Where I live in the mountains of Panama, the only change of season we see is from rainy to dry. This begins to take place in November. There’s a shift in the wind and the town braces itself for the Fiestas Patrias (Panama’s Independence Days). Strings of small plastic flags crisscross the streets and flap as if applauding you whenever you drive beneath them. Grey clouds hover above the town as barjareque, (not quite rain, but heavier than mist) falls on the tourists and marching bands, covering them with a sparkling layer of microscopic droplets.
November also signals National Novel Writing Month, which I first participated in 2012. I had been wanting to write a novel my whole life, and the only thing that forced me to get a book started and finished was NaNoWriMo.
I completed my first ever book, surprising myself and triggering an addiction to finishing books ever since. Now when the winds of November change and I hear the echoes of the marching bands practicing for the Independence Day parades, I feel like a horse at the starting gate ready to race to my word count with all the other bucking writers.
I think anyone who’s participated in National Novel Writing Month start to look forward to it as a yearly tradition. It’s something to get excited about, and you are not alone in your enthusiasm and anxiety. You can connect with other writers who are on the same crazy train. NaNoWriMo helps to stop the usual procrastinating and put writing first for a whole month.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to participate in the last few years. My job consists of mostly writing now and my writing fuel and tolerance for sitting at the computer are wiped out by the time I finish my work for the day. I’m often traveling during this time for the holidays, which makes it difficult to scurry off to some quiet place to write.
I also don’t allow myself to participate because have to stop piling up manuscripts. It’s becoming a problem. I wrote three novels in a mad dash and they are still left rumpled up and tossed aside like piles of dirty laundry on the floor. I have no business writing more Nano novels until I clean these up, right?But I wonder… just because I wrote them, does that mean they should be published? Is it worth salvaging them? These were my first practice novels, before The Sick Series, when I had no idea what I was doing. Hell, I still don’t know.
Then, I decided to revisit the books to do a damage assessment. The story is about two artists – Antoni, who can’t stop the creative outpouring of his soul, and Ona, who is creatively stunted. They frequently talk about the reasons behind making art and what it means to them.
Their wisdom baffles me (did I actually write that?). In the very book I was going to chuck to the side, I received message from my characters. My voice came through them to tell me that maybe the world doesn’t need these books, but that doesn’t matter, because I do. I must finish what I started.
NaNoWriMo has taught me to get the book out. I’m so used to making the 50K a month word count that to this day I write in 1,667 word spurts. But it’s time to face reality and learn how to clean up the messes. Those of you who’ve followed this blog are sick of hearing it. I know a few of you are ready to clobber me over the head if I keep dragging on about The Sculptor.
Believe me, I attempted to revise several times. I did a lot of work and still didn’t get the desired results. I’ve realized that the most important part of writing is rewriting. No matter how experienced a writer is, no one writes a perfect first draft (or second … or third).
All the rewriting and revising methods I’ve tried helped so much, but they still left something missing. Even worse, sometimes I over-rewrote and the story it lost its raw core. That’s because I was trying to control it. Then I ended up completely lost.
Update Nov. 2019:
Another two years has passed since this original post above. November is here, with its cloudy, breezy days and the sound of snare drums ricocheting through the valley.
And no, my NaNoWriMo Novels are still not published.
And yes, I have new ideas for books that I’m dying to put on the page.
But I am restraining myself from NaNoWriMo this year again. No more new novels until my work on The Sculptor, which will resume in 2020.
In the meantime, I completed three new short stories which I am happy to announce will come out in an anthology with three other super-talented writers. It’s called Lost Voices and will be published by The Writing Collective.
As writers, we all have times of confusion, self-doubt, and setbacks. The important thing is to adapt as circumstances change, keep moving forward, and never give up on a story you believe in.
Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year?
What are your plans for the NaNo novels you wrote?
Let’s Get Published is community of writers, and we’d love to get a conversation going. That’s why we’ll be posting a Writers Share every now and then to keep a pulse on the writers working their wordly magic all over the world.
Today we want to know about what you’re working on right now.
Tell us about yourself and your work-in-progress by responding by email, leaving a comment, or posting on our Facebook page.
Tag or share with your writing friends so they can join too.
