The SoapBoxers

Guest writer Martin Kelly is participating in National Novel Writing Month.  NaNoWriMo pushes writers to write a fully contained 50,000 word novel (this equates to about 175 pages) in the course of just a month.  This is quite an aggressive goal – a bit too aggressive for Kosmo!  Martin shares his writing diary with us:

11/1 – calculated the word count that I will have to achieve 50,000 words by 11/30: 1667 words a day if I work every day, 1352 on weekdays and 4054 on Saturdays if I take Sundays off. Today is Sunday, and I’m taking it off.

11/2 – signed up for NaNoWriMo. Easy enough to sign up. You have to declare a genre. I chose general fiction. I may have to change to Romance later, but I am trying to stay away from that. Got to work on first chapter. I want to complete a chapter each night, about 2.5 pages in MS Word at 11pt Calibri. 1313 words by MS Word (-39 words for the day), 1316 by the web site counter. You can copy your text into a box on the web site and it will calculate your word count so far. It is considered “beta” until the end when the official counts are made. I’m going to stick with the MS Word tool for now. Introduced the main character and his wife, a couple of nurses and a doctor. Dialog is hard, description is easy, I will have to work on that. Having just been in the hospital recently helped the descriptions. Having a doctor and several nurses in the family helps too (all on my wife’s side).

11/3 – Chapter 2 was 1407 words, so I caught up from yesterday (+55 today, +16 over all). We will have to see if I can keep this pace up. Started the interaction of the main character and his wife. Since he is still in the hospital and weak, I was able to avoid dialog for a while longer. I have to stop reading what I have already written and editing. I can clean it up after 11/30. My wife is worried that I am staying up too late working on this. There are lots of support options on the web page, but I haven’t figured out how to use them yet. I am more concerned about writing right now. If I hit a block, I will probably spend some time diving into the site to get help. Everyone else who is trying, KEEP WRITING!

11/4 – Chapter 3 was 1723 words, anther good day (+329 today, +355 over all). Tried dialog today, Mother-Daughter. I will ask my wife to read it over to make sure it is realistic. I reread the first two chapters again and probably deleted more than I added. Introduced the wife’s mother and father. Started the conflict of the main character and his mother in law. It is all one sided for now, until I build up the main character. A lot of this book is going to include farming commentary. I will be depending on my father in law to make sure I do it right. He grew up on a farm in western Iowa. I am a townee.

11/5 – Chapter 4 was only 1310 words (-42 today, +313 over all). My overall count over/under count is not accurate any more as I continue to edit the earlier chapters. I think I have stopped deleting more than I am adding, but I am spending too much time editing instead of composing. I added in two more characters today and I think I am doing better with dialog. Two older men (like myself) so a little easier to think of what they would say and how they would react. Tried to capture some future chapter stuff at the suggestion of Kosmo, but can’t do it. I can revise stuff I have already written, but writing ahead poses the challenge of merging. I am writing almost like a soap opera. It all flows nicely, but I do not know where it is going.

11/6 – Chapters 5 and 6 are in the bag. I started an Excel sheet to keep track of just my totals. I was right about hosing up the count earlier in the week. My total is now 8447 words or just 100 words ahead of schedule. I really developed the characters of the main character’s minister (Methodist) and his wife’s priest (Roman Catholic). I really like both of them. That probably sound strange as I created them. I added a list of characters at the front to help me remember who everyone is, I will not include that in my word count. I brought in the news reporter who covered the accident for the local TV station. I don’t know if I will use her again, but she could be useful.

11/7 – Chapters 7 and 8 are good. I am falling behind on the word count. I got the main character out of the hospital. He is meeting his wife’s family, father in law first. Before he got out, the priest and minister set up a video of him in high school. He had been a football starter, so they had gotten footage from the TV reporter. It is all part of their effort to help him heal. I realized that in this blog, I haven’t given a summary of the story plot, so here it goes.

The basic story is that a young man (about 22 years old) is in a major accident. He was drunk and the other driver died. When he wakes up in the hospital he cannot remember anything. He spends the first few days awake listening to everyone to try to piece together what happened. His wife visits every day, that helps him a lot but also presents a problem, he doesn’t remember her. He had been a pretty lousy husband up to this point, drinking and carousing with his friends instead of taking care of their farm which he inherited from his grandfather. Her mother asks her priest and his minister to help them with their marriage. The young man confesses his problem to his minister. The minister and priest are good friends and decide to try to help the young couple together, including trying to help the young man recover his memories. The video in these chapters is supposed to give him some positive commentary on his life to this point, since he has only learned about the bad parts so far.

