Background Noise
Because of the way my brain works, I need a combination of background noise and silence while I work. I never know until I’m writing what it is going to be. Yesterday, I spent about an hour in a noisy restaurant and thought, This would be a great place to write. Back when I first started, my writing set-up was a table near a window of a Pizza Hut near Mount San Jacinto Community College. The result was a 150,000-word historical fiction novel.
Sometimes the noise I require is music. Sometimes, it’s a movie or TV show in the background. For instance, I’ve got The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey playing while I write this blog post. I credit Pepper Basham for this particular selection. She’s referenced the LOTR movies so much in her Skymar series that I felt they deserved a rewatch.
On rare occasions, quiet is preferred. I’ll get into a zone and won’t even realize that a movie or song has ended, and I’ve just kept going. I don’t really don’t care which it is as long as the words keep flowing. They’ve been flowing beautifully lately, inspiring me to up my writing game.
I’ve decided to write as if every day is part of NaNoWriMo. Let me elaborate if you’re unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Every November, hundreds of thousands of writers make a commitment to write a 50,000-word project. This requires writing 1,667 words per day. It’s a great way to kick-start a novel.
In November of 2022, I wrote my 50,000 words and felt pretty good about it. Then, I set it aside and went back to a previous project. Switching back and forth between manuscripts allows me to gain perspective and gives me the distance I need to see plot holes and problems. However, the number of projects can sometimes multiply with very little encouragement.
If you ask writers how many manuscripts they have going at one time, they’ll probably forget to list half of them until you start prodding. While preparing The Art of Persisting, I was also doing rewrites on my NaNoWriMo manuscript. And starting two YA novels. And doing some minor rewrites on the original historical fiction manuscript (that is still not ready to publish).
But The Art of Persisting has been launched, and now I can focus on the NaNoWriMo novel full-time. And the Christmas novella I started yesterday. And the idea I had this morning for a stand-alone novel.
Okay, so I have a problem. A wonderfully delicious problem. I have too many stories to write and share, and for that, I am thankful. Better to have too many than too few.
But, my commitment to writing at least 1,700 words a day has been as rewarding as my NaNoWriMo journey each year. Crafting the scene that will be referenced on the cover of the next Rose Collection novel was especially fun.
It’s an exciting process. A bit noisy at times, but exhilarating all the same.