1. What have you written?
2. What are you working on right now?
3. What do you plan to do with your current work-in-progress?
4. Where are you feeling good about your path to becoming a successful writer?
5. What are you struggling with?
As for me, I’m in the middle of Richard Thomas’s Contemporary Dark Fiction Class. Since the beginning of September, I have finished 8 short pieces of fiction, two 3,500-word short stories, and 2 essays analyzing books we read for the class. I have crammed more short fiction writing in the last two months than I can believe.
Yes, my brain hurts, but I’ve realized that I can make things happen even when I’m pressed for time and feeling uninspired.
I also feel empowered. I used to wonder why my work is not getting accepted. Rejection letters rarely come with an in-depth report about what’s not working in a manuscript. It’s a writer’s job to know that themselves. This class is teaching me the secret language of good writing (there is a language under the language).
Of course, now I want to take down everything I’ve ever written and rewrite it.
When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people—our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families—will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.
Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
When it comes to becoming a successful author, planning is 200% more valuable than writing. I’m not talking about outlining your stories and novels before writing them. That is important too, but I’m talking about planning on both macro and micro levels to reach your big picture vision of your life as a writer. Without planning ahead, we get distracted, sidetracked, and stray off task.
Aspiring writers are especially susceptible to writer’s drift, a state when we feel like life always gets in the way of our writing. There are several reasons we allow this to happen on a conscious or subconscious level.
1. Because we don’t earn a steady paycheck from writing yet, so we can’t justify spending time and energy on it.
2. We usually don’t have writing deadlines, except those we impose on ourselves. When we fail to meet them, who cares? No one knows but us. We have no one to hold us accountable.
3. We don’t know exactly what to do next, leaving gaps to be filled with interruptions, distractions, or someone else’s priorities.
We’ll get up for a job we’re not crazy about. We rearrange our schedule for our kids or significant other. We even drag ourselves out to walk the dog no matter how tired we are.
But how often do we take a stand for our writing?
The first chunk of time to be sacrificed when some unforeseen issue comes up is our writing time. Writing time is vague and unconvincing. People don’t respect it. Even we’re not sure what it is we’re not getting done when we’re not able to write. So it’s easy to dismiss it as no big deal.
The one person we fail is ourselves. And we don’t realize the impact it makes on our wellbeing when we’re constantly letting ourselves down by pushing aside our heart’s dream.
What would happen if you treated your writing with the same priority as other aspects of your life?
And how do we put ourselves into position to do that?
How do we do it without feeling guilty or self-indulgent?
Planning out your writer’s path to the smallest details will keep you committed to your writing. This means breaking things up in 5-year, 1-year, quarterly, weekly, and daily goals.
It’s not about finding time to write. It’s about making time to write.
Making sure you always have something scheduled to do next will ensure that you avoid wasting time, overwhelm, and paralysis. This will help you keep moving forward no matter what.
You’ll be able to ignore your fears and push past rejection. You’ll always be able to put one foot in front of the other by executing the next step in your plan.
Start Here
I’ve created a planning guide to avoid writer’s drift. You can download it for free using the link or form below.
How to find beta readers? It’s crucial for every writer to get honest and useful feedback, but it’s difficult to find beta readers outside of family and friends.
Today, we talk to Matt Brindley from fresh.ink, an exciting new platform that will match writers with unbiased beta readers. It will not only allow them to receive feedback, but also provide detailed analytics.
Ahead of its launch, fresh.ink is hosting a writing contest. $7,500 in prizes are available across 4 fiction categories: short story, novelette, novella, and novel. This contest is live.
Fresh.ink is also launching a digital literary magazine which will feature the best work across the platform and reprints from previously published literary works. All authors will be paid for their submissions.
This means writers can upload a story or novel for feedback, enter it into the writing contest, and possibly get published in the magazine all in one submission.
Read on to learn more about this amazing new tool for authors!
Whether an author plans to publish in a literary magazine, self-publish or traditionally publish, we envision fresh.ink as the connector between authors and agents, publishers and editors.
Interview with Matt Brindley, founder of fresh.ink
Tell us about yourself, Matt. You’re a product and software developer. What made you decide to make the transition to the publishing world?
The idea for fresh.ink was the result of many experiences and conversations over several years. I was first exposed to the writing world and the challenges writers and publishers alike face via my wife, Mary, who is a writer and editor.
