Chris Baty's Blog, page 215

"This is a strange thing, but I’ve noticed it many times: a bad day’s work is a lot better than no..."

“This is a strange thing, but I’ve noticed it many times: a bad day’s work is a lot better than no day’s work at all.


The question authors get asked more than any other is “Where do you get your ideas from?” And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn’t arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is “I don’t know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I’m not there, they go away again.””

- Philip Pullman, on the need to write regularly.

NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: How to Write with Wit and Skill

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Mary Robinette Kowal, award-winning writer and puppeteer (you heard me!) , shares just how important it is to write smart :

S – Size Up the Situation
U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
R – Remember Where You Are
V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
I – Improvise
V – Value Living
A – Act Like the Natives
L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

NaNoWriMo teaches you to write fast and to write without fear. I have always loved that adventurous plunge into wild story. Even if you are an outliner, like me, you’ll still hit a point where you head off the map and into uncharted territory. That journey can become exhausting because you have to build the landscape and navigate it at the same time.

Sometimes a feature that looks pretty can become impassable, so you have to backtrack and work your way around or invent a passage through the mountains. That’s when you start questioning if you will survive the month…

Live by your wits…

When you start bogging down, trust your instincts. You know the sort of story you want to read, so much of this journey is figuring out how to engage your own sense of wonder.

I’ll tell you a secret. Writers are storytellers, and the first person you are telling a story to is yourself. Don’t worry about any readers right now, this is just a daydream that you’re writing down. 

That place you’re stuck in? What would make you sit up with excitement or pull you deeper in the story if you were just a reader? Do that.

But… make sure that your character is living by her wits too. When she faces a difficult situation, let her make the smartest choice possible. I’m not saying that things should be easy for her—far from it—but what will help you stay engaged is if you have a hero that you want to follow, and that means someone who isn’t creating her own problems. 

Then you, as the author, get to make that smart choice go horribly wrong.

For instance: Scary noise in the dark basement? She’s smart enough to turn on a light. Only it burns out immediately. So she grabs a flashlight. Which gives the monster time to come up the basement stairs.

You get the idea. Make sure she hasn’t been stuck holding the stupid ball. If she’s living by her wits, it’ll make the story more fun for you.

… but learn basic skills

And while you are living by your wits and haring off through the story landscape, take the opportunity to hone your craft. Just because you are writing fast, doesn’t mean you can’t think about the writer toolbox. When you sit down for a writing session, pick a skill that you want to practice. Maybe that’s description of clothing, or dialogue, or using the five senses, or alliteration… whatever it is, take it out for a spin.

This has two benefits, beyond practicing that particular technique. First: It’ll help you hit your word count for the day. Seriously, there is nothing like describing the lace on someone’s cuff in minute detail to boost word count.

Second: You might be surprised at the areas where, say, slipping in some alliteration is useful. But it will also show you what a technique is not good at. That is as good to know so that when you are living by your wits and writing fast, you reach for the right tool.

You want to hit a point where the techniques are an instinct, so you can just enjoy the ride. Wit and skill are the keys to survival.

Mary Robinette Kowal is a novelist and professional puppeteer. Her debut novel Shades of Milk and Honey  was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Novel. When she isn’t writing or puppeteering, Kowal brings her speech and theater background to her work as a voice actor. Mary lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Sometimes she even writes on them.

Photo by Flickr user alessandro luerti.

Best of luck during these last few days, Wrimos! What skills and moments of wit have served you well this past month?

To the Victor Go the Spoils: Celebrating Your Creative Self

“Love your writing self…think about how you can keep the kitchen clean enough to keep that love simmering all year, until it’s time to turn up the heat next November. You deserve to create.” - Tupelo Hassman

This past November, our favorite former OLL-staff-member-turned-published-author dropped the above bit of wisdom, and guess what? You’ve done just that: because of your incredible self’s dedication this April, the noveling machine has been simmering all through the beginnings of spring, and the promise of an even more prolific summer is on the horizon for our July session of Camp NaNoWriMo.

