How to Write and What to Read

While I was in Ireland, our rental house had a small library with travel guides, discarded paperback mysteries, and a few old gems. I was mightily tempted to steal a book called How to Write and What to Read (written by Richard Ferrar Patterson and W. Kersley Holmes), but my husband shamed me into leaving it in the house. Still, I snapped some images of a few pages so I could consult some of the words later. Today, I share a tiny snippet contained in that book:

"We cannot all be Shakespeares; but we can all learn to express ourselves; for who knows what, in the course of our lives, we may be called upon to express.

"Words and sentences are the writer’s tools, and as most of us have to be writers at some time or another, if only writers of notes to our friends, or applications for posts, we must learn how to make those tools serve our purpose."

Confessions from an Anxious Mind: A NaNoWriMo Writer's Story - Final Day

I'm currently sitting just shy of 20,000 words; 33,000 away from a blue ribbon finish, but 12,000 words farther than I made it last year. I'm going to make a concerted effort to pump up the volume of words in the remaining 8 hours.

However, I still have two items to take away regardless of how many words I finish with: 1) the group behind NaNoWriMo, the Office of Light and Letters, does fantastic things throughout the year to help writers and champion the future successors of the written word with their Young Writer's Program (which, incidentally, contributed a Dare Machine to NaNoWriMo that led me to construct one of my favorite passages of my story). 2) I have a lot of groundwork laid for a story and characters I'm supremely interested in continue to work through. I'm going to spend some time after I send in my final manuscript for word tally really breaking out a working outline to give more structure and guidance to this project.

Confessions from an Anxious Mind: A NaNoWriMo Writer's Story - Week 1

I had a plan. I was going to start at 11pm on October 31st: harvest some plot ideas, plant some seeds of character and reap some stalks of subject matter so that I could chow down on the fruits of prose come midnight. But even the best laid plans–and this was not one of them–can go awry, and so it ended up being 12:30am on November 1st when I launched full-force into my National Novel Writing Month endeavor. Which is actually more true to the spirit of NaNoWriMo, working in the moment and removing the bonds of self-censorship.

In that first sprint, I employed nearly 400 words, inventing less than 1% of them. After 3 days, I am now perched at 3,200 of the eventual 50,000 I hope to acquire. Currently, I don't have any significant plot developments, no real "story" to speak of–it's mainly character sketches and small moments, which is suitable coming from a short story background and having consumed that medium as a reader for the past few weeks. But that is the appeal of NaNo: freedom to write the way you want with the impetus to write more of it. I'm braving the impending storm of brain fatigue and laptop eyestrain, and I look forward to sharing more of the ongoing madness.

NU MFA buzz

Northwestern is starting a part-time creative writing MFA program, which is getting some buzz on the literary-blog circuit. (Lit blog circuit? Really? Yes.)

Details from the institution here, discussion here and here.