{"id":623,"date":"2012-11-11T20:57:29","date_gmt":"2012-11-12T04:57:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/?p=623"},"modified":"2012-11-12T08:58:01","modified_gmt":"2012-11-12T16:58:01","slug":"nanowrimo-megoinsaneo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/nanowrimo-megoinsaneo\/","title":{"rendered":"NaNoWriMo = MeGoInsaneO"},"content":{"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 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,"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"],"yoast_head":"\nNaNoWriMo = MeGoInsaneO - Landguppy Productions<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/nanowrimo-megoinsaneo\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"NaNoWriMo = MeGoInsaneO - Landguppy Productions\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ve been a writer for my entire adult life. 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