Revisiting Ghosts of NaNoWriMos Past

Abstract:

A decade-plus commitment to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) drove significant personal creative output, yielding multiple epic-length novels despite major career shifts, growing family responsibilities, and increasing corporate workload. The annual challenge provided structure and community until the organization’s eventual 2025 closure. Currently, a new career transition has renewed the focus, maintaining a 50,000-word November goal independently.

Content:

In August or September of 2010, I was in the midst of a career transition. Aside from looking for work, I didn’t have much going on in my life. I was settling into married life, making dinner on a nightly basis, and had large gaps in my day to explore my new neighborhood. I had an idea for a novel that had been rattling around in my head for months, and decided that there was no time like the present to get writing. A former mentor of mine had mentioned NaNoWriMo, the national novel writing month. This was hardly a nascent thing, as it had been around since 1999. I decided to give it a shot and I began planning that novel that had been percolating for so long.

The forums were lively and I was beginning to meet virtual friends who, like me, were looking to break into the fiction writing arena. The time spent at home alone began feeling less lonely and I was writing. I was committing 2,000 words per day to the story, with few exceptions, and spent at least three months writing the first draft of that story. I’ll let you do the math. Since I had already started planning the project in August/September and was writing not long thereafter, NaNoWriMo occupied the middle third of that story (I was a NaNoWriMo rebel, what can I say?) and pushed my story through the rising action to the eventual climax. I liked that feeling! By January 2011, I had my first draft of an epic-length novel. I also had a job.

Later that year, I did it again. By mid-2012 I had two books, over 150,000 words each, and was in the process of editing both. NaNoWriMo provided community through forums, site-specific email messages, and in-person meetups. I continued writing through NaNoWriMo every November, no matter what else was going on in my life.

A few years later, NaNoWriMo became a real challenge (not that it wasn’t before) because I was a new father, we were in the process of selling our house and moving, and I had taken on many more responsibilities at work. In-person meetups were scarce; I went to the year-end bash, but that’s about it. The next year brought a new house and more responsibilities. I could no longer attend NaNoWriMo events and did not even bother looking for them because I hadn’t been able to make events at the appointed times for several years. The forums had dried up over the years, in part due to a new site architecture and in part due to controversies that I only became aware of much later. People were leaving NaNoWriMo in droves, but it was hard for me to realize it as an independent user.

Then 2020 came. Our second child was on the way, and I was working at home due to COVID-19 restrictions. My work responsibilities again increased and I still managed to complete the NaNoWriMo challenge. I had written during NaNoWriMo’s main event every year, each time starting something new. I used an occasional secondary NaNoWriMo event, conducted in April, to pad those writing numbers a little further and make sure I’d added to the stories while they were still relatively fresh in my mind. Thus, NaNoWriMo was an annual event for me, every year from 2010 to 2024. Without fail, I started writing on November 1st and continued hacking away at it until November 30th. For many of those years, I wrote every day. In fact, I can’t remember days where I didn’t write something. There were days where I fell well short of the goal, but I always ended up with 50,000 words by the end of November. Sometimes, I would continue to write every day for a few weeks after, while other times I stopped that project on December 1st and never revisited it again.

By 2024, I was a disillusioned veteran of the NaNoWriMo game. I had realized things weren’t going well for the Office of Letters and Light. They’d frozen the forums, meaning that I no longer had that community avenue to pursue. Our region’s leaders were no longer posting any in-person events. Writing had become a solitary exercise beyond what it had been for the fifteen previous years. Still, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge – and that project is still alive in my conscious thought to this day. That was the end of NaNoWriMo as I knew it. I took some time off away from the NaNoWriMo website and didn’t return to it until early 2025. By the time I checked the NaNoWriMo website again, there was a note from its stewards that NaNoWriMo was no more. The site went dark some time later.

As 2025 trudged onward, things got more difficult for me. My work responsibilities were at a fever pitch and we had several projects that involved me taking work home every night. There were quite a few times when I got home after 7pm, started putting the kids to bed at 8:30pm, and then went back to work until midnight. There were other times where I worked straight through until 9:00pm and ate dinner alone. During this time, I couldn’t write (both for lack of time and for lack of energy). It was all for naught, as the company’s management decided a change was needed. We slowly closed up shop.

For the first time since 2010, this has left me with time to write during November. NaNoWriMo is no longer. I am still writing and have taken it upon myself to write 1,667 words per day during November, picking up fiction writing again during my career transition, the same number I would need to write if I were still doing NaNoWriMo. I haven’t hit 1,667 every day, but I am presently on pace to write 50,000 words this November, just like old times.

The Project from Hell and Writing

During the last year of my time with my former employer, we called one project the Project from Hell. We said that it must not be named, as if a snake would magically bite us if we said the name out loud. What made this project so terrible, you might ask? Vagueness. Vagueness and a disagreement on how we defined terminology. Due to vagueness and disagreements on terminology in our statement of work, we ended up doing far more work on a project than we’d ever intended. The scope had crept; it crept like kudzu.

You might ask what this has to do with writing. Well, there are two things, both related to additional or separate writers, that makes vagueness, a lack of definition, and omission critical flaws in writing.

Fan Fiction and Vagueness

The fan-fic genre is many writers’ entrée into fiction writing. Fan-fic, for the uninitiated, is taking one medium’s story and characters and changing it to incorporate other stories. It is not new. A man wrote an unofficial sequel to Don Quixote in 1614, a year before Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra published the second volume that completed the Don Quixote saga. More recently, Star Trek fans have published additional voyages of Captain Kirk and crew in their own fan-made magazines since the 1960s. Today, one of the largest fan-created websites, Archive of our Own, boasts more than 15.8 million fan-fic stories across nearly 74,000 “fandoms” (as of September 2025).

Fan-fiction can be brilliant, especially for those populations that wonder “what happened to Character A after the book ended?” or “what would have happened if the show hadn’t been cancelled?” However, one concern that seemingly plagues fan-fiction writers and readers is the vagueness associated with the writing and the assumptions that the writers make about the audience.