By taking that leap of faith and dedicating your month to the creative endeavor you’ve cherished, you’ve both made an investment in and professed your love for your creative self. From personal experience, I know how that accomplishment can get lost in life’s daily shuffle. “Yes, I wrote. I made. I created. Great: now, on to scrubbing that stovetop!” It happens.

So, before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to celebrate our newest novels (or scripts, or memoirs, or hours spent editing, etc.!). That’s right; another month is coming to an end, and, if you’re ready, you can now validate that word count, boast of your official win to all your closest friends and family, then claim your nifty winner goodies, which will be available May 1. (Not sure how to do that? Check out our Help Desk!)

If you’re still a little behind, fear not! The end is near, but not quite here.  I have faith that you can push through this last week and claim your victory. Besides, that mad dash to the finish line is half the fun. That’s my strategy for this week; who’s with me?

Whether you end up reaching your goal this month or not, remember to take a load off and enjoy the reward of keeping your creative juices bubbling this April. You deserve to create, and you embraced that. So leave the chores for later, and have a treat, on us! Then maybe start planning that July project. We’ll see you there.

— Shelby

Photo by Flickr user kbcanon.

NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: What All Writers Do

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Howard Tayler, writer and illustrator of the comic  Schlock Mercenary , shares the one key trait of all native writers :

S – Size Up the Situation
U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
R – Remember Where You Are
V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
I – Improvise
V – Value Living
A – Act Like the Natives
L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

If you want to write professionally, it stands to reason that you will need to act the way professional writers act. They are the natives in this wondrous paradise to which you wish to relocate. You will need to do the things that they do.

“Act like the natives” means, at least in this context, “behave in the same way as the people like whom you wish to become.” Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and happens to also be a great way to learn.

So let’s look at the natives—writers, in this case—and ask ourselves which of their many colorful behaviors we should be emulating. How did they become such great world-builders, or dialoguers, or whatever else they might be? How do they arrange their work day? What do they eat? How often do they post to Twitter?

Uh-oh.

Writers write. That, ultimately, is the one thing, the only thing they all have in common. If you want to be a writer, do what all of the other writers do, and write. 

There is a logical fallacy called “affirming the consequent.”  Allow me to explain it with an example: 

Brandon Sanderson was chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. 
Brandon has over 40,000 Twitter followers. 
If you get over 40,000 Twitter followers, you will be chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series!

We can agree that this is absurd, yes? That task has already been assigned and completed. But you may catch yourself thinking something more along these lines:

Dan Wells co-hosted a podcast with a published author.
Dan landed lots of book deals.
If you want lots of book deals, be on a podcast with a published author.

Can you see through that one?

If you look more closely at what Dan did to launch his writing career, you’ll find that he was attending conventions and chasing down agents and editors with Brandon Sanderson before either of them had book deals. Most importantly, both Dan and Brandon spent uncounted hours writing so that they’d have things to submit to the folks they managed to corner in the bar at World Fantasy.

I write and illustrate science fiction for a living. I’m self-published, I attend a lot of conventions, I have run a couple of successful projects on Kickstarter, I’m married, I have four kids and a cat, I write and draw for at least twenty hours (each) per week, I am pretty noisy on Twitter, I eat lots of red meat, I don’t wear t-shirts in public, and I live in Utah.

I’m one of the natives. How far do you need to go in your attempts to act like me, or Dan, or Brandon, or any professional writer whose trajectory you hope to follow? 

Not very far, really. You are going to build your own career, and while you can begin by carefully identifying the elements of other people’s careers that are significant and reproducible, I’d like to save you some time:

Writers write. 

What’s the magic in that activity? Certainly there are other things that writers do, other common elements that enable them to write well, to write for an audience, and to write for money. 

There probably are. But you don’t get to find out about them until you write. A lot. 

