{"id":170,"date":"2015-11-02T18:40:12","date_gmt":"2015-11-03T00:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/?p=170"},"modified":"2015-11-02T18:40:12","modified_gmt":"2015-11-03T00:40:12","slug":"characters-revolt-nanowrimo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/characters-revolt-nanowrimo\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year My Characters Revolted During #NaNoWriMo"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Yes, I’m doing NaNoWriMo.”<\/p>\n

If you know any author personally, you’ve probably heard (or read) those words. National Novel Writing Month<\/a> takes place every year, when hundreds of thousands of writers vow to write every day for a month, producing 50,000 words each by month’s end. Why? Because they can. Because writing can be a lonely endeavor and for one month suddenly we all have a community that is dominating social media and cheering us on to write more, write faster, just write, write, write!<\/p>\n

So, yes, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. Again.\u00a0NaNo is intense. It’s exhausting. It’s like the Olympics for the literary world because relatively\u00a0few people (who are not writing full time already)\u00a0have the stamina to sustain the pace of writing for several hours every day for thirty days (especially when you consider that we’ve got Thanksgiving this month, and by the time the turkey’s tryptophan hits us, we’ve already devoured\u00a0the leftover Halloween candy stash that was supposed to get us through the month. Hell, we polished that off the first week!).<\/p>\n

Let me let you in on a little secret: Writing is not easy. It’s not just sitting down at the keyboard or kitchen table and pounding out a bunch of words. Writing can require hours and hours of advanced prep work (something my teachers all referred to in a derogatory tone as daydreaming) not to mention the time spent agonizing over the right word, the right tone, the right tempo of a sentence within a story. And then there are the characters—the greatest divas in all existence. You can have the entire character profile done, the plot of three novels in a series mapped out, and the first ten chapters of book one done and your characters will still wake you up at 3 am to let you know that they will no longer be following your\u00a0script taking them through a treacherous but exciting adventure on the Andalusian Islands, but instead will be babysitting miniature unicorns while listening to Bieber audition tapes on YouTube, so deal with it and fix the plot…now!<\/p>\n

Ahem. Okay, so I might still be dealing with my own characters’ revolution three days before the start of NaNo this year. Sorry, I will do better to keep my frustrations\u00a0in check.<\/p>\n

This year I decided not to work on just one novel. Instead, I prepped ideas for three different novels, worked out the plot lines and characters’ backstories, and identified intriguing connections and themes I would like to explore. The idea is not to get 50k words on all three novels done, but rather to work on whichever novel calls to me each day. And the novels are wildly disparate. Well, they do all have sisters in them, but that’s where any similarities end. One of the three is going to be particularly hard to write because the way I envision it is actually three novels in one. The core detail\u00a0tying them all together is a particularly abominable crime carried out against two elementary school-age sisters.\u00a0\u00a0I’m absolutely terrified of writing this novel—not because of the subject matter, but because it is so far outside my wheelhouse that it would take a spaceship\u00a0to find it. But the characters and their stories won’t stop tormenting me, so by God I’m gonna try just so I can make the voices in my head go away.<\/p>\n

Luckily Charli Mills over at the Carrot Ranch<\/a>\u00a0worked her magic yet again and set up the perfect little challenge to get me started down the path of one of the characters’ stories. This week’s challenge is to write a 99-word story that includes a tool. So here we go:<\/p>\n

Unraveled\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Earl rolled his rusted-out Ford to a stop in the overgrown lot. He was not a successful man. He was not a doting father, a hardworking employee, or an affable neighbor. He poured vodka in his beer cans and spent his janitor\u2019s paycheck on Pall Malls, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese\u2014the orange glue being the only food his youngest would eat. She\u2019d been buying more when it happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t think about what he did to her.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Earl slid the pliers from the glovebox, gripping them until his knuckles turned white. All because of that damned orange glue.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Yes, I’m doing NaNoWriMo.” If you know any author personally, you’ve probably heard (or read) those words. National Novel Writing Month takes place every year, when hundreds of thousands of writers vow to write every day for a month, producing 50,000 words each by month’s end. Why? Because they can. Because writing can be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Year My Characters Revolted During #NaNoWriMo (but I kept #writing)","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[15,37,38,20],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-carrot-ranch","tag-nanowrimo","tag-sneak-peek","tag-writing-challenge"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WVQN-2K","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":172,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions\/172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cjaiferry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}