At times, fan-fic writers complain that the characters go far astray from the source material. This is sometimes a deliberate choice that the author makes. After all, the original author’s character isn’t necessarily going to go off and change their name to Vampire or decide that mortal enemies should suddenly room together. (And yes, Harry Potter and permutations thereof attract millions of hits on fan-fic sites)

However, characters may stray from the source material for another reason: everyone interprets characters differently. Thus, the direction that a character takes is likely to creep away from the source material beyond what the new story creates because a person’s “head canon” of what a character says, does, or believes is different from the original author’s.

The other main concern with fan fiction’s vagueness is that it can make stories impenetrable to someone who is not firmly ensconced in, or at least recently familiar with, the source material. Why is Cosmo Kramer going into the shower to make dinner? (He has a disposal in his shower drain.) Why does Charlie Bucket have all his grandparents following him wherever he goes? (They all shared the same bed before he received Wonka’s golden ticket.) It may be a forgone conclusion for anyone who remembers the source material, but it creates a bad habit for writers who want to write original works that don’t explicitly borrow from their predecessors.

This is not a matter of the old writer’s adage “show, don’t tell.” It’s more a matter of “don’t show, don’t tell.” The writer assumes that the reader knows what Rubeus Hagrid (a half-giant from Harry Potter) looks like, why John Savage doesn’t fit in with the World State (he was born into a society that is wholly different from it), or why Sue Snell can’t get a taxi in Chamberlain (she’s held, in part, responsible for not stopping a killer). Thus, no matter how much one might intend to stick to a character’s canonical portrayal, leaving out key details does not allow the reader to reenter the world of the original story and understand the characters beyond what they may remember (or think they remember) of the source material.

Telling, instead of showing, creates flat characters and thin atmospheres. Neither telling nor showing is like handing in a script without stage directions. Every snippet of dialogue could take on a completely different meaning if you didn’t already know that the character was overly anxious, ruthlessly sarcastic, or incredibly self-absorbed.

Defining Terms: Shared Stories

Television shows usually have numerous writers. These shows often have a creative lead who oversees the story’s direction and tone. Their panel of writers can vary from season to season or episode to episode. However, both the creative leads and the writer’s rooms change over time, especially when long-running shows exceed a decade.

For example, Eric Kripke, the original showrunner and creator of Supernatural, left the show after five years. In the 10 years that followed, the show had four additional showrunners. Under Kripke, the show followed a monster-of-the-week format with an overarching concern of following and doing right by the main characters’ father. Under the other showrunners, the main characters became the last vestiges of a secret society; paired up with a fallen angel, Lucifer’s son, and their resurrected mother; and fought against God, the devil, and existence itself.

Similarly, Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the show Family Guy, let the show’s characterization stray over time. Initially, he used a talking dog, Brian, to be his mouthpiece. MacFarlane added self-effacing humor to Brian, and many of Brian’s situations had an awareness that Brian was being pretentious. As MacFarlane distanced himself from the showrunner role to pursue other interests, the Brian character became increasingly unlikeable, not only due to his pretentiousness, but also due to hypocrisy and overarching egotism. While Brian can still be cast in a sympathetic light, his character has drifted from his earlier characterization as a self-fashioned intellectual with a drinking problem to become an insufferable sleaze.

Sometimes, drift is built into the show. Characters change, stakes change, and tastes change. Modern Family would not have worked as a sitcom for as long as it did if the Dunphy children were still treated as if they were in elementary or middle school. Sometimes, viewers (or readers, in the case of a team-written book series like The Hardy Boys) may experience a form of whiplash as a character goes from the affable clown one episode to an endlessly sarcastic wit the next episode, and back. This whiplash can even extend to the setting or the plot. The monster of the week may have been a known quantity in an earlier episode, yet treated as something new and entirely foreign later that same season.

Whether you’re one of many writers working on a long-running series or simply an individual writer who sets a story down for six months at a time, you should have a document that lists the specific traits or qualities of characters, the general outline of the plot, and any other defining features of that work. In television, this is called “the Bible,” but you can call it whatever you like. Dramatis personae, for example, may still sound equally as pretentious as “the Bible,” but tickle your fancy as a theater-lover. However, this document should change over time; that is, you should augment it rather than change canonical portrayals, as the characters and their circumstances should change over the course of your work. If the pirate doesn’t have an eye patch at the beginning of the story, yet has one in chapter 12, you should note what happened to make that change.

Bringing It All Together

As someone who has written some doorstoppers in his moonlight hours, I have encountered struggles where I don’t know where a character is going or, worse yet, forgot what I was doing in the first place. While I often participate in NaNoWriMo with just a situation and a sense of direction to go by, I have routinely kicked myself for not having set out a list of rules or guidelines for my piece from the outset, and I have encountered further frustration when I return to a piece and find that a lack of dialogue tags and blocking provide less reminder than I’d hoped about the scene’s direction or a character’s motivation in that moment. Those characters who were so fresh and vibrant in my mind six years ago have been under the literary equivalent of a steamroller in the intervening years: not just flat, but flat and dead.

I can’t say that I have knowingly written so much more than I’d intended with a writing project, as I did in “the project from hell” for my daylight job. However, I have had to drop tools with a promise that I would come back again later because I didn’t lay out breadcrumbs of where I was and where I intended to go. In that way, while the scope does not creep in volume, it certainly creeps in direction.

On Writing and Not Writing

Hello to all my readers. With yet another long hiatus in the books, you are probably wondering what I have been up to. The answer is that I have been writing. Yes, lots of writing. However, my fiction writing has not come along as I had hoped for over the past six months or so, especially given all the time I have had lately.

There is a good reason for this. You see, I am currently unemployed. For nearly a decade and a half, I worked for the same company. In that time, I grew from one of the lower-level employees to overseeing all production for the company. The thing about working for a company for so long and holding similar roles is that it becomes part of your identity. Then, one day, you wake up and it is not. You can still take pride and passion from what you did, but when somebody asks you what you do for a living, the word that follows “I’m a” may no longer apply.