The plot goal is to get him to overcome his memory loss, not recover it. Finally admit to his wife what has happened. Reform his life in general, and face down the bad influences he has been hanging out with. The romance part of this story is the two main characters restarting their love life together.

11/8 – I had to keep working to stay on schedule even though it is Sunday. Chapter 9 introduced the main character’s brother in law. I needed someone to teach him what to do on his farm. Basically, his brother in law is a guide both for the main character and the reader. He tours the farm, the house, the chores and introduces some more characters for later. I am getting close to having the main character and his wife in bed. I don’t know why, but I am nervous about that.

11/9 – I was on an airplane all day traveling for business. This turned out to be a good thing. I got most of chapters 10 and 11 done. I am well ahead in word count now, about 2000 words ahead. I was uncomfortable writing a sex scene sitting next so a stranger on an airplane, so I had my characters avoid it to. I will be in a hotel room the next 11 nights so I should get a lot of writing done. I joined a writing group on NaNoWriMo today. They have “write-ins” where local groups get together at coffee shops and such to sit, talk and write. I don’t know if I will join it, but it seems friendly. There are also dedicated people in each group who have completed the event in the past who are on call to help. Help could mean explanation of the rules or help on plot. They also have a tracking graph to let you see if you are on schedule. I will have to copy my effort in every day. There is a distinct plateau and jump up on my graph.

11/10 – Chapter 12 was all description. Also started the main character taking on responsibility. I explained why only his in laws are part of the story. Dad is dead, mother move off to be with one of his older brothers. He came from a very cold family, but the farm house suggests that his mother came from a very warm and loving home. She was an only child but our character had lots of brothers and sisters. Again I don’t know what I am going to do with that, but it is an interesting branch if I need it.

11/11 – Chapter 13 the main character finds out that he was kind of a pervert. He had a rather tall stack of adult magazines that his bother in law stumbles across causing great embarrassment. Then the minister drops by to check on him. He confesses that he feels like a creep because he want to have sex with his wife, but he doesn’t know her. That is just me avoiding the sex chapter again. I am getting more comfortable with dialog. Others will have to decide if I am actually good at it. This was a short chapter so I have lost some of my advantage in words. I am right at 20,000 words now, which is still good. I have to have at least 25000 words by Sunday.

11/12 – Chapter 14 and a lot of editing of the earlier stuff. I had the time passage all messed up. I am about 3000 words ahead of my plan, which is great. In the story, the main character’s wife is having problems believing that he has changed his ways. It is hard to believe that a drunk can change quickly, even if the drying out is forced by a hospital stay. He still hasn’t told her that he has lost his memory. He is worried that he is doing everything wrong, what just about every man in the world worries about when his woman is upset.

Yes.  I most certainly did alienate a reader.  I’ll refer to the reader as Reader X.

Reader X has been one of my my loyal readers.  Reader X and I had established a dialogue over email, and I had enjoyed the conversations we had shared.  However, my recent story The Cell Window struck a rather sour chord with Reader X.  Reader X considered the story to be “smut” and took me to task for making the female characters clueless rather than strong.

Those of you who have read the story can likely figure out why the female characters were “clueless”.  This wasn’t a character flaw on their part, but simply an effect of the plot.  Anyone in their situation would been clueless.  As for the characters not being stronger – if they had been stronger, this would have critically wounded the setup to the story’s ending.  The ending of the story was one of the first pieces of the story that I wrote, so I really wanted to use it.

Was the story smut?  I personally don’t think so – nor do a handful of female readers I queried.  While the content was a bit disturbing, they didn’t feel that it was any more disturbing than the typical episode of Law & Order.  Certainly there was content that was sexual in nature.  It would have been difficult to write a story with a similar plot without including some content of this type.

Does the inclusion of sexual content mean that a book is rubbish and should be tossed aside?  I certainly hope not.  If this was the case, we would lose fine books like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and John Grisham’s A Time To Kill.  (Don’t remember the sexual content in those books?  Grab a copy and re-read it!)  We would also be forced to cast aside the works of modern masters such as Lawrence Block and John Sandford.  Certainly, this would be a crime against literature.