Act like the natives and write, and there will come a time when you are able to truly see and understand some of the other things the natives are doing. Details you’d missed before will become blindingly obvious. Behaviors you’d dismissed as trivial will present themselves as crucial. 

And when you add those details, engage in those behaviors, embrace those nigh-invisible mysteries, you’ll realize that for all their enabling power, none of them means anything unless you write.

Howard Tayler is the writer and illustrator behind Schlock Mercenary, the Hugo-nominated science fiction comic strip. Howard co-hosts the Parsec award-winning “Writing Excuses” podcast, a weekly ‘cast for genre-fiction writers. His latest story, Schlock Mercenary: Random Access Memorabilia , is a fantastic place to get acquainted with the work for which he is best known. He lives in Orem, Utah with his wife Sandra, their four children, and one ungrateful, archetypally imperious cat.

Fighting Injustice with the Harry Potter Alliance

Through the Harry Potter Alliance (yes, such a magical thing exists!), Harry Potter fans can do more than read and re-read the books; they can turn fiction into reality through social activism. Executive director and co-founder Andrew Slack tells us how NaNoWriMo and HPA are working together for good through their Accio Books! campaign: 

According to the HPA website, “The Harry Potter Alliance fights the Dark Arts in the real world.” Tell us more about how HPA accomplishes this.

If Harry Potter were in our world, he’d do more than talk about Harry Potter. He’d fight for justice in our world the way he fought for justice in his. In the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), we aspire to be the heroes we read about. Time and again, we see Dumbledore advocate for fair and equal treatment of all wizards, muggles and magical creatures and since our inception, we’ve worked very hard on a number of equality issues.

After all, Lupin has to hide in the closet for being a werewolf, Hagrid has to hide in the closet for being a half-giant, and Harry Potter is literally forced to live in a closet because of his identity as a wizard. We want a world where no one has to live in the closet because of their identity whether due to their sexual orientation, gender identification, or their immigration status. In the HPA, we work for LGBTQ equality and immigration reform.

Tell us more about the Accio Books! campaign and how our Wrimos can help!

Wrimos and HPA members believe in the power of story. We recognize that books have changed our lives and we believe that sharing our love of books can change the lives of people we’ve never met. That’s why we’re working with Read Indeed to help Maria Keller—a book-loving 7th grader—achieve her dream of putting a million books in the hands of young people across the world. Read Indeed is glad to accept new or gently-used books for babies through teens. We’ve just extended the campaign through June 1!

The best way for Wrimos to get involved would be for them to find and work with their local Harry Potter Alliance chapter. We’ve also put together a few pointers for organizing your own book drive, as well as some guidelines that might help you identify a suitable recipient in your own community. However, anyone with small numbers of books to donate can mail those books directly to:

Read Indeed
155 Jackson Ave. N., Ste 20
Hopkins, MN 55343

How did the Harry Potter Alliance start? Any magic involved?

As a professional comedian trying to make ends meet, I started working with kids and they helped me fall completely in love with Harry Potter. Looking at the books from the perspective of an experienced social organizer, I saw many parallels between Harry’s world and our own.

I drew a map of all the different real world issues that I saw connected to the Harry Potter novels. With the story’s strong stance for human rights, equality, and against torture in prison, it was no surprise that J.K. Rowling used to work for Amnesty International.

Most people found my idea for a real world Dumbledore’s Army crazy. But then I met Harry and the Potters, two brothers and indie rock musicians who sing punk songs from Harry’s perspective. They loved my idea for a Dumbledore’s Army for our world, and together we began using social media to organize. From there, the movement grew and spread throughout the Harry Potter fan community.

What are some of your success stories?

We’ve raised enough money to send five cargo planes to Haiti. Through Accio Books!, our members have donated over 86,000 books and have helped build libraries across the world. We’ve worked for years on marriage equality and have recently contributed to successes on that issue in Maine.

