The tortoise and the hare

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 23

An observant contestant pointed out that the Best First Chapter guideline page still listed March 1, 2007 as the deadline. I apologize for failing to catch that when I updated Brian’s site. I am going to use aging as my excuse. Every year, I get a little more absent-minded, and then too, I can’t seem to wrap my brain around the fact that it is 2007, which must have prevented me from realizing that next March will actually be 2008. Where do all the years go?

Back to the writing exercise from earlier this week…besides noticing that you wrote more when you were just observing (and not evaluating as you went along), you might have found that the quality of writing from the second part of the exercise was better.

Therein lies the conundrum of first draft writing. Do you spill it all out fast, NaNoWriMo-style, to prevent paralysis, or do you go at a slow and steady pace, editing yourself as you go along?

Different writers use different strategies when it comes to a first draft. Some prefer a more polished draft and can’t stomach the thought of writing dozens (or even hundreds) of pages that might end up on the cutting room floor, while others don’t mind ruthlessly slashing and burning a messy first draft during revisions.

Play around with both the tortoise and the hare approach. If you’re perpetually frozen with fear of failure (or any other writers' block-creating thoughts), try the speedy, free-writing method. Charge straight ahead without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a problem accumulating pages but have more trouble structuring your writing into a cohesive whole, you might want to invest more time on plotting notes beforehand and on revising as you go along. It will take you longer to reach the end of your first draft, but odds are that when you do, it won’t be quite as much of a baggy monster.

November is NaNoWriMo

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 22

There are quite possibly more people writing novels during the month of November than any other time of year, thanks to the popularity of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

In order to ‘win’ NaNoWriMo, participants write a complete novel—defined as 50,000 words—during the month. Here’s a quote from the website: “Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.”

That kind of free-writing mentality can be useful for cranking out a first draft. Some writers can’t turn off the editors' voices in their heads and end up with writers' block, terrified of making a misstep.

Here’s a writing exercise that quickly illustrates how this approach works. (I didn’t make it up, but alas, I can’t remember where it came from.) Go to a good people-watching spot. First, watch one couple or one small group of people interact. Jot down every single gesture you observe. Do this for 10 minutes.

Next, choose another set of people to watch, but this time, write down only the gestures that you find intriguing. Take 10 minutes again.

You’ll probably find that you wrote a lot more during the first ten minutes than the second. That’s because your inner editor was temporarily silenced. Once you started judging whether your subject matter was good enough to warrant writing about, that slowed you down and decreased your output. More thoughts on this next time...

And hey, if you’re participating in NaNoWriMo this year, remember you have till March 1 to polish up your first chapter and submit it to the InnermoonLit contest.

Happy Halloweiner

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 21

Hope you had a wonderful Halloween!


Brodsky's thinking, There are so many little trick-or-treaters out there. Can't I eat just one???