[Bill Denise] Adventures in Writing

Hello! Tami has granted me the honor of writing a guest post for her wonderful blog, now I’ll try not to make her (and you) regret it!

I’d like to tell you a little story about my adventures in writing. But, before I begin, I need to tell you just a little bit about myself. I’m an engineer by schooling and a project manager by experience.

I was never a writer.

I learned a long time ago that creativity is not my strong suit, despite the fact that I have always tried to be creative. In junior high school I was the DM in our AD&D group (yes, I’m that old – AD&D was the newest version! ), but I mostly used store-bought campaigns. Try as I might, I never had the vision to create anything truly my own. I’ve had no formal writing training, and I barely get by in the real world with my rudimentary knowledge of grammar.

 

I have always loved reading. I read all of the John Carter of Mars books when I was young, and my love of science fiction and fantasy has grown ever since. Like many avid readers, I dreamed of writing my own novel some day. Also like much of the general populace, I thought that writing said novel was simply a matter of taking the time to do it. As you all know, I was wrong! I tried writing a couple of times, but gave up after only a few pages because I sucked.

Almost two years ago, through a long series of events while searching for tanking info for World of Warcraft (thanks Honorshammer!), I eventually found myself on the Saucy Ink website. There I learned about NaNoWriMo, and the writing bug was rekindled. Luckily, I also found Tami’s excellent NaNo prep course, and I followed every step of her plan or I would not be writing this today. (See, you CAN blame her for this post!)

I was surprised to discover that writing takes planning! Now, remember, I’m a project manager, so I’m all about planning! This I could understand. Taking what little creative juice I had, I planned the heck out of this novel. I planned for two whole months leading up to NaNo, and I needed every bit of it. To be honest, I find a lack of creativity can actually be helpful in this process, since I don’t have new and exciting ideas constantly knocking on the door and disturbing my focus.

So, I planned and I planned, and I waited for November to start. I also got involved in the Saucy Ink short story group, which helped me more than I can explain. I learned so much from that small group of talented writers, from reading their work and their critiques of others’ work. Submitting my short story to them for review was surprisingly frightening, even though they are all very nice people! The process taught me more about writing than any other single thing I’ve done.

NaNo was fun, crazy, and actually quite productive. I won, which simply means I wrote 50,000 words in the month, but more importantly, I discovered that writing is hard work. During the month I truly realized how important the planning was to actually getting words on the page. Without the planning guidance from Tami, I would never have had enough structure to allow the story to make it that far. A good idea is nice, but it won’t get you past anything longer than a short story.

With NaNo complete, my enthusiasm waned. I realized that 50,000 is nice, but my story was only half done.  At times I had to force myself to write a hundred words or so, and I found that it was best to write something every day, rather than waiting for the mood to strike. I won’t lie to you, there were long stretches when nothing at all made it to the page.  By now I really didn’t like my book anymore, but as I’ve mentioned, I had no other cool ideas trying to steal me away.

At one point I decided I didn’t need to finish. Why should I? I’m not writing a best-seller here, I’m not going to make a living as a writer, so who cares if I quit? I’m only doing for fun, right? Then my 11-year-old son asked me when the book would be done. Apparently he’d told his teacher that I was writing a book, and the teacher wanted to know when he could read it. If I quit now, it wouldn’t set a very good example would it?

So I buckled down. Somewhere I got the idea that I needed to finish the book before NaNo came around again. It should have been easy, but it wasn’t. I still struggled with getting words down, and now I’d hit the empty places in my initial outline from soooo long ago. Despite that fact, I had created the ending in the planning stage, and I knew (sort of) how to get there; there was simply the DOING.

Finally, during lunch while at work, I typed in “THE END” at around 107,000 words. It was October 31,2012. WHAT A RUSH!

Now comes the easy part – Revision! It’s easier than writing, right?

To be continued…

Related posts:

Writing Status, July 2012
NaNoWriMo is Uponxt Us
Where’d the Writing Go?