We’ve also helped pass the Maryland Dream Act; we’ve protected thousands of civilians in Darfur; we’ve worked for media reform; and we are currently working to make all Harry Potter chocolate Fair Trade in an effort to help end child slavery and its connection to the cocoa trade.

What is it about Harry Potter fans that has translated so well to social activism?

I think as Harry Potter fans, we share a sense of responsibility to these stories: they have impacted us in profound ways. So we’re doing our part to make some of that magic real. Just as Dumbledore gave Hermione Granger a children’s storybook to arm her with the knowledge required to defeat Voldemort’s horcruxes, I think the Harry Potter Generation looks to the story of Harry Potter as a weapon in fighting our real-world horcruxes.

The world that Harry Potter inhabits is not perfect, but Harry and his friends continue to fight to make their world better. There’s no reason that Harry Potter fans can’t do the same in our own world.

What has been J.K. Rowling’s response to this daring endeavor?

J.K. Rowling has been wonderful. In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, she donated seven signed Harry Potter books to be auctioned off. She’s been nothing but incredible and supportive throughout our existence.

She said in Time Magazine: “I am honoured and humbled that Harry’s name has been given to such an extraordinary campaign, which really does exemplify the values for which Dumbledore’s Army fought in the books. To Andrew and all the others who work on this most inspirational website: the world needs more people like you.”

We know the world is full of amazing people like the folks at the Harry Potter Alliance; in fact, you’re one of them. We hope you’ll join them, and NaNoWriMo in this year’s book drive!

If you have questions about the campaign, please email them to: acciobooks@thehpalliance.org.

"When you were a little kid, you probably read a picture book with a title like The Jobs People Do...."

“When you were a little kid, you probably read a picture book with a title like The Jobs People Do. And the jobs were teacher, doctor, police officer, and the guy who sells you ice cream. But out here in the real world there are also chicken sexers, forensic accountants, perfume designers, and thousands of other professions you’ve never heard of. The real world is full of gnarly details, and whenever you think you have a handle on how complex something is, it just gets gnarlier.


This inherent gnarliness of things is an opportunity. When your writing starts to run out of steam, dare to ask, “Where is my novel too simple?””

- Scott Westerfeld, on writing complexity into your stories.

NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: The Value of Life Experience

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Nathan Bransford, author of the Jacob Wonderbar series, and blogger extraordinaire reminds us why living has to come before writing :

S – Size Up the Situation
U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
R – Remember Where You Are
V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
I – Improvise
V – Value Living
A – Act Like the Natives
L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

Writing, by its very nature, is a solitary activity. It requires blocking out the world around you, surrounding yourself only with your own thoughts, and swimming and diving through the oceans of your imagination.

It’s also a tremendously time-consuming activity, one that requires blocking off days on the calendar when you would much prefer to be out doing something far easier than pouring your heart out onto the page. You have to focus, power through when the writing gets hard, and above all, make sacrifices to complete a novel.

When you combine the necessity of concentrating on your own thoughts and the amount of time it takes to write and publish the novel, it becomes more and more tempting to block out life, zero in solely on the world you’re making so many sacrifices to create, and plan to rejoin real life when you’re finished.

But this isn’t the right path. In order to write, writers have to live.

You need to open yourself up to the world to gain inspiration by being out in public, seeing how people interact, hearing the way people speak, or even just walking through a park and letting ideas come to you. You’re only as good as the truths you’re able to channel into your fiction, and learning from the world by living in it is the only way you’ll find them.

You need breaks from your writing to achieve the right amount of distance to view it objectively. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in your world and fall so deeply in love with your characters and your plot that you stop seeing what isn’t working. Stepping out into the real world will give you a fresh perspective and allow you to approach your novel with new ideas.

Above all, you need people around you, because the writing process by its very nature is fraught at every stage, and you will depend upon the love and support of your friends and family to ground you and get you past the inevitable difficult times. But most crucially, no novel is worth losing friends, losing a spouse, losing a significant other or failing to develop new relationships and friendships. Love has to take precedence over your imagination.