Now that I no longer have that word, aside from “Imma looking for work,” I am spending countless hours looking for work. I have had days lost to perusing job postings, evaluating my qualifications versus what the employer listed in the posting, and applying to jobs. One of the more frustrating aspects I have come across in this job search is when online applications do not allow you to upload the cover letter. The cover letter was one of the central artifacts I used when evaluating prospective hires.

Not long ago, I was on the other side of the interview table. My CEO and COO would send me resumes from job postings. I would look at those resumes and cover letters and provide feedback surrounding a candidate’s viability for a first round of interviews. Often, resumes would not get to my desk because the resume itself lacked certain keywords. We were always looking for candidates that had knowledge of R and R Studio, Python, and applicable Python frameworks, such as NumPy and SciPy. However, many individuals have some background with programming languages, but that does not mean that they would be effective in the myriad other tasks that our small firm demanded. In particular, an individual’s ability to match these qualifications would say nothing about an individual’s ability to communicate effectively, either in writing or in a presentation.

Despite the statistical and programmatic knowledge that our analyst positions required, everything we did required a lot of prose writing. We needed to document our processes, write detailed analysis of our findings that drew in both statistical methods and historical knowledge, create concise bullet points to reflect complex ideas, script out presentations to ensure that we hit all the main talking points and understood how data points reflected each other throughout a presentation, and send numerous emails to clients about current, perspective, and past projects.

Therefore, we could not ignore a person’s ability to write coherent, effective, and complete prose. The few times that we ignored this capability in favor of someone who had superior statistical chops, their inability to write solid, well-founded analysis came back to haunt us. At times, these individuals were also good at the technical approach needed for our projects but failed to understand the implications that the outputs had in a practical sense. There were even times when it was as if someone could complete an operation but not understand what the answer meant. Further, there were times when what a person put on paper did not match what we received; they knew how to write in Python but had never applied it in any meaningful way.

Thus, after more than a decade of reading resumes for open positions, the cover letter became even more important than the resume’s content. We saw all types of writing styles in cover letters. Some individuals neglected to provide any cover letter whatsoever. Others looked at their resume and simply tried to write their resume in a three-to-five paragraph format. That type of cover letter made me feel like I was wasting my time.

I have been going back and forth with an old neighbor of mine about potential job opportunities. He has sent me a few postings that have qualifications that are outside of my present experience but have needs that I could absolutely meet. I expressed to him that this is where the cover letter becomes so important because it allows me to make a case for a position that says, regardless of what you see on the resume, that I could be the right person for the job. It allows me to take a fact and interpret it in a way that shows a prospective employer that my skills do in fact translate to their needs.

I have been active on several job websites, including LinkedIn and Indeed, in looking for opportunities and applying to jobs that would fit my skills, even if I need to shoehorn my skills into a nice little box for the prospective employer. As mentioned, those companies that do not allow me to write cover letters frustrate me. I also believe that these companies are doing themselves a tremendous disservice because they pass along candidates to their first round of interviews that they may never have selected had they known that the individuals cannot communicate effectively. Someone may be English-proficient or capable of working in a position for so many other factors yet have limited written communication skills that would make it difficult to put them in a public-facing role.

One might wonder what purpose it serves to limit cover letters. First and foremost, it is about volume. Job postings on LinkedIn generate hundreds of responses from across the world. Resumes spend moments on a hiring manager’s desk, so a cover letter is just one more piece of paper (or set of bits) that a hiring manager needs to consider in their limited time. The second issue is that many cover letters tell hiring managers nothing that they could not already see in the resume. Yet another issue is the rise of large language models (LLMs evoke my ire). If one uses an LLM to write their cover letter, some hiring managers will be no wiser while others will be frustrated by prose that seems obvious or stilted. Further, LLMs have little ability to expand upon what is already present in the prompt. If one uses their resume to inform their cover letter, the LLM is likely not making meaningful connections that allow hiring managers to learn something new. In a way, I understand why hiring managers do not want cover letters, especially if they expect applicants to use ChatGPT, Gemini, or other LLMs to do the writing for them. Nevertheless, I have missed out on jobs that I felt overqualified for or knew I could absolutely nail because I was unable to speak my truth.

All of this leaves me with a lot of writing. Sometimes, this writing is not as much as I would like. Further, as you all know, I would rather save my fingers for other writing projects. Whether you are writing for business or for pleasure, for creation or reflection, or just to get something on (virtual) paper, write on!

A Memorial, of sorts

It has been a long time since I have posted. Every time I begin a blog post, it seems to be like this. It’s almost like going to confession.

I’ve gained a lot of subscribers since I started blogging regularly 15 years ago. For those of you who are seeing this in your inbox and wondering who the heck this is, I wouldn’t blame you. My last post was five years ago. I am Jim Owen, still an aspiring writer, but now with many responsibilities beyond what I had in 2010, when I started this blog, and 2019, when I last posted. I’d just like to say thank you for subscribing and for your patience in this very long post. With that preface out of the way, I’ll just dive right into it.

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Today, I am celebrating an anniversary. Someone very special to me was born on this date. He is not with us anymore, but he will always be in my heart and mind. The world has changed so much since his birth and it’s amazing how little people recognize how much the world has changed in effectively a lifetime.

I’ve learned so much from this earlier generation, which includes the subject of this post: my grandfather. However, one of the most basic things I’ve learned is that the assumptions you make and details that you include about your life are highly dependent on the context you were placed in and your recognition of how that may differ from others.

In 1924, when my grandfather was born in the American South, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. This was a time of poverity and austerity that was almost without comparison in the annals of American history because of how mature and industrialized the American economy had become. Sure, the American continent had seen war and famine, but it’s far different with many 100,000 inhabitant communities dotting the American landscape and established civic infrastructure. In the 1920s, American population growth had slowed to “only” 15% per decade. 1 in every 10 of the 106 million Americans lived in New York City. This population was several times the population of the southern state from which my grandfather came.

