This starts with your story idea, that little nugget that itches your brain until you have to write just to get it off your back.
It’s a romantic notion, isn’t it? The writer at the mercy of her muse, chased down and tackled every single day until she is forced to write something–anything–just so she can rid all the extra voices in her head.
Not all story ideas are like this, and if professional writers waited around for this particular phenomenon, we’d never get anything done.
Truth is you often have to mine for ideas, carefully picking and choosing where to put your passion. You have to force yourself to fall in love with your ideas and your characters, to train yourself how to race to the computer day after day just to see what they’re up to.
I grew up reading very prolific authors like Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Janet Dailey and V.C. Andrews. They spit out new books on a yearly basis, and it always astounded me how they could come up with so many stories. When I was a young writer, I was still waiting on the Muse to come calling, which she did a couple of notable times, turning my ideas immediately into a passion that I needed to, and wanted to, indulge. The rest of the time my Muse was MIA, which worried me that I might not have what it takes to join the ranks of my favorite writers, whose livelihood depended on writing book after book.
What I didn’t realize then was that the creative muscle is one that grows stronger by flexing. The more ideas you entertain and discard, the more chances you have to land on something that will motivate you enough to invest hours/days/weeks/months–years–of your life on. It’s up to you to bring the passion to your project, by first finding what you’re passionate about.
For me, back then especially, this often started with another passion of mine. Music.
Like I mentioned before, my first book was a novella based on the Barry Manilow song, "Ships." I remember very vividly lying in my single bed that one afternoon, listening to my record player (yes, I said record player,) and really listening to the words in the song.
For those unfamiliar, the song tells the story of an adult male and the complex relationship he had with what appears to be an estranged father. Because I had already seen this play out in my own family, where an adult child meets a parent for the first time, my mind just sort of ran with the idea. It all comes down to one simple question: “What if?” So I asked myself, “What if a man shows up on an adult son’s doorstep, wanting to reconnect after years of absence and silence, and the man wants absolutely nothing to do with him?”
Emotion + conflict = the birth of a story idea. I wanted to answer that question so much, it made me reach immediately for a spiral-bound notebook where I jumped in, both feet, to do exactly that.
I don’t recall exactly how much time it took me to write the story. Some days were harder than other days, because even with this novella written longhand in a notebook, I knew it had to reach a certain number of words to be considered “a real book,” and that involves a lot of skill to build the story and craft the plot. Since these were the days before Google to learn such things, I decided to use the size of the notebook as my goal to complete the story. It was going to be however long the notebook was, and that's the time frame I had to get from asking the question to finally answering it. When I was fourteen, this was what amounted to plotting a story.
Before long I had the complete "book" in my hot little hands, filling that notebook from the first place to the last, with a story that sprang from one simple question.
I didn’t write another novel until five years later, when I was homeless and living out of my car in Los Angeles at the age of nineteen. Once again, music was my motivator.
I was listening to the radio as I sat in the driver’s seat of my then-boyfriend’s (and ultimately first husband’s) old Buick LeSabre.* (*See note at the end.) We used to park behind a Ralph’s* grocery store in Van Nuys, where the forgotten road ran alongside the train tracks. It was not a busy street in the least, which is why we chose it. We could park there without any hassle and no one bothered us, even overnight when we had to put towels in the windows just for a little privacy so we could sleep.
These were the considerations we had to make, rewiring our brains for survival, taking nothing for granted. The thing about homelessness is that you feel absolutely vulnerable 100% of the time. In our world, having money is what makes you have value – what gives you the right to exist, with a place to stay, all your needs met so you can turn your attention from pure survival to actually living.
Not a lot of people really, truly get this, mostly because they’re blessed enough not to live through it.
But when you have no money and no home, you virtually become invisible to the world around you; one that is so preoccupied what you might ask of them that they’d rather not see you at all. (Kind of like certain members of my family, who told me that offering me a place to stay would “encourage dependency.”)
And perhaps that is why when “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses came on the radio that afternoon in 1989, I listened with new ears. Like almost everyone else in 1987, I had listened to Appetite for Destruction until I wore out the grooves in the record (yes, I said record.) I had seen the video more than once, the one where Axl shows up on the mean streets of Los Angeles, playing the character of a clueless kid from the Midwest who was in store for a rude, effin’ awakening the minute he stepped off the bus.