Writing can wait. Living comes first.

Nathan Bransford is the author of Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow , Jacob Wonderbar for President of the Universe and most recently  Jacob Wonderbar and the Interstellar Time Warp . He writes a blog on writing and publishing. He lives in Brooklyn and is currently writing a guide to writing a novel.

Photo by Flickr user shenamt.

"The most common refrain from those of us who are grappling with sluggish stories and dwindling mojo..."

“The most common refrain from those of us who are grappling with sluggish stories and dwindling mojo is that we’re just feeling Blah. Our stories are Blah, our writing is Blah. We’ve spent the last two weeks mining our creative depths, and many of us have emerged with too few diamonds and way too many lumps of coal.


Trust the process. If you’re doubting yourself or your story, just keep moving forward. Every year, authors who press on to 50K are treated to the electric moment when the tangle of plots and people we dropped into the first half of our books end up forming unexpected connections. Themes develop. Arcs emerge. Things crackle, then hum, and, at the very end of the month, enough circuits connect that the whole story lights up with a bookish glow.”

- Chris Baty, on writing through the “blah”s.

Getting Through Camp With a Little Help From Your Friends

One great feature about Camp NaNoWriMo is the ability to get to know  the fellow writers in your virtual cabin. Now, you may be asking: Just what is a virtual cabin? And will you look the other way on any inter-cabin prank wars?

Think of Camp NaNoWriMo cabins as your personal, kick-butt writing group during the month. Up to six writers are grouped together to chat and keep an eye on each other’s word count. (You can find out how to be sorted into one over at Camp News!)

If you’re already in one, you may be wondering what the next steps are. Fortunately, your fellow campers have come up with some amazingly creative ways to get the most out of their cabins, and I’d like to share some of my favorite ways with you:

Breaking the Ice and Getting Your Cabin Rocking

Writers can be reticent, especially when deeply immersed in a month-long project. That can lead to some pretty thick ice to break. Still, all it takes to turn a quiet cabin into a bustling hotbed of authorial wit and wisdom is some creative ice-breaking. Wrimos are multifaceted people, so showcase what makes you unique!  

“I offered to create book covers for my cabin mates. So far I’ve completed one, and another is on the way.”

— Camp Participant jodotha

Maybe you really just want a place you can relax and gab about your writing process. You can make your cabin like that, too!

“Our conversations have ranged from 90s pop culture (leading to our cabin name - Salute Your Shorts) to writing discussions and encouragement.”

— Camp Participant Shiflet

Speaking of cabin names…

Building Solidarity with your Cabin Mates

… a simple and effective way to make your cabin experience more enjoyable is to give it a unique identity. Some Campers have really run with this concept:

“Since we are all fantasy writers, we’ve chosen Word Wizards for the cabin name, and our mascot is a Rainbow Unicorn (wearing a wizard hat).”

— Camp Participant sarasvati.river

It does help a lot of people to request cabin mates who’ll have something in common with you, whether that’s age range, word-count goal, or genre.

“The five of us are writing science fiction with varying word count goals and together we represent four countries.”

— Camp Participant Dazophia

That’s the kind of thing that’s so magical about the cabin-sorting process. Five people from four different countries were brought together simply by having a common interest in writing science fiction.

If It’s Not Right, Don’t Force It! Keep Searching

It might sound like a lot of these people simply lucked into the perfect cabin on the first try. Not so! Dazophia didn’t find her international house of sci-fi writers on the first try:

“I cycled through seven cabins in March before settling into my current cabin. This one is just right!”

It’s a common theme I noticed as I read through the “Tell Us About Your Cabin!” forum thread. Lots of people found their ideal cabins only after an exhaustive search. Fortunately, there are resources to help you along the way:

“I’m loving my cabin. We didn’t know each other before finding each other in the Finding Cabin Buddies forum, but we’re getting a long very well.”

