I’ve been a writer for my entire adult life. I’ve made my living doing nothing else. And as a journalist, I’m pretty confident in what I do. I know how to find sources, interview intelligently, craft a story designed specifically for the audience at hand. If I don’t know something, I know where to look for the expertise I need.<\/p>\n
But this whole writing a book thing is completely different. I’ve been toying with the idea of a memoir for a while. I’ve thought about what I want to write about and I’ve even worked on a proposal. But at the Willamette Writers Conference<\/a> in Portland last summer, I met with a bunch of agents, the majority of whom told me that memoirs are treated like novels these days. You no longer write a book proposal for a memoir. You write the whole thing and submit it, like you do with a piece of fiction.<\/p>\n Given that I had worked on a proposal you’d think it would be easy to just sit down and do the writing. But it wasn’t. I was conflicted on where to start. And my whole writing life I had started from a specific place I determined was the beginning and written my way to the end. Very occasionally, the start wasn’t the start and I’d rewrite it after I finished. But there was a form to the story in my head and it was easy to start.<\/p>\n This was different. My friend Hanks tried to bribe me into daily writing, offering me a dollar for every day I wrote 500 words, and charging me a dollar for every day I didn’t. I could earn $7 a week, but my potential loss was just $5. That lasted about three days before health issues caught up with me. And I’m sure a bit of trepidation on where to start and where to go after I started.<\/p>\n Some of my writer friends on Freelance Success <\/a>had been talking about National Novel Writing Month<\/a> (NaNoWriMo) which occurs each November (so should it be NaNoWriNo, with November the last word?). The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month. Ideally, they will be coherent words that hang together as a whole. Like, you know, a novel.<\/p>\n And so, on a whim on November 1 at 5 p.m. Pacific, I signed up. In the first 11 days of the month, I have skipped one day, and have more than 16,000 words written. I think that barring one or two days writing, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m barfing words onto the screen. There is nothing that hangs on anything else.<\/p>\n But writer friends who have written far more books than I can dream of (hello Lisa Rogak<\/a>, and congratulations on making the Best Sellers list with Dogs of Courage<\/em><\/a>!) tell me that I need to just keep going. No editing, no looking back, no starting over. Keep puking up words and sometime in the next three weeks, in the 50,000 words I hope to complete, will be the nugget of my book. And then I can start all over writing that.<\/p>\n Now, I have another couple thousand words to get out before the clock strikes midnight. It’s a glamorous life being an aspiring author, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been a writer for my entire adult life. I’ve made my living doing nothing else. And as a journalist, I’m pretty confident in what I do. I know how to find sources, interview intelligently, craft a story designed specifically for the audience at hand. If I don’t know something, I know where to look…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36],"tags":[522,523,520,521],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","category-writing","tag-dogs-of-courage","tag-lisa-rogak","tag-nanowrimo","tag-willamette-writers-conference"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":625,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions\/625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}