I knew a little bit more about this rude awakening, so my mind began to churn again with, “What If?” If nothing else, it gave me a sense of control when I had none, and that's a very empowering place to be.
What if a young girl runs away from her awful past and lands in Los Angeles because there is nowhere else she could think to go? What if she, too, was some clueless kid, who shows up in the ironically named City of Angels, fresh-faced, naïve, and vulnerable? Someone who faced the terrifying LA streets alone as another nameless, faceless runaway because going back home was the much scarier alternative?
And what if someone crossed her path to help her, to save her, that didn’t look anything at all like what a savior should look like? What if it was a biker, who looked to the world like a rebel at best and a criminal at worst? And what if this biker used that ambiguity to fight both the criminals and the cops, just to protect the innocent and squash the evil that simmers just below the surface in any city?
And what if… that savior was a woman?
This was what made me reach for an ever-present notebook to figure these things out longhand. Not only could I authentically embody the young, clueless girl, but I could also embody the strong, fearless road warrior who decided to protect her.
It, essentially, became a book about salvation. What could possibly be more inspirational to someone who desperately needed saving?
At the time I was attending some classes at a business school. After every lesson was done, I would put in my spare floppy disk (yes, I said floppy disk,) that I used for notes and just fired up the word processor program to fill in any down time I had getting to know these characters who would ultimately become so real to me that they felt like actual friends and family. Actually they were better than friends and family, because they were there for me when I had almost literally been abandoned by most everyone. Aside from my mother, my best friend and my then boyfriend, these fictional people were really the only people in the world who wanted to save me.
I cared about these characters so I cared about their story, so much so that I did take quite a long time to tell it. The bar was set so high I knew I couldn't grab it on the first jump. Granted, I was in the midst of surviving on the mean streets of Los Angeles at the time. Real life interfered all over the place. My mother finally road to the rescue, like she was prone to do, and we all escaped Los Angeles for Fresno, where a whole new set of concerns kept me preoccupied, especially after I found out I was pregnant.
I didn’t finish this book until 1990, where I promptly sent it off for representation only to find out I wasn’t quite ready for that part yet. I didn’t quite reach the bar I had set for myself, evidenced by the heavily edited version the agent sent back to me with a “Thanks but no thanks.”
Just because you finish a book doesn’t mean you’re ready for the big leagues, particularly when it’s your first. No one told me that, so to say I was disappointed to learn that is a whopper of an understatement.
Unlike today, back then I needed to find an agent or publisher to grant me permission to join the ranks of professional writers. I didn’t just get to hit a button and voila… there I was, sitting alongside my idols.
Needless to say, one of the biggest ways to get hung up back then was writing a story idea that wasn’t marketable. Fortunately for me, my story was, as evidenced by the heavily edited manuscript the agent sent back to me. She wouldn't have wasted her time doing that if she didn't think it had merit. It was the execution that failed. I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I had failed my beloved characters that I shelved that project and wouldn’t touch it again until I had proven to myself that I had the goods to write it.
It was 2014 before I completed a whole new draft of CHASING THUNDER, which ultimately got me what I had always wanted most: an agent who was as passionate about the project as I was. She had a buyer for it within a month after I signed with her.
Some ideas land in your brain before you have the ability to do them justice. You have to earn the right to write them. This isn’t an excuse to stop or stall, by the way. It should motivate you to develop the skills that your story deserves, and the only way you’re going to do that is writing. How much you need to write depends on how epic you want your story to be. In between the first draft of CHASING THUNDER and the one that got it sold, I wrote twenty books.
Like my dear friend Hal Sparks says about virginity, “You don’t save yourself for the one. You practice for the one."
Of course, I didn't know all that in the 1990s, when I used my inability to tell the story I wanted to tell as an excuse not to write anything at all ever. I set aside my passion for storytelling to concentrate on being a young mother and new wife. I honestly didn’t have the energy to chase the muse, even if I had known that was what I had to do.
Instead I waited for inspiration to strike. It finally did in 1995, when I ran across an ad for Harlequin or Silhouette, one of those romance publishers, who wanted stories based on the written word. It could be any kind of romance story (suspense, romantic comedy, etc.,) and it could be any kind of written correspondence.