Although I write fiction on a wide range of topics and using a variety of tones, I strive to become a writer of crime fiction.  It has been suggested that I am stronger with my humor writing than with crime.  This is almost certainly true – my humor pieces flow off the keyboard nearly as fast as I can write, whereas the crime stories take considerably more thought.  Nonetheless, crime fiction is what I enjoy, and it is where I would like to make my mark as a writer.

As an aspiring crime writer, I will often find myself writing passages that make a segment of my readership uncomfortable.  While I would hope all of my writing would appeal to everyone, I know that this will not be the case.  Certainly, on occasion, I will upset someone with my writing.  While I do not go out of my way to offend, I also do not go out of my way to ensure that my work doesn’t have offensive rough edges.  A key component of crime fiction is that it does have rough edges.  To refine my stories so that they were too smooth to possible offend anyone would be to subvert the genre.

And that is something I will not do.

My latest story, The Cell Window, took six weeks to finish. Key Relationships (the main story from The Fiction of Kosmo Volume 1 – roughly the same length as The Cell Window) took about ten days to complete, so I assumed I was setting aside plenty of time when I began writing a full month in advance of my projected publication date. I never dreamed that I would miss the date by two weeks.  (one of the nice things about being the Editor-in-Chief is that nobody breathes down my neck when I miss a deadline)

So, what happened? I try to avoid uses excuses too often, but I’m making this an “all excuses” edition of The Soap Boxers, just for kicks.

• I have been fighting off a few different illnesses. In August, I contracted the stomach flu twice. For the month of October, I have been dealing with a sinus infection that just won’t go away. I’m on the second treatment of antibiotics – hopefully this will do the trick. Needless to say, a sick Kosmo is a Kosmo who doesn’t feel like writing.  None of this stuff was particularly severe, but still enough to hamper creativity a bit.
• In the last month, my two year old daughter had decided that she doesn’t want to go to be at eight o’clock; preferring eight thirty or nine o’clock instead. This effectively cuts my writing time in half, as I often use the 8-10 PM block to write.
• I really, really wanted to read Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol and get a review up quickly.  Alas, that hasn’t happened quite yet, although I am about 70% of the way through the book.
• My Rockies made the playoffs!  There was important October baseball to watch.  My Rockies have made the playoffs three times in seventeen years – so Rockies playoff games will push a lot of things to the back burner.
• Issues related to the blog took up some time. Some other writers were also dealing with illnesses and were unable to meet timelines, meaning that I had to write more in order to fill in the gaps. Obviously, I’m not faulting them for this – it was completely beyond their control. There was a sudden unilateral parting of the ways with another writer that caused a gap. I wrote several articles to fill this gap, while also taking the time to line up some new writers to fill this spot.
• Finally, I backed myself into a bit of a corner. Typically, when I write, I rough out a plot, suggesting several larger scenes. I use these as benchmarks during the writing process. I know that on the way from point A to point Z, I’ll hit D, J, T, and X. Along the way, there will be a lot of “connector” material. I can’t simply skip from high point to high point – there must be a natural flow to the story. I skip around a lot during the writing process. I’ll write point J and then perhaps write the connector material between points X and Z. In the case of The Cell Window, I wrote too many of the main scenes first.  Effectively, I ate all of the dessert first and left myself with a plate of veggies.  This made the second half of the work much harder.  Lesson learned – leave some good parts for later!

So, what does the future hold, as far as fiction?

• First, I have a rough idea of the story for next quarter.  I’m not waiting until I have a mere month before the deadline this time around!  The working title is If the Walls Could Talk.  I doubt that will be the final title, as I’m not a big fan of it.  Anyway, the story will features stories-within-a-story, as the owner of a B&B reminisces about some of the past guests and their experiences.  The B&B featured in the book will be Buckingham Place.  If this sounds familiar (other than the reference to Buckingham PALACE), it’s because Hayley and Mike in Key Relationships stayed at this B&B.
• Also, I am finally beginning work on my novel.  Its working title will be Casting Stones.  I AM a big fan of that title, so there is a strong chance the book will retain the title. Casting Stones will be a murder mystery that follow a detective named Brooke as she attempts to catch a serial killer.  I don’t want to share many more details at this point, because most of the details that I have figured out would be huge spoilers and give away a ton of the plot.  Considering the other irons that are currently in the fire, I would be very surprised if I finish Casting Stones in less than two years.  I do NOT plan to make this available on the web – I actually intend to find a publisher.  Obviously, that’s a long shot, but it’s what I’m aiming for.