— Camp Participant LovelyLici

Maybe you’re looking for the perfect cabin to help you push through the final two weeks of Camp this April. Or maybe you’ve started looking ahead to July, and planning for your best Camp experience ever. Remember, you’re only limited by your own creativity. So go forth and  make your novel, and Camp what you want it to be!

— Mike

Photo by Flickr user juicyrai.

NaNoWriMo Survival Guide: Improvising, or How to Fake It 'Til You Make It

This month, we’re taking the SURVIVAL acronym from a wilderness survival guide, and using it to lead you through the depths of the forests, lakes, and crags of your writing journey. Therese Walsh, author of The Last Will of Moira Leahy and cofounder of Writer Unboxed tells us how improvisation can be an essential tool in the writer’s toolbox :

S – Size Up the Situation
U – Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste
R – Remember Where You Are
V – Vanquish Fear and Panic
I – Improvise
V – Value Living
A – Act Like the Natives
L – Live by Your Wits, But for Now, Learn Basic Skills

Whose Line is it Anyway? is one of my favorite television shows; I’m always amazed at the skill of these improvisers as they craft an entertaining story from scratch within minutes. Their philosophy and techniques can help you, too, as you write your draft in record time. Here’s how:

Ideas. Each actor brings a set of special talents to the table: a spot-on impersonation, or the ability to sing or dance. They have an established bag of tricks that they can pull from as needed.

You have a similar bag as you begin your NaNoWriMo experience. Maybe it’s a talent for dialogue, maybe it’s a broad outline of your story, or maybe it’s character worksheets you plan to keep by your side. Pull wisely from your bag of tricks. 

Mayday Option. Sometimes ideas just don’t work. If a story element that had seemed strong begins to fail, allow yourself the freedom to think on your feet and move on to a fresh concept.

Punting the Critic. No director will ever appear onstage during an improvised show and criticize someone for failing to live up to his or her potential. Evict the critic from your writing space as well; she’ll only slow you down during the creation phase (she can come back when it’s time to revise!).

Reinventions. Whose Line features a game called “props,” during which the actors use common items in unconventional ways. Your story may be filled with established details, but if you become stuck, why not play a bit? Maybe the telephone in the kitchen is a portal to another world! (C’mon, it could work if you’re writing a sci-fi thriller.)

The point is: you can mix up anything. You can mix up everything. In fact, mixing things up might move your story along in new and entertaining ways.

Open Doors. Improvisational teams create new opportunities for each other that make it easier to continue their storytelling. You can create open-door possibilities for yourself as you write, too.

The easiest way to do that is to generate problems for your characters. And if they resolve a conflict? Replace it with a new one, more complex than the original. Remember: resolution is a closed door, but conflict is an open one.

Volume. Not everything the Whose Line actors say and do is masterful, of course, but they know to keep going, instead of staring off numbly hoping for inspiration to strike. Typing your way through a half-baked scene is one way to actively work toward story solutions. That it does so often work itself out is one of the great mysteries and joys of being a writer.

Interaction. Often, improv actors will look to the audience for inspiration. If you get stuck, why not reach out to a friend, and see if their thoughts spark new ideas for you? Fresh brains = fresh material.

Sidestepping. During another of my favorite skits, a host must guess at the identity of his guests with only their quirks to guide him. Sometimes the host will find himself at a loss, so will turn to another “guest” and guess what they are instead.

If you run into trouble with one of your plot points, you can sidestep it temporarily by attending to a secondary storyline.

Experimentation. Every episode of Whose Line is unique, with newly invented characters. If the actors ever feel intimidated by this unpredictability, they don’t show it.

Live just as fearlessly as you push through your new scenes. There are no wrong moves. No wrong words. Only the stage you’ve created for yourself, and every possibility before you.

Therese Walsh co-founded Writer Unboxed with Kathleen Bolton in 2006. Her debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy (Random House), was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, and was a Target Breakout Book.

Photo by Flickr user  Anirudh Koul.