What a great opportunity to ask some questions!
The one that got me motivated to write? “What if a woman moved into a new place and she kept getting the mail of the occupant before her? What if they were postcards, which meant she could read them without violating any privacy? And what if they were romantic postcards that were never signed? What if she fell in love with this man without ever meeting him?”
Because this was an actual publisher who was looking for material, this time I had a word-count goal. These romance novels generally fell around 50,000-65,000 words, which is shorter format than most mainstream fiction.
To my mind, these seemed easier to meet, so I sat at my computer and got going. I had a good idea what needed to happen when, so I was able to finish this particular book within a couple of months.
Of course, I was also going through some personal trauma at the time I first wrote PICTURE POSTCARDS, which had me escaping into my fictional world as a way to cope, to take control in a very powerless situation, but we’ll talk about that more during my “No Excuses” installment.
Because of this trauma, I also wrote what would eventually become THE FULLERTON FAMILY SAGA, based on more depressing and complex questions, like coping with loss and loving two very different men at the same time. These were the questions that haunted into my darkened brain in 1995.
I wouldn’t write another book till years later, when I took a project I had begun in my teens and novelized it. It was the first book I wasn't driven to write, instead it was one I very much decided to write, just to get another completed book under my belt. I didn't wait for inspiration to strike. I very purposefully sat down to craft a marketable idea that would fit neatly into the genre so that I could shop it around.
Passion still played a part, however. Like so much of my material when I was young, UNDER TEXAS SKIES was inspired by music, specifically the Eagles “Desperado” album. For those who know me, the Eagles are one of my favorite bands, landing squarely and securely in the #2 position since I discovered their music in 1983, thanks to a friend of mine.
Though I love their flawless harmonies and their musicianship, what I’ve always admired in particular is Don Henley’s and Glenn Frey’s songwriting skill. They often tell pretty complex stories in a completely poetic and beautiful way. “Lyin’ Eyes,” “The Last Resort,” “Life in the Fast Lane,” “Hotel California,” – all of these songs were self-contained novels in a way, which is why I fell in love with their music so much. My mind was allowed to run free for a few minutes and fill in the worlds that they introduced.
For the “Desperado” album, the guys were darned near operatic, telling a story over the course of all their songs, not just contained within one. I personally thought it should be a musical and set out to write it when I was only sixteen years old.
My fantasy was that one day I’d meet them when the show opened on Broadway, and how cool that would be. (Still would be, frankly.) But after I was done, writing a stage play without any idea how to do that, I knew it wasn’t good enough to show the likes of Don and Glenn. I shelved it and gave up writing for the stage before I could even get started.
Years later, when I wanted to write a book but really didn’t have any new ideas picking at my brain, I decided to revisit that story I wrote around this album. It was, at its core, a romance between a land owner and a drifter, so I had everything I needed to craft a shorter format romance novel. Since I believed that was where I had the best shot to launch my career, I figured it was a good place to start.
This project ultimately became UNDER TEXAS SKIES. (Thank you, Don and Glenn.)
By the time I discovered Nanowrimo in 2004, I had already abandoned novel writing for screenwriting. Well, maybe abandoned isn’t the right word. I hadn’t made much progress breaking down the gates to publication, so I simply decided to throw my energy into trying another angle. Screenwriting has always appealed to me because it’s more minimalist in nature. Since I tend to be a bit more verbose, writing a 100-page screenplay that says everything I need and want to say is the biggest challenge of all. It sounds so much simpler than what it is. The rules are much more defined. The format is a lot more rigid. You don’t get to meander through page after page; you run into place markers every five or ten pages that force you to stay on track.
When I first decided to answer Nanowrimo’s enticing call, I figured there was no better outline anywhere than a screenplay that I had already completed. This is an important part of selecting a story idea for Nanowrimo. To successfully complete a book in 30 days, you kind of need those place markers to keep you on track. These will keep you motivated to keep going, giving you tasks to complete one at a time until you find yourself typing “The End.”
Since this was a love story, I knew I could complete it in the shorter format of 50,000 words.
I keep bringing up word counts because that’s something you need to consider whenever you sit down to write a book. Different genres have different rules. Granted a story isn’t done until it’s done, and you should never bulk up shorter stories into bloated novels just to satisfy a word count.