I’m seriously trying to avoid making this blog “all Kosmo, all the time”. Nonetheless, I have been focusing so much on writing the end-of-quarter short story that this makes a natural topic for today.

I’m about 5000 words into the story. The story will likely be between 10000 and 12000 words when I’m done, meaning that I have about 1/3 of it written. Why the funny math? Because some of the words that have already written will surely fall to my editing scythe before I am done.

Writing a story of this length is really a fairly big undertaking. While I can sometimes crank out 1500 words in an hour, I probably average 500-1000 polished words per hour – meaning that this story will take between 12 and 24 hours of work. I really should put a stopwatch to it. Maybe next time.

What exactly is going on with the story at this point? Well, I don’t give away plot details, but I’ll share some insight into the process.

• Proofreading – When I get 3500+ words written, I start convincing myself that this would be a good time to read through the initial draft and correct some errors. Sure, a lot of the story still needs to be written, and errors will pop in the later work. Nonetheless, I try to make this an iterative process to avoid too much proofreading at one time, since the task kind of sucks. On the bright side, I get more of a feeling of accomplishment once the story has been printed – it feels more “real”.
• The plot – When I first beginning writing a story, I just start writing various bits and pieces, with just a basic high level plot. When I get to 3000 – 4000 words, I can start shaping the plot a lot more. I divide the story into “scenes” that each have a somewhat independent plot. I also begin to look more closely at the timeline. Are certain events in the correct location, or would they make more sense in a different spot? I also look for gaps in the plot and starting thinking of ways to fill those gaps.
• Character lifestyles – A basic foundation for fiction is that readers must suspend belief and allow themselves to be carried away by the story. However, I try to blend at least a bit of realism into my stories. Right now, I’m taking a look at the residences of some of my characters and comparing them to the income they would likely earn from their jobs. Are their inconsistencies? Is a character living in a place that would obviously be unaffordable? If so, something must change – either the type of apartment/house, or the occupation.
• Brainstorm – A substantial amount of the story has been written at this point, but I want to make sure to keep myself open to new ideas. I’ll agree that it is difficult to force brainstorming to occur, but I do try. Essentially, I try to take a step back from the actual work at time, and let things stew on the back burner. I turn the car radio off when I’m driving, to force my brain to go into an unstructured thought process. I’ll jot down some very brief ideas for the plot – or question about how certain situations will be resolved – and go to bed without making and effort to answer them. I’ll let the ideas kick around the next day, and waiting until some new ideas pop up.

As I have mentioned eleventy billion times previously, I am an aspiring novelist.  By “aspiring”, I mean that I have yet to produce anything long enough to be classified as a novel (although the story Key Relationships was a step in the right direction in terms of length).

Writing fiction for The Soap Boxers has kick-started my fiction writing, and the creative process in general).  Never in my life have I written such a volume of fiction is such a short time (roughly thirty thousand words since the advent of Fiction Friday back in March) – while also writing a significant amount of non-fiction pieces and balancing other life constraints (work, family, baseball).  I think there are a few reasons for this revival.

• First, this blog allow my work to immediately reach an audience.  Even when I don’t get feedback in the form of comments, there is an extra jolt of adrenaline that comes with knowing that anyone in the world could stumble across one of my stories.  It’s even better when someone actually leave a comment.
• I’m beginning to realize that I’m an aberration from most writers.  I’m really not a big fan of taking a pen and physically writing on paper.  I prefer to do my writing almost entirely behind a computer.  Not only do I prefer the physical aspects of typing to those of writing, but I appreciate the ability to make correction and restructure the story on the fly.  If I did my writing with pen and paper, my notebook would be a mess.  I do use paper to write ideas and very short segments (preferring a composition book rather than a spiral bound notebook), but I rarely write an entire story with pen and paper.
• Blog readers, in general, like to read relatively short blog posts.  This pushed me in the direction of writing pretty short stories, since I really couldn’t drop a ten thousand word story into a blog post (although I can serialize the lengthy stories at The Fiction Writers).  Writing a new short story every week forced my the write about things I hadn’t previously written about – there are a pretty strange variety of stories within Fiction Friday).  This has allow me to branch off into new direction and also refine a lot of my techniques – in particular, dialogue.

Onto another tangent … another way to I express my creativity is through “Instant Message Bombs”.  One particular friend seems to drift away from the keyboard and leave AIM up and running (I’m fairly certain that he’s not simply avoiding me).  Whenever I determine that he’s unresponsive, I leave him a few random comments, such as:

“Then there was this explosion.  Grapes and Cheerios everywhere.  It took hours for them to clean up the mess.”