While researching and evolving this idea, I met some brilliant people who were very generous with their time. One London-based editor took me to see her company’s office in a converted Victorian house. It was a beautiful building with a grand staircase, books lining every wall. She talked enthusiastically but realistically about working in the industry, the challenges and frustrations, the wins that made it all worthwhile, and the joy of reading. Another advisor, a literary agent, spoke of her passion for reading, of discovering authors, and her reasons for switching roles (she had recently moved from a senior editor position at Macmillan). Their passion was infectious!
I also had the opportunity to speak about the project with an author who had published a number of books with Hachette and was working on her latest novel. She walked me through her story of how she first found an agent, the ins and outs of working with a publisher and the feeling of seeing her book advertised on the subway for the first time.
I have a lot of respect for the publishing industry, for the decades of work it takes to succeed in it, but I was intrigued by the ways in which technology could be used to complement both traditional publishing and self-published authors. Writing great software is about empowering others with just the right amount of technology to improve their lives. I’m very excited that we’ve found a way to strike that balance here and genuinely help authors, agents and publishers.
I wish I had the skills and patience to write! I’m much more comfortable in a code editor than a word processor.
You love a good book, who are your favorite authors?
We Brits love a good murder mystery, so I’d be remiss not to mention the Agatha Christie books I grew up reading. More recently I’ve been reading through everything Ruth Ware has written, Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders and The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.
On those occasions I fancy fiction where the protagonist isn’t solving a whodunnit, I enjoy a pretty wide range of genres. I recently enjoyed reading Red Clocks (Leni Zumas), Goodnight Stranger (Miciah Bay Gault), Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens) and Less (Andrew Sean Greer).
What gave you the idea to help writers with feedback on fresh.ink?
I’d like to claim it was a brilliant idea of mine that came in a eureka moment, but in reality, the idea was formed over many interviews, much research, and ongoing involvement in online writing communities. I was keen to contribute to the literary world, but the idea took multiple years to fully shape, and will continue to evolve.
How does the platform work for authors?
Authors submit their fiction (of any length) to fresh.ink. It should be a final draft, free of typos and mistakes and ready for beta readers.
If a story is accepted, we analyze it to match it to readers who we think we’ll enjoy it to give it the best chance of being well-received. Readers can only see stories they’ve been matched with, otherwise work remains private.
Once reading starts, authors receive detailed analytics on open rates, if and where readers drop off, and ratings. Much like test screenings in film and television, understanding a reader’s behavior can be hugely beneficial in understanding how to improve a story. Readers will also answer more detailed questions about what they liked and what they think could be worked on, as well as join a book club with the author for further discussion and commentary.
Preview of fresh.ink’s story dashboard
How does one become a beta reader on fresh.ink?
We’re aiming to open up to beta readers in mid-October, so sign up for the waiting list at https://fresh.ink/#readers now to be first in line!
Tell us more about fresh.ink magazine and the fresh.ink app.
Our reader app has two sections: reader matching and our premium section, fresh.ink magazine, of which Mary is the editor. At launch, fresh.ink magazine will feature hand-picked writing from around the world. After our contest concludes, the magazine will begin including the best work that has come through fresh.ink’s matching service. All authors who are invited and agree to be featured in our magazine are paid, either via payment upfront or via revenue-sharing.
When is the official launch date?
We’re open to author submissions now, and readers will be invited in mid-October 2019. Not long now!
What is the future vision for fresh.ink?
Our vision is to create the de facto process for getting great writing out into the world.
Publishing is a tough business, especially for smaller houses and literary magazines. We want to support them all and help them thrive, either by matching them with proven writing or providing additional readers for their own content.
Whether an author plans to publish in a literary magazine, self-publish or traditionally publish, we envision fresh.ink as the connector between authors and agents, publishers and editors.
If you’ve been writing for a while, you might notice that much of your writing is similar.
Character-types repeat.
Themes replay over and over.
Settings and atmosphere don’t vary much.
This is good when starting out. You settle into your voice, genre, and style. You get comfortable.
Don’t languish in a writing rut.
Once you’ve found your footing as a writer and are confident in your process, it is time to take some risks.
Sure, your readers will expect a certain something from you, but they will also like to be surprised and delighted. Don’t tell the same story over and over again.
Experiment with different POVs, genres, and twists. Ask yourself, how can I make this story unique?
Predictability is boring for you and your readers. Go wild. Go crazy. See what happens! Be remembered!