The details I have from my grandfather’s life in a “big city” are faily scant. Please note that I am being deliberately vague for the purposes of this post and privacy. My great-grandfather was in the trades and his wife, my great grandmother, was a school teacher. My grandfather grew up in a home that would be small by today’s standards with his four brothers and sisters. He joked about eating animals like opossums, rabbits and squirrels, despite being from a decently large city. At first, I thought that this was a joke. However, if it was, he never let us in on that detail.

When work grew scarce, my great-grandfather uprooted almost the entire family and moved to another part of the state, hours away from where they had spent the previous few decades. My grandfather and one of his brothers stayed behind. This was in the early 1940s. My grand-uncle enlisted. My grandfather, still a minor, worked to support himself while he continued his schooling. He spent the last of his education living in a YMCA, working to support himself, and studying. I don’t know how common this may seem to my readers. When I was that age, I knew very few people who were under age 18, working, and completing their secondary school education. The only person I recall who was doing exactly that when I was a teenager had grit and determination that far exceeded the pale for people my age. My grandfather talked about his own situation as if it were nothing unusual.

In the 1940s, when my grandfather was in his late teens and early twenties, he was enlisted in the Army. He never discussed combat duty, although his role was different than those of general infantry. He was involved in the European Theater as a young man, although the bulk of the activity he discussed was during the Berlin Airlift. Afterward, now a father of two, his family returned to the United States.

In the early 1950s, while he was still in his 20s, my grandfather lost his mother. A few months later, he lost his father. A few months after that, his role as a reservist and a military contractor uprooted his family and moved them across the country. In short, he spent his 30s living in a new place with a young family and minimal familial ties beyond the nuclear family of four. While he made friends through the service and his job, he was living in a very different location, situation, and world than what he had known as a child. He was a reservist in both Korea and Vietnam, although effectively in transport, before retiring from the service entirely to work for a military contractor and then, eventually, for a major civil engineering firm.

He retired in the late 1980s, immediately prior to the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, and moved upstate, where he spent his retirement years living in a community he had known through his time as a reservist. In that time, he cared for my grandmother in an illness that eventually took her life. After nearly seven decades of marriage, he was alone. My grandfather reflected that he was a much better man for having my grandmother in his life. Given the high value he placed on truth, I have no question that he was correct, even if I don’t know exactly what he meant by it.

My grandfather had my aunt and her family to look after him and provide him with companionship, intellectual stimulation, and so many other forms of support. And they did. He was both social and independent. Despite having made friends with his neighbors over the years, he enjoyed a quiet evening and nightly phone conversations with his children. However, now in his 80s, my grandfather was in a fully empty nest.

It was an accident that eventually led to his death. He didn’t recover and eventually had a second accident that left him in the hospital and convalescent home. Among his many great qualities, my grandfather was a survivor and determined. However, there are some things that one cannot overcome when relegated to a hospital bed in an unfamiliar environment. It has been nearly a decade since his passing.

Now, with all of these vague details about my grandfather’s life, one might wonder what this has to do with you, dear reader, and with writing. One of the important things to recall is the context and that every detail provides a glimpse into someone else’s life and what they have come to know. Assumptions that we have come to make about various eras or come to make based on our own era can color our perceptions and expectations.

After all, if someone’s car breaks down on a lonely road, why won’t they just call a tow truck rather than hitchhike? It depends on the period. If they needed to do this in the 1970s, for example, they couldn’t unless they had a CB radio. Save for a few brick phones in the 1980s and a growing number of cell phones by the late 1990s, nobody could simply pull a phone out of their pocket to get out of trouble. However, that kind of question (“why didn’t they just call somebody?”) emerges from a generation who has never known anything but a world with smartphones.

Not long ago, I read commentary on the Internet that intimated that Wilt Chamberlain never scored 100 points in a game because it wasn’t televised. Well, how do we know if Jim Thorpe won both the decathlon and pentathlon in 1912 if there was no film? Given the scarcity of filmed events prior to the 1960s, Gen-Alpha might wonder if anything ever happened at all prior to the Kennedy assassination (11/22/1963, for those of you keeping score).

When people of my grandparents’ generation were children, AM band radios were the height of home entertainment and were in the majority of children of the 1920s’ homes by the late 1930s. Television, let alone color television, was not nationwide. For most families, this did not become viable until after World War II. Thus, if a character in a book you’ve read or written heard about something on the evening news in the 1930s, it was likely on the radio. If they saw it on TV, then they were either a New Yorker or very well-heeled.

If you’re writing a period piece about the 1980s and you include a cellular phone, then it was only done for phone calls and likely was a business call. Gordon Gekko may have had a Motorola, but a teenager growing up in San Jose, CA, did not — unless their father was an IBM exec. My grandfather received his first cellular phone around the same time I did; the early 2000s. They were flip phones and were used for phone calls, maybe for texting, and nothing else. This isn’t to say that people didn’t use something like a Palm Pilot or other PDA in the 1990s, but the reality for most people Gen-X or older was that they never owned cell phones until they were adults.

Today, I see Gen-Alpha children get frustrated when the show they want to watch is not available on-demand. However, the world that they live in, despite streaming being a hallmark of the past decade, is still so novel, even among people who are living it.

My living grandfather, several years my deceased grandfather’s junior, has circulated his various memoirs about his life to family. His discussion goes beyond his own life and discusses family histories and the history of San Francisco, including his mother living in a tent city following the Great Earthquake of 1906. The reality of the world he and his family lived in may seem so foreign to someone attending Galileo or Mission today, but their grandparents or great-grandparents may recognize the San Francisco they knew in those words. Knowing my grandparents and what they’ve been through gives me insights into the people I know, but also the world they lived in.

I know I’ve said this before, albeit in different words, but the only way of letting people into the worlds you know or create in your own writing is by providing the details. You need not be explicit in what makes this era or writing different, as readers may be inclined to identify those differences themselves. However, without these details, your reader may make many false assumptions based on the world they know. I’ve had to fill in many gaps due to my lack of knowledge about Depression-era Southern cities, but what I do know makes me incredibly grateful that I was born in the 1980s and experienced the world I did in my childhood.