But if you’re going to market your book, you need to be aware of the accepted standards. Per the Writer’s Digest and Romance Writers of America, some of these work out as follows:
Young Adult: 55,000 – 70,000
Romance: 40,000 – 100,000
Science Fiction/Fantas: 100,000 – 110,000
Mainstream: 80,000 – 90,000
Westerns: 50,000 – 80,000
Middle Grade: 20,000 – 55,000
This gives you a number of options. You can either mine for a story in specific genres that would easily satisfy the 50,000-word requirement of Nano, or you can write whatever the hell you want to write, and if your book isn’t done at the end of November, at least you will have met the word count requirement.
This was how it worked out for me with MY IMMORTAL, which I live-blogged much like I am doing now. I met the 50,000-word count before I finished the book. One I did by November 30. One I didn’t. And it’s okay either way. The objective of Nano isn’t so much to complete the book as much as it is to show you that you can complete 50,000 words in 30 days, which means you could write a solid first draft of more mainstream books within two.
Where people get most hung up is that they think they’re going to have a completed project in a month, and that’s much more daunting. Writing a first draft is just the itty bitty tip of the iceberg. This merely moves you along the game board so you’re a little closer than you would have been otherwise. It's a step in the right direction, but it's still only a step.
Can you complete a solid first draft within a month or two? Yes.
Is it ready to market?
No.
That’s not the point of Nanowrimo. It never was. The point is to get you in the habit of writing so that you can complete a project. You can turn "I wish," into "I did." You can get one step further to your goal of being a published writer, but it's still only going to be one step.
As such, you can keep the marketing aspect in the back of your head, but it shouldn’t be your sole focus, unless you’re an experienced writer who participates in Nano more for the fun and community of it, rather than the educational, skill-building aspect of it. Like we’ve discussed before, it is highly unlikely you’ll have written a polished, completed, publishable bestseller by the end of 30 days. What you’re assembling, really, is a skeleton on which to build, one that will motivate you enough to keep going day after day, so that one book becomes two. Completed projects become careers.
(This can, by the way, lead to a bestselling book. If you can’t wait to see what happens next, imagine how that will work with your readers.)
This is why I recommend picking a project where your passion sustains you. Ask the questions that drive you to the computer so you can figure out the answers. Some will get you over the finish line. Others won’t. The only time I “lost” Nano was when my story ran out before I reached the final word count.
I still finished the first draft within a month, so I personally consider that a win.
Even if it’s your own story that motivates you (memoirs = 80,000 words,) one that you would never sell in a million years because it is a little too raw and a little too real (Fatty: Nanowrimo Project 2006,) you need something to inspire your muse to keep coming around. It’s not a one-way street between the two of you. If you get in the habit of writing, she’ll show up just to see what kind of hijinks you’re getting into.
So choose wisely. You’re going to be eating/drinking/sleeping/talking/writing/obsessing about this idea for the next 30 days. Make it one that inspires you. You’re the first reader of this book, so make it one you’ve always wanted to read but never did, because it could only come from you.
This is the reason you write in the first place. Now get your fanny in that chair and make it happen.
*This asterisk represents a placeholder. I’m not 100% sure that the car in question was a Buick LeSabre or that the grocery store was Ralph's. I'll need to research to get that right, but it doesn't need to be right right now. I’m a stickler for getting things as accurate as possible, I know I’ll have to dig around through my photographs to compare the car in question in order to get this part correct, but those are loose ends I can tie up in the second draft I nitpick for consistency. Instead of using this as an excuse to stop, thus destroying the momentum and getting me out of the writing groove, I’m simply notating it so I can come back to it in the editing process. Nano is all about moving forward. There are plenty of things to fix and repair, but now is not really the time to do it. If I weren’t live-blogging this book, I’d likely not even read the passages after I write them, just so I can keep my focus where it belongs: that very next word that needs to be written. We’ll talk more about this later on; I just wanted to use this opportunity to show you how it works in practice.
Started First Draft: November 4, 2015 12:20pm PST
Completed First draft: November 4, 2015 2:01pm PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,245
Completed revisions: November 4, 2015 3:50pm PST
Updated WC: 3,975/13,429
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