Tag: Book

One of the hardest parts about writing a 30-day novel is knowing what to do with yourself after it ends. Studies have shown that both men and women can suffer from postpartum depression after the birth of their child, and you shouldn’t be too surprised if you come down with a touch of the blues as you put your baby to bed.

My Advice:
Make the transition from intense creative period back to normal life easier by tackling a few of those nonessential things you’ve been putting on hold this past month. Go grocery shopping. Call people back. Make appointments. But still, no dishwashing. Please. Let’s not get crazy.

Once I was on a plane, smooshing my forehead against the window, watching farmlands pass in a slow-motion scroll beneath me. I was willing the plane to go faster, eager to get home, when another passenger jet shot through the airspace elow, rocketing in the opposite direction at an unbelievable speed. It took me a second to realize the obvious: We were going just as fast as teh other jet. But when you’re riding the bullet, it’s easy to lose track of speed. This is a lot like your novel. Take a second and scroll back through all you’ve written in the last 28 days. You did all that. It came out of nowhere, at a speed that would make professional writers queasy. You’ll likely hear a clunk at the end of today’s noveling session. It’s the sound of the landing gear coming down. You’re almost home, writer.

When it comes to ornamentation on buildings, architects tend to give up after creating the first story. The truth is, no matter ho much work they put into decorating upper floors’ facades, people just don’t notice things higher than 10 feet. (this is also the reason that towering warehouse shops like Costco or Wal-Mart don’t worry overly much about leaving their ceilings surprisingly raw and ugly.) Remember the law of the invisible ceilings when you worry that you’ve left something ruinously ugly in your book. Caught up in the sweep of your story, most reader won’t even notice the rough patches.

In the sport of ultramarathioning, racers sometimes run a hundred miles or more at a stretch. The sport’s king is Dean Karnazes, an unlikely athlete who hadn’t done any running until he dead-end life left him feeling so frustrated that he just stripped down to his underwear and ran out into the night. He hasn’t slowed down since, and now he can run more than 200 miles without stopping. On his training runs, he uses his cell phone to order pizza and cheesecake that are delivered ((and consumed) while he’s running. The lesson Dean offers monthlong novelists is clear: You can maintain focus and speed while wolfing down an oversized dessert item. Get on that cell phone, writer. Your cheesecake is long overdue.

I you’ve ever been in a book group before, you know what wildly different interpretations readers can derive from the same passage. A screamingly obvious Freudian allegory to one reader will be a hilarious skewering of today’s political parties to another. The discussions are especially fiery when an author leaves a little ambiguity in the book’s ending. Did the main characters end up together? Apart? Eaten by rampaging zombies? As you start to head into the wrap-up for your book, feel free to leave a little ambiguity in your story. Leaving some plot moves unelaborated and characters’ actions unclear means less work for you as you a writer, and gives readers the toothy satisfaction of putting the pieces together in ways that make sense to them.

As part of their ethincal code, archaeologists agree to leave a protion of their excavation sites untouched. They do this as a gift to the archaeologists of the future, who may be able to glean more from the area than current technologies allow. As you dig deeper into your novel, you may find that your cup of good novel ideas runneth over, and you can’t fit all your interesting characters and scenes into the arc of the story. If this is the case, just make a note of them, and set them aside to explore in future writing projects.

Procrastination, I think, gets a bad rap. To start a project and see it through to completion, we need the pressure and sense of urgency procrastination provides. Sure, in the midst of a frantic all-nighter to get a paper or report done, it feels horribly dysfunctional. But I see procrastination as a terrifically functional way to minimize toil and maximize output. So if you’ve been letting yourself fall behind on your novel, it’s okay. You’re just allowing the pressure to build, waiting for the do-or-die moment to arrive before you throw yourself into the book with everything you’ve go. A note to all procrastinators, though:

That moment starts today.

An anthropologist named Victor Turnere added a new wrinkle to the disciplines canon in the 1950’s when he wrote about the importance of something called limen. Translating roughly as “threshold,” limen refers to those times like adolescence when we’re caught between two life phases. In these neither-here-nor-there periods, he wrote, levels of energy and disorder both run high.

You’re in a period of limen right now, novelist, and this week I recommend you heighten the energetic state by taking a writing field trip to a space such as an airport, hotel lobby, bus depot, or anywhere people are temporarily lodged in that fascinating space between departure and arrival.

One of the most useful office products in the world, the Post-It(r) Note, began as a total failure. A scientist at 3M was trying to brew up a batch of super-strong adhesive. One particularly miserable attempt produced a substance that could barely hold two pieces of paper together. It took four years for the company to see that the weak glue wasn’t the problem. Te problem was preconceived expectations. As your book starts to become something different from what you’d originally intended, keep 3M’s sticky situation in mind.

A few years ago, my car’s rearview mirror dropped off the windshield and landed in my lap. Freaked out, I headed over to an autoparts store where they assured me it happens all the time, and sold me a kit to glue it back in place. But after I got used to the mirror’s absence, I really started loving life without it. The view ahead was so much broader than it had been with the mirror blocking it up. I found myself savoring the forward-focused feel of driving without looking behind me all the time. It felt dangerous, yes. But also exciting. While my mirror is safely back in place again, today I recommend you pull the literary equivalent of a rearview mirror-removal.

The finish line is just 10 days ahead. Stomp that foot down on the accelerator and don’t look back.