On November, Nanowrimo, and Exploration

by Dianna L. Gunn

In spite of the rain and cold keeping me indoors, when I heard that November's Penumbra issue was going to have an exploration theme, I thought it was perfect. Not because American Thanksgiving celebrates taking land from the natives or because of any historical feat, but because November is the month of Nanowrimo.

For those of you who don't know, Nanowrimo is an annual challenge to write 50, 000 words of fiction in a month. The motto of quantity over quality along with the large community and tight deadline forces you to just write, without holding anything back. It's a great way to discover whether or not you actually have a novel in you. Along the way you'll learn more about yourself and about writing than you thought possible, even though you probably won't want to look at the draft when you're done with it.

Even after eight years, I consider every Nanowrimo an exploration. Each year I start with a story—usually the bare bones of one—and explore all its avenues. I travel through the world I've created for this year's novel, learning everything there is to know. I discover my character's darkest secrets and their greatest joys.

Year after year, I also discover things about myself. I've discovered that, if left alone for a month with no ability to go outside and only a computer to keep me company, I can write 300, 000 words in 30 days. I've discovered that this behaviour leads to tendonitis, which I still struggle with. I've also discovered that if I'm actually trying to do well in school, I can't accomplish anywhere near that word count.

Similarly, in one year of working at Penumbra I've learned a lot. I've learned what it takes to build a successful magazine, how difficult it is to manage a blog when you're relying primarily on other people, and how awesome it feels to see the slow but steady climb of readers. I've also learned that even I have a burn out point, and that as much as I want to be superwoman, sometimes I have to take a step back and refuse extra duties.

This November, I planned to discover a whole new world with my writing. I'm also hoping to find new ways to make Penumbra shine and to bring our blog—and the eMagazine itself—to new audiences all over the world.

What did you hope to discover this November?

Dianna L. Gunn is a young Canadian fiction writer who specializes in dark fantasy. She also writes poetry, generally dark, which is her way of dealing with life. This insightful author hosts a website covering every aspect of fiction writing and interviews with noted guest authors.

Learn more about Dianna L. Gunn on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Hacking the Writer Brain: The Stevenson Imperative

by Jude Griffin

It’s NaNoWriMo time again. National Novel Writing Month ( hundreds of thousands of people around the world dedicate themselves to writing fifty thousand words between 1 Nov. and 30 Nov.

As an enthusiastic but less than prolific participant, I'm fascinated by the people who manage to write fifty thousand words in a month. Once, when I was relating a glorious but short-lived period of writing 5000 words a week to my writing group, the whole room gasped. As a whole, writers love what they do while simulatenously struggling like hell to do it.

WTF, right?

Right.

So this time around, I'm making my writer brain the subject of an experiment. An experiment that will last til the next NaNo next year, and I will be documenting it in occasional posts here.

The first principle to be put into practice is what I'll call "The Stevenson Imperative" after the wonderful Jennifer Stevenson, author of the astonishing Trash Sex Magic (inter alia), who once sent me one of the finest pieces of writing advice ever:

"Write a page a day or burn in hell."

Genius.

Deceptively simple, but it strikes at the core of what underlies great productivity in writing: make it a habit.

What does it take to form a habit? Repetition+time=habit. But how much time and how much repetition is where it starts to get fuzzy. Maxwell Maltz published his book on cognitive behavioral therapy, Psycho-Cybernetics, in 1960 from which we seem to have gotten the very popular modern-day belief that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit.

While there is no scientific proof that three weeks has magical habit-forming power, we do know that repetition over time creates physical changes in the brain--less the subject of conscious decision-making and focus and more the output of a brain trained to perform.

In The War of Art, a book all about our resistance to writing (or, more generally, behavior chance), Stephen Pressfield writes:

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write."

I used to thrash about in avoidance. I'd do the dishes, clean the utensil drawer, check all the batteries in the flashlights, organize the medicine cabinet, remind myself of how to use our fire extinguishers--until I applied the same tactic that I used to get myself out of bed at 4:15 am for crew: no thought permitted. Just action.

If I treated getting up and getting ready as non-negotiable, if I did not allow myself even one moment of lying back to think about how I felt, how I tired I was, how cold out it must be, could I sleep a little longer, then it was much easier for me every morning to get out of bed. It sounds simple, but changing where you let your brain go takes constant reinforcement.

But now the challenge for me is the writing. I can open the document, read my notes, even envision a scene. But then: nothing. I am frozen. My brain feels weird. I can't write anything good. I don't know how to open the scene.

Ugh.

This is my challenge. To move forward when even the next step is unclear and feels shaky and wrong. This is where I want to teach myself to have faith in the transcendental nature of writing, as so memorably described by Joyce Carol Oates in The Paris Review's "The Art of Fiction No. 72":

"One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."

This is parallel to something I have noticed with running, or, more precisely in my case, waddling. It takes about fifteen minutes before it starts to feel good, before it stops being an effort, before a thousand nose and ankle itches stop plaguing me. I've learned to have faith in the power of those fifteen minutes of slogging, before the endorphins release and the dopamine rewards me for sticking it out.

One part of me knows this is also true for writing, that it also takes me about fifteen minutes of sustained effort before the act of writing stops being so difficult and fraught and becomes pleasurable. But, like exercise, the gap between knowing and doing can be large. So my task this month is to have faith. To apply The Stevenson Imperative and have faith that, in the act of doing so, everything changes.

Jude Griffin is a writer, photographer, and an expert in learning and knowledge management. Inclined toward geekitude in all things, she loves to read about the neuroscience of creativity. She is a member of the rollicking NaNo Boston 2012 group, reads slush for Nightmare and Lightspeed magazines, and is working on a novel that might be sci fi, might be fantasy.

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