I started writing. Finally! It feels so good to say that. I found several sources that helped me along the way and I want to share.
Last year I took a writing class through my local adult education program. Annette Lyon, the instructor, was excellent. She taught the basics of writing. But she taught more than just foundational skills; she gave sound advice from her own personal experiences on being published. And she gave us encouragement and the confidence to give it a go.
I made the decision to write young adult (YA) fantasy – the biggest reason is my kids. We started reading some of their books together and I was hooked. I still read adult science fiction and fantasy, but I’m continually drawn back to YA.
At “Life, the Universe, and Everything” (LTUE), a local writing symposium, I attended a session where a publisher said she was looking for novels with multi-cultural characters or main characters from different cultures. That sounded interesting to me so I started researching. My main POV character is a First Nation Cree (Native American) from Canada. And I have several other characters from around the globe including: Tanzania, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Denmark, England, and the US.
Once I found my characters and developed a little of their personal history I was so excited to start the novel. I officially started writing the first draft last year in June. Finding time to write was hard, but the more I wrote the easier it was, and the more excited I was. Even so, my output wasn’t great. I had maybe 10K words by the end of October. Then came National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) – what a great thing. I know the pure goal of NaNoWriMo is to write an entire novel in a single month, but I twisted it a little to meet my own needs. I just wanted make progress on my novel. The great part about NaNoWriMo is the constant reminder to write something, anything. The inspirational messages focusing on quantity over quality were exactly what I needed at the time. I finished the month of November having written an additional 18K words. That is far short of the 50K goal, but for me, producing almost two times my starting word count in a single month was a significant step forward. At the same time it was kind of grueling. So, since then I’ve tried to maintain a more moderate pace. But, without the constant reminders – and encouragement – my production hasn’t been as consistent as I had hoped. My current word count is around 38K, which overall I’m happy about. But I am disappointed I was stuck on one particular scene for a few weeks – I should have written more.
This past weekend, though, was rejuvenating. I received a jumpstart. I literally feel like someone attached jumper cables to my attitude and said here you go, have some of my energy. The source of that energy was another writing seminar, “So You Want to Write a Book,” conducted by Luann Staheli. I heard about it on twitter from Annette Lyon. I saw Luann at LTUE on a couple of the panels. But meeting her in this class was so much more personal. The seminar participants included me and one other aspiring writer – so pretty much one on one instruction. Luann covered a wide range of topics from genre definitions to plot structure. Along the way she told encouraging stories from her own life and from the lives of other writers—she knows a lot of writers. She made me absolutely jealous listening to stories about her own writing group.
While the instructional part of the class was great, my biggest takeaway was Luann’s encouragement. There were several opportunities during the class where Luann asked about my current project, and used my answers in examples of how to do something – like generate a plot. Each of us took time to outline our plot starting with the initial incident and ending with the resolution. I struggled at first, this is an area where I needed some help. By the end I had some new ideas and some needed focus that I’m confident will make my novel better.
I have to confess something at this point. When I say I struggled when we worked on our plot outlines here’s what I really meant. I’ve never felt so fragile in my life than when I was trying to express my ideas in that class. It’s not that I didn’t have something to say. I’ve been thinking about it, working on it, and discussing it with my family, and even a few select friends, for over a year now. But sharing it with someone new, the entire class no less, was, and still is, a scary experience for me. Look, I consider myself a fairly confident person. I’m a computer programmer with 20 years of experience, 19 in my current job. I’ve played sports, coached my kids in sports, plus planned and carried out activities with scouts including winter camping for so many years I stopped counting. But sharing my story ideas, and as an extension of that, writing something that other people will hopefully read, is scary. This is tough to admit. I know as a male I’m supposed to bottle up my feelings rather than share them this way, especially in such a way as to emasculate myself in public. I blame this uncharacteristic expression on the fact that I recently watched “You’ve got mail.” We actually talked about “You’ve got mail” in Luann’s class, then that night it was on TV. I even stayed up late to watch the ending. Ok, I feel better now. Hey, maybe the fact that writing is scary to me is why I want to do it so bad – I have to prove to myself I can do it. I think I just had a psychological breakthrough.
Ok, getting back to my jumpstart. Another insightful thing Luann asked us to do was to write our top ten list of things we’d do if we had no obstacles stopping us. That was illuminating. The thing I learned was I can do all of them now. But like most things in life, it will take effort and a plan to balance those things in with the rest of my “busy” life. One of the things I want to do is to blog more consistently – this blog is my first attempt to make good on that one.
And now I’m almost as excited to write as I was when I started last summer.
To sum things up what I've learned about writing over the past year is to never give up, write about what you are passionate about, and surround yourself with encouragement – especially people who will encourage you. If you feel scared reach out and connect with others who are in the same situation – there are a lot of us. Annette and Luann are awesome at that – but I bet that wherever you are you can find people like them who are passionate about writing and willing to share.
My goal is to finish the novel I’m working on as soon as I can – I’m shooting for 90K words – then see what happens. I want to blog at least once a month; in order to practice writing, and to give me small writing breaks from the “big” novel. And I’m hoping to find a writing group; I feel like that will help me make more consistent progress, and that it will help increase the quality of my work.
I have to try.