Nanowrimo 2019: An Exercise in Word Counts

After another month of literary abandon, I have crossed the finish line with more than 50,000 words in a month. This was an interesting month for me, as I had a clear situation in mind, a fair idea of the setting, and a few clear characters in mind, but not a well formed plot at the outset. I suppose that’s why we write, because we’re trying to work out a story.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Nanowrimo, the idea of “National Novel Writing Month” is that you start a new story in November (or in April or July for off-month ‘Camp Nanowrimo’ sessions) and carry it through to 50,000 words. This magic number for words works out to be 1,667 words per month and is a far cry more manageable than the sweet spot for many genres. For instance, the sweet spot for submissions for fantasy ranges from about 100,000 to 120,000 words. This is, of course, for new writers. Luminaries in the genre regularly exceed these word counts. For instance, Terry Brooks, one of fantasy author I read a lot of growing up, regularly exceeds 200,000 words, doubling up on that sweet spot.

I wrapped up this month with more than 57,000 words. I don’t have a word count goal to target in this project, but I’d imagine it will take another 40-50k to wrap up, and then may shrink as I trim the fat from my drafts.

I won’t get to the trimming the fat part for a while, but as I think about simple things that I do to trim the fat in my business reports (and, yes, my novels), I wanted to share a few strategies that can add up and help you reduce your own word count:

1) Progressive verbs don’t add much progress – There’s nothing wrong with the present and past progressive, but overuse of this type of language can add unneeded words to your copy. Over the course of thousands of words, changing “was running” to “ran” won’t cut your word count in half, but it may save a few hundred words over time. In my day job, where lines of text are at a premium, I may save a line or two through this strategy alone.

2) Cut to the chase with the action – This is also a trick that revolves around your verbs, and it is something that I’ve picked up from years of a clunky sentence construction that lets everybody know that the survey respondents state this or that. While my novels don’t have those extended constructions to let my readers know that Dick said that he’d been hanging out with Jane, I might use something like “Dick waffled about using the gun, but put it in his pocket, just in case.” There are more succinct ways of conveying the idea that Dick took the gun with some uncertainty about using it. Sometimes, the construction can’t be avoided or better suits the tone of the piece. Most of the time, you can say what you need in fewer words and with greater impact.

3) Erase epithets – I am not as averse to using a descriptor in place of a name (the literary use of the term epithet) as some writers. It was good enough for Homer, after all — although Homer would usually use both the epithet and the name — but either use takes up more words than simply naming the character outright or using a pronoun. This isn’t to say that mentioning “the blonde doctor” instead of “Dr. Norcross” or “Norcross” is sometimes necessary, but look at how the epithet adds at least one more word. Now, imagine how many times you use this construction during the course of a story. In addition, there are times where epithets may come laden with unintended connotations, transforming what you view as an objective observation to something subjective.

As I’m still working through the first draft of my current untitled work and other novels, I won’t be putting this to use anywhere other than at work over the next few months. Hopefully, you can put these to use sooner than that!

Until next time, I hope you have a safe and warm December. Keep writing!

Just a Birthday Party Conversation

A few months ago, I was chatting with someone at a child’s birthday party. They were in marketing and I am in market research, so the conversation formed around that common ground. Thankfully, it didn’t center around marimekko charts and conjoint analysis. Instead, it was a sort of shared problem that the two of us have encountered: the gap between people who live and breathe something and the people getting in on the ground floor. This man was talking about bicycles, and what it’s like being surrounded by people who are bicycle-obsessed when you’re trying to reach a target population that may not know how to change a tire. In my experience, it’s about trying to appease clients who often have advanced degrees in computer science who are trying to reach a population that may be brand new to some specific hardware or software. The more that I’ve reflected on this conversation, over time, the more that I realize that the conversation that we had really applied to writing and writers. Writing a novel is like trying to share a world in which you are an expert to someone who doesn’t even have a globe.

Not all writers have degrees in literature or other liberal arts. Even those of us that do may still look at Alexander Pope or Marcel Proust and wonder why we even bothered. I enjoy the occasional turn into Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser, but even I find them hard to penetrate at times. Unless you’re a real giant in the literary fiction genre, and nigh untouchable, it’s very likely that your readers aren’t going to be a bunch of lit majors. Most of us mere mortals working on our novels will reach administrative assistants, bank tellers, and mechanics — if we’re lucky enough to be published at all. All of those potential readers are likely intelligent people — after all, they’re readers — but none of them need to be well versed in The Faerie Queene or The Decameron in order to be good at their jobs or to enjoy books.

This isn’t to say that we, as writers, need to tone down references to Astrophel and Stella or Howl in our writing. Of course, maybe laying off of such names as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti might win over some readers. However, it does mean that we need to engage in two things. The first is to bring the concepts and references to the people in such a way that we’re simplifying or modernizing something without insulting our readers’ intelligence. The other is to show, don’t tell.  Both of these can be difficult for us as writers, as we often like to show off our knowledge and may be prone to providing an information dump on sections that are interesting, but aren’t really pervasive throughout the rest of the story. In a manner of speaking, we like to prove that we did the homework.

Plenty of writers do this in a variety of ways. When I was still in elementary school, my friend Robert and I read through Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant series. I remember the first two books, as they were on my bookshelf for many years, but I can’t say that I remember anything beyond that. Anthony wrote about what he liked, which included lots of naughty words and scenes (believe me, they were particularly shocking to a 10-year-old), but he also wrote about something that was very interesting to him: a complex geo-political landscape. Granted, the early books in Anthony’s series took place in the moons of Jupiter, but these books were effectively a commentary on the climate that various groups were encountering in the ’80s, beginning with the Latino refugee situation in the Americas. If I recall correctly, Anthony did have his moments that were more diatribe than narration, but it wasn’t too much for a book-minded grade schooler to handle and wouldn’t have been too much for someone with little understanding of 1980s geopolitical conflicts to grasp.

