Krista McLaughlin, Kim Van Sickler, Heather Gardner, and Hart Johnson for all their hard work!

As we reach the halfway mark of the year, I thought it’d be interesting to talk about goals and check in with everyone on their progress: Are you on track, falling behind, happy with your progress despite everything?

For myself, I hit a setback in June as I didn’t meet any of my writing goals. Life happens, things come up, other things have to be prioritized, and those few pages of edits and research…Do they really count as accomplishing something? I tell myself that yes, they do; that somehow they are all the bits and pieces that have to happen in order for me to achieve my goal. But am I deluding myself? I don’t know. All I know is that goals aren’t achieved overnight. We have to keep on working and moving towards them, even if it’s at a slow pace. As the ever-wise Gandalf said: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

What’s your process in trying to meet your goals? How do you deal with the adversities and missed deadlines?

And to everyone who’s participating in Camp NaNoWriMo this July, good luck!

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Do It Without Fear – An IWSG Post

This month’s group posting for Insecure Writer’s Support Group is a bit tricky for me. First I was too busy to be insecure about anything in particular and then the more I thought of what I could post about, the more all sorts of insecurities started popping up that I scarcely know which one to talk about.

Since I can’t post about all of them unless I want my head (and yours) to explode, I’ve decided to leave my insecurities be for now and get back to work. I think one of the greatest actors of our time, Sir Anthony Hopkins, really summed it up very well with this quote:

Yeah, no mention of writing there. But it works just as well, wouldn’t you say? 😉

Thanks to our host Alex J. Cavanaugh and his June co-hosts C. Lee McKenzie, Tracy Jo, Melanie Schulz, and LG Keltner!

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Mid-Novel Slump – How Do You Deal With It?

As we reach the halfway mark of Camp NaNoWriMo, some will find themselves hitting the infamous mid-month slump. If you’re on track with your writing goals, you should be halfway through your novel by now. And if you’re behind, well, you’re probably beginning to panic, which brings me to Pep Talks.

Over the course of the month, you get pep talks from famous writers who share their words of wisdom and encourage you on this crazy, wonderful journey you’ve decided to take. What could be better than that?

Camp NaNoWriMo apparently has this feature, too, although on a smaller scale, it would seem, as they’re delivered directly to your inboxes.

It’s the 14th, which means I should have 23,334 words by now. At 20,040 words, I’m still two days behind. A few days ago, I hit my “mid-month slump,” way ahead of schedule. Writing was becoming more and more like pulling teeth. I had to force myself to keep writing, skipping ahead with the scenes, because otherwise I’d not get anything written.

All of us go through this, that moment when you wonder if you should simply give up on this story and move on to the next shiny thing. You begin to wonder whether anyone else but you would care about your novel and your characters. As a matter of fact, you probably want to stab each and every one of your characters by now for being the boring, uncooperative lot that they are.

It is easy to fall into this trap and go through an endless loop of never-finished stories. In these times, we need more than ever to have that cheerleader: someone who’s going to tell you to keep at it, someone who believes in you even when you have lost faith in yourself. Not everyone will have that, unfortunately.

There are way too many amazing pep talks but for today, I want to focus on the one given by Neil Gaiman.

In his pep talk, he sums up the frustration and despair that we go through when writing. We are not unique in this; all writers go through it. The difference is whether we choose to give up or forge on. As much as we’d like to believe, there is no magic formula. It’s all just hard work and we have to be prepared to do it.

As Neil Gaiman put it: One word after another. That’s the only way that novels get written. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Which part of your novel do you find hardest to get through–the beginning, middle, or the end? How do you deal with it? And if you’re participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, how is your writing going so far?

Why Do You Write?

Writing is not easy. Sure, sometimes you will be in that zone when everything is flowing and you can’t seem to type fast enough. And then there are those times when you simply can’t string a decent sentence together. Why has your muse abandoned you? Everything was going so great.

Setbacks. They happen in life, they happen in writing. The building process of writing a novel is a slow, painful and oftentimes lonely one. For the most part you are on your own and no matter how difficult things get, you have to plod on, from start to finish, or it would never see the light of day. That’s the beauty–and the curse–of the art form. You are the architect, the engineer, and the builder–all in one, and just like any real job, you have to show up and do the work, regardless of how you feel.

Not exactly what we want to hear but the sad reality is we’ll probably spend more time staring at a blank page, cursing and hating what we’ve written, rather than patting ourselves on the back for a prose well done. It’s an uphill climb and we constantly have to battle with ourselves, our insecurities, and perhaps even our demons, questioning all the while why we keep at it, when reason says there are better ways to spend our time on.

So why do we do it? Are we simply gluttons for punishment? Or is writing an intrinsic part of us that no matter all the hair-pulling and angst that goes with it, we just can’t seem to give it up? There are hundreds of reasons why we do it, and as many reasons not to. Perhaps at the end of the day, the reasons don’t really matter; when the undeniable truth is that we write simply because we have to.