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.