I like to start my novels with something called an “expy.” These are so-called exported characters, in which one takes the basic characteristics of a character from a different story and then continues to adapt and iterate on that character until they’re someone different. In a way, this is a character as a trope, or like taking a bike and changing out just about every component other than the frame, maybe the cranks, and perhaps  a few cables. Ultimately, the original character was the basis for your new character, but the result is far from the same ol’ character. Disney (allegedly) did this with Mickey Mouse, basing him off of Felix the Cat; Roald Dahl effectively did this off of his own books, as similar characters can be seen across such books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach; and many action-adventure stories take elements from heroes in other stories. One could argue that Allan Quatermain, Indiana Jones, and Michael Douglas’s character from Romancing the Stone have many of the same characteristics with just a few parts changed out here and there. The problem that we all face is that these expies can be quite high-fallooting if not updated for the appropriate audience. In essence, unless I’ve set up my characters quite well, they can still feel foreign to readers living in the good ol’ 21st Century.

One technique that I have seen others use is adding an excess of dialogue and loading that dialogue with drama or comedy. This sometimes works (see Terry Pratchett for a real winner in this technique), but it can almost equally backfire, particularly if you are dropping your reader into a world that is entirely foreign to them. Unless they’re well acquainted with your writing and the world that you’ve imagined/seen, then they won’t quite understand what you’re saying, and the jokes will likely go over their heads. I have seen other aspiring authors do this for years throughout my various writing groups. The dialogue might humanize their characters, to an extent, but it also totally derails my understanding of their world, as well as the plot’s deliberate march toward resolution.

Another technique that I’ve seen is providing lavish descriptions of scenery, positions on a battlefield, food, and clothing. George R.R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire and the driving force behind Game of Thrones is notorious for this — particularly as it relates to food. He is very well acquainted with the details that paint a picture. However, this approach has its limitations, and such a practice can make for very dense writing. Another caveat to this is that it also slows the movements and motivations that make up the plot. I came across one example in a writing class many years ago in which the author had lengthy descriptions of clothes, fragrances, and haircuts, but pieced together a short story that had exceedingly little by way of plot. Come to think of it, I don’t remember the plot at all.

Some writing teachers have expressed the need to be a minimalist. Hemingway was like this in the sense that he used few long words and very few long sentences. Roddy Doyle would use this technique in a different way, cutting out virtually everything aside from the dialogue. This often meant that dialogue tags would also go by the wayside, and the reader would have to keep careful score of who said what. Other writing teachers talk about the need to remove sentences that don’t evoke feelings, or don’t move the plot forward, or don’t express some sort of action, regardless of its impact on the plot. All of this is important to consider, but may not apply to your individual style.

Instead, consider that you are the expert and that you are trying to express your world and your plot to a skeptical, but still intelligent novice. Your reader may know how to replace the P-trap underneath their sink, but they might not understand the reasoning behind it or have enough familiarity with the technical jargon to be patient when you start throwing out concepts like air admittance valve and cleanout, they either don’t know what it is or can’t imagine why it would be important. More importantly, they lack the emotional or intellectual attachment to understand why P-traps and cleanouts are a part of your story. Plumbers might understand the functional or aesthetic importance of positioning pipes a certain way, but the layman or novice is likely not so fortunate.

Ultimately, writing a novel is like a gearhead marketing a beach cruiser to someone who hasn’t ridden a bike in years or a hardware engineer trying to explain HDLs (very hardware-oriented programming languages) to someone who has just barely picked up Python (a relatively simple entry point to software development). Your readers will eventually understand your novel, given enough time, but you can make the novel so much easier for them by thinking about your book in terms of what an absolute foreigner to your body of work might need to know as they approach your writing and what would attract them to your book in the first place. You can’t loop them into the full 400 pages if they’re struggling to understand (and perhaps a little intimidated by) the first 20.

Short Thoughts on the Beauty of Words

Dear Readers:

Quite a few months have passed since my last blog post. It’s a irregular pattern at this point.  I feel like I’m always drawn to publish a post when I attend Community Writers of Santa Cruz County. My attendance yesterday is what prompted this post. 

Thank you for your patience,

JO

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The Beauty of Words: Danusha Lameris and Community Writers, Feb 2019

I’ve never heard words so beautiful as my first child babbling (for reference, I only have one). I don’t know if they mean anything at this point, but my son has common repeated syllables that flow through his stream of babble.  Most of his babble is gentle, which makes me think that whoever coined the term ‘babbling brook’ spent time around infant children.

I am at the point where I need to be more careful with my words.  As a writer, I guess I’ve always been there. It takes on a new meaning now that I’m a father. If I recall my Linguistics correctly, my son already understands some of what I’m saying. Soon, he will repeat some of the things that I say. Often, that won’t be an issue. I don’t curse (much). When I have done so with any intent, I was in one of several environment that I’ve (almost entirely) left behind. They haven’t been my proudest moments. Of course, there are inevitably topics and opinions that I like to keep private, as everyone does. From the comfort of home, I don’t always have the filters that I should have around inquiring minds.

This brings me to Community Writers. Yesterday, we heard from Danusha Lameris, the reigning Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. During her 20 minutes or so of sharing, I was surprised by the gentleness of her words and her voice. While I don’t think anyone would ever be offended by the content of her poems, a few contained subject matter that wouldn’t have been as well received if it was handled differently. Discussion of drunken nights with naked people and people gunned down in the streets, when handled well, can be no different than discussing dreams and nightmares. Of course, given more evocative words, images, and actions, they might run afoul of any watchdog for public decency. I’m sure Tarantino, another UC-Santa Cruz alum, has had to navigate those waters from time to time.

Still, the reigning Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County proved her mettle with the gentle, carefully-picked images she used. I enjoy poetry. It’s not my go-to for writing or for reading entertainment.  I appreciate it, and appreciated hearing Mrs. Lameris share her work. My favorite was a somber rumination on mortality, The Watch. For lighter fare, Bonfire Opera was very good, as well, although I could probably say the same of everything she shared. I’d invite you to check out Mrs. Lameris, if you’re a fan of poetry. I’ve included the link above, or you can click here.