“A horse.  Can you imagine that?  Why on earth would they pick a horse for that job.  A gerbil would be a much better candidate.”

I’m really not sure if these non sequitur comments serve any purpose in the creative process, but the reaction can be fun to watch 🙂

I have been writing fiction stories since elementary school. In sixth grade, my teacher gave me the opportunity to attend a local young writer’s conference – if I could produce just one non-sports story for her. I dashed off a story about Bigfoot and got the chance to spend a day with a few classmates, attending writing workshops. On the same day, most of our class was pent up in the boring old school building.

It was also during the sixth grade when I first plunged into the world of publishing. I convinced a lot of classmates to write articles for my newly formed magazine, Howdy. Howdy was a critical success, but operations ceased after just one issue after a discussion on the proper and improper use of the school copy machine.

In high school, my short story The Case of the State vs. Santa Claus was among a handful selected for publication in the school paper.  The story detailed the prosecution of Santa Claus in the death of grandma (sing it with me – “Grandma got run over by a reindeer …”).

During my college years, my fiction writing ground to a near halt, due in large part to the increase in writing required for term papers.  I wrote a few very short stories, but really nothing subtantial.  Oddly, although I obtained a minor in English while in college, I did not take a single creative writing class; choosing instead to focus on pre-19th century British literature.

In my post-college years, I would write the occassional story.  The story Tina, for example, was written for a long-forgotten acquaintance by that name.  I also began writing invitations to a weekly dinner/movie event.  Most people would simply send out the location of dinner and the choice of movie.  I unleashed my creativity and typically threw several hundreds words into the email.  This would occassionally cause some confusion – such as the time when one person ended up at the wrong Australian steakhouse.

After moving back to my native Iowa, my writing once again dropped off.  It later regained some momentum when I joined a simulation baseball league (essentially, a cross between fantasy baseball and Dungeons and Dragons, with fake players).  Credits could be earned by writing about your team, and my favorite type of article quickly became fictional accounts of my player’s lives.

During my time in the league, I shared  my tongue-in-cheek investment advice.  After encouragement from friends, I launched a blog in October, with the investment advice piece as the very first article.  The blog was unlike many blogs in that it did not focus on a particular niche, instead trying to bring a diverse group of topics under a single umbrella.

I picked up my fiction pen again in November when I wrote  about Oregon’s election process.  After a few more satires, the first true original fiction piece, Release Point, became the first story in the Fiction Friday series.  Shortly thereafter, The Soap Boxers moved to its current address.  In recent months, I have added several writers to the staff, in an effort to add diverse content, as well as allowing me to focus on a handful of topics.  The most important of these topics is definitely the fiction stories.  In July, the Fiction Friday stories were collected into an eBook (along with a longer bonus story).  (If you’re a repeat visitor, you can click on the “Free eBook” link at the right edge of the blue bar toward the top of the screen).

I plan to perodically release new volumes of the compiled fiction – always with at least one brand new story.  I also have a few other irons in the fire, including a couple of possible book ideas.

While I do wish to devote energy to novels in the future, I do not want to forget my short stories, either.  It is for this reason that I am announcing my intention to enter the 2010  Iowa Short Fiction contest (see details about the 2009 contest).  The contest requires a 150+ page manuscript of short stories.  I will not be able to have a manuscript ready in time for this year’s content (submissions are due on September 30), but this is my goal for 2010.  I plan to dust off some of my books about writing (including on book that is devoted entirely to writing better dialogue) as I attempt to refine my writing style.  My hope is that this will result in stories that are more enjoyable to read.

What’s the moral to the story?  If you have the itch to write, grab a pen (or keyboard) and start!  It’s a cheap hobby.

There are plenty of great guides to fiction writing on the market. Many of them are written by authors who are much more accomplished than myself. However, my advice is free, and today I share it with you. Of course, this is not a comprehensive guide, but just a few tips.

• Write – This seems rather obvious, doesn’t it? However, it is easy for life to get in the way of your best intentions. Set aside some time to focus on writing, and try to write a specific number of times each week. For many people, finding time to write 365 days of the year is not realistic. However, perhaps you can try two or three times per week. It is not necessary to write a story from start to finish – feel free to skip around. I use [BREAK] to note points in the story that have not yet been written (so if you ever encounter this in one of my stories, you have found an “oops”). This helps reduce