When I edit my work, I try to tighten my word choice, going for impact rather than beauty (although beauty sometimes follows). As a result, my writing and voice is often crude relative to the deep examinations of abstract thoughts and personal histories that I often hear in Community Writers.  My writing sometimes feels like a Pollock painting in the middle of a Monet exhibit. Where everyone else is taking great care to present an impression, my words sometimes look like the detritus left behind after a series of impacts.

To illustrate this point, what I shared yesterday was a draft of something that I’d thought missing after successive hard drive crashes and destroyed flash drives. I hadn’t bothered to edit it prior to printing it out. For this reason, the copy has lines through it, penned in words added here and dropped there. It was perfect for a section about a man losing his mind, but it stood out greatly in between Keith Emmons’ ruminations on losing his father and Audrey’s memoir about being a young girl displaced from Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma and Texas. The words on the page had their own beauty, but their sensibility was far from what Keith, Audrey, or many of the other Community Writers had to share.

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Update: Delays

My current work in progress, The Best of You, has undergone many delays. I’m about 60-70% through draft zero, but I’ve left a lot of gaps that need to be filled before I have a complete draft. I’ve been struggling with writer’s block here. Since the start of the month, I’ve been beginning to break through.

What I shared yesterday, a section from a piece I started in November 2015 (Nanowrimo, for what it’s worth), is one of many half-finished works that I want to complete and publish somewhere down the road. I’ve lost sections of this piece in my electronic troubles (I think they were located on a flash drive that is now in multiple pieces), but 75% of what I’d already committed to the page, if not more, is still there.

Bachelor’s Parties and Best Man Speeches

For the past seventeen months, I have been working on a best man speech.  No, it hasn’t been a diligent affair.  I was dictating notes into my iPod Nano more than a year ago, but I haven’t contributed anything to those dictations since then.  Instead, it has been percolating, as have many other projects, including this latest post. Much of the time that it has been percolating, I have been doing other things: among these, planning a bachelor’s party.

Well, those plans have already come to fruition.  A few weeks ago, we went up to Lake Tahoe to celebrate my friend’s coming nuptials. It was the first bachelor party or “stag party” that I’ve been to since I attended my own.  My own was a tame affair: a lunch, a hike, and an A’s game.  I can’t remember if we had any beer, but that’s not due to the amount of braincells I may or may not have killed since then.  Other bachelor parties I’ve been to included a 27-hole disc golf game, as well as one night of billiards and Halo on X-box.  To be fair, it may have been Halo 2, but I wouldn’t have known the difference. Aside from, perhaps, my own, none of these were lacking in beer and spirits, and all of them have their own unique stories.

There are probably many items to come out of this latest bachelor’s party that I won’t know, and others that I wouldn’t dare report in a blog post.  There were definitely a few jokes that I only caught in the same way that I might catch the glimmer of a minnow as I’m walking across a bridge: with great uncertainty and from a distance. One of the jokes came while we were on the river, and not just on a bridge. We went rafting down the Truckee (shoutout to Truckee River Raft Company – despite our best efforts, we’re still alive and kicking). My raft, which had all of the designated drivers, all of the parents (no, no kids were there), almost all of the married men (and women), and most of the booze, made a comment about the other raft being like Lord of the Flies. I think that it was in reference to what would happen if the other raft ran out of booze. That other raft latched onto that comment, and before long there were the inevitable calls that “Nick has the conch,” as well as the rather alarming crowing that we would cannibalize one of the guys if the rafting trip went too far. Fortunately, we didn’t draw any inspiration from nearby Donner Lake, and everyone came home with the same number of fingers and toes that they had when they arrived.

This was somehow the perfect segue from a night spent watching Zoso, a Led Zeppelin tribute band,  to a totally relaxing night of bocce later that night. The event went from hard rock in a casino to (dare I say) family-friendly fare in the span of 24 hours.

Cory, the mastermind behind the bachelor’s party, and I were among several who spent most of our time as flies on the wall, watching as everyone flitted like satellites around the man of the hour. It was interesting to see just how many connections were made, and just how the sixteen of us connected to Eamon, the future groom.  Aside from the cousins — one of which drove all of the way from Tucson in the midst of a move from the Gulf Coast to the California Coast — I was likely the person who knew him the longest. I don’t know the exact date, but we’re talking in the neighborhood of three decades. On the other end, Eamon had pulled in Ash, who was originally a friend of the bride’s, and had met Eamon about three years ago.  In between, there were friends from elementary school, middle school, high school, and Camp Mather. I’d known most of these people for years, and probably would never have crossed paths with these men (and women) if I hadn’t known Eamon.

It made me think about how we all have these connections.  I wouldn’t consider most of these guys the “call ’em up and meet at a bar” friends.  Sure, hanging out would be fun (not at a bar), but it’s been a few years since I’ve been through some of their hometowns, to say nothing about their usual haunts.  Due to distance, if not due to any other reason, the only time I see some of them is when there’s an Eamon-related event. At the same time, that is the one important thing that we have as common ground: the groom.  I’ve been working to add friendships into my writing for just this purpose: the random connections that come from mutual friends and acquaintances can put together the most unlikely of people, and can even make them friends.

In my personal life, I haven’t been a powerhouse when it comes to making friends. Writing consumes most of my moonlight hours, and work consumes most of my day.  In between, I enjoy spending time with my family, particularly my wife and young son, exercise, and reading. Writing, particularly on the scale to which I have grown accustomed, takes hours — hundreds of ’em. Reading and writing often occupy my mind space.  Even as I am writing this, and thinking about the best man’s speech that I ought to be firming up (both committing to a longform document and tightening), I am thinking about what might happen to Pelayo, the main character in my current WIP, or how I might start my next project.  I’m also thinking about the unfinished projects that have gone into deep freeze, as well as the seemingly distant prospect of getting my first completed project to print.  Eamon, who also is an aspiring writer, has never had this problem.  Wait a few years, when there’s a little Siobhan or Sinead calling him “dad” and things might be a little different — though it’s not likely!

Even with all of the other projects going through my head, the next month will be about finding the mot juste for my best man speech.  How long is this speech, you might ask?  Well, it should have ended halfway through this post. Even if I have a completed first draft tomorrow (and that’s a big if), it will likely take me the entirety of the time I have remaining before I can put my stamp on it — of course, then there’s the matter of actually delivering it.

Thanks for your patience in this long delay, folks!  Read and write to your heart’s content, and then do it some more!

All Writing Can Be Personal

You don’t need to write something that discusses politics, spirituality, or personal details to write something that is political, spiritual, or personal.  The very act of writing is all of those, even if it appears to be (or professes to be) none of them.  There’s something inherently personal about sharing your own words and thoughts, even if they don’t always seem like yours.  By sharing your writing, you are placing a certain amount of trust in your audience.  While sharing very personal writing, like a diary, is exposing yourself to the World, allowing readers to study who you are and, perhaps the most chilling aspect of it all, to make determinations about what you are.

Today, I had the opportunity to share at Community Writers.  I heard a tribute to an 88 year old man who always encouraged others to publish, I witnessed a four part poem (including a two-voice third act) that gave tribute to Beethoven, and I found out why not everybody necessarily wants to go to Hawaii.  One person shared about the 43 years that they have been with their husband, another shared about losing their mother, and another shared about a spiritual experience that they had on the Big Sur River.  What did I share?  I shared a moment from a work in progress, Their Sharpest Thorns, in which my protagonist gets distracted from his main objective.  What I shared was not personal, or political, or spiritual, but it was my writing.  I’ve come a long way in the past year, moving past my first experiences in front of other writers — minutes spent shaking and  stammering as I shared excerpts of the very novel that I shared today.

I’m learning to speak with a more deliberate pace.  So far, sharing my work out loud has been like having to change clothes in your car: the faster you go, the lower the chance that you’ll be exposed.  Today, I think I succeeded. I spoke deliberately.  I think I’ve improved, and the reason why is something that is personal.

As you might suspect, another hobby of mine is reading.  I love to read — particularly if what I’m reading is Stephen King. I’ve spent hundreds of hours reading King.  I’m not even entirely sure how many times I’ve read The Stand, On Writing, and The Gunslinger.  Reading is a very personal experience, and a very personal hobby.  After all, I will gravitate to my personal favorites, as well as books that pique my curiosity, and perhaps my guilty pleasures.  Everybody does this.  Their preferences and selection is personal; even if you are one to share books, you may not share the same perception of the same books. As such, not many people I know share my love for Stephen King’s work.  Lately, I’ve met a few King fans.  During a group hike, I bonded with a new friend over our love for Stephen King.  I didn’t tell him even half the story.  One of the items that I omitted was that I’ve been reading Stephen King out loud to my son.

Reading Stephen King to a child might make you cringe, especially when you think of all of the bloody and disturbing imagery that has come from Stephen King’s fingertips.  I’m not too worried about that, right now, as the book that I’ve been reading is docile compared to King’s bloodier works. Reading out loud has been unusual, and I find it to be very interesting trying to read another author’s work out loud.  I haven’t done this since I was a teacher — but that’s another story.  Reading another novelist’s work out loud is not as difficult as reading your own work out loud — at least, not on an emotional level — but I find myself stumbling on words that I already know well because Stephen King’s voice is not my own.  His word choice and pacing is not the same as my own.  As I read King, I have to keep myself from phrasing things the way that I expect them to be phrased, rather than how King would phrase them.

Thus, as I’m slowly training myself to orate more deliberately, I am slowly training myself to expose my writings to others. It may not be political, or spiritual, or even all that personal, but learning to trust readers with my writing sure feels like a personal endeavor.

A Pen Too Far

I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.  — Mitch Hedberg, Mitch All Together (2003)

It’s often difficult for me to fall asleep.  Odds are, if I finish this tonight, it will be because I am having trouble falling asleep.  All of my best ideas come to me at night. Over the past few nights, I’ve thought of a way of breaking the stalemate I have with my current work in progress, delved back into a work that I abandoned several years ago, thought of a plot to a new project, and (most recently) started drafting out a speech that I am giving in September.  Tonight, my mind went back to that speech, as well as thinking of a different way I would have approached teaching a book back when I was still a teacher. I even dreamt up this post before falling asleep last night.

I perpetually have a problem with getting these ideas onto (virtual) paper. The problem is that life, and sleep, often get in the way of my writing. I’ve kept a note pad or journal under my side of the bed.  Both are mostly empty.  I may be tempted to write something down, but I am usually so desperate in my desire to fall asleep that I will gladly forgo that brilliant idea if it means that I will get to sleep faster.  I guess that pen is just too far away from where I want to go.

If it’s closer to the middle of the day, I have been known to use a dictation app on my iPod while at lunch or on a break.  If things are really desperate, I might write something in the margins of some scratch paper and hope that it doesn’t go out with the recycling. However, I pride myself in staying on task at work, and will only resort to such tactics if the creative part of my brain simply won’t shut up.  It’s not like a pen is too far when I’m sitting at my desk, but that’s not what I’m paid to do.

During NaNoWriMo, and especially just prior to the time change, I have been known to sty up until 1am and strike while the iron is hot. However, that is typically much more than jotting a few notes down on a page.  Back when I was teaching, this was an impossibility, as every night was a struggle just to get all of the work I needed to get done finished by midnight.  For that one magical, crazy month, nothing is too far away when it comes to my work in progress.

After several nights of wrestling with this struggle between getting to that pen and getting to sleep for what feels like hours, I thought of the Mitch Hedberg quote above.  Yes, I am guilty of that.  What about you?  What do you do when the creative part of your brain is operating at all cylinders while you’re trying to eat, sleep, shower, work, or otherwise go about your day?  When is this need to distance yourself from your creative ideas the worst? Feel free to leave your strategies in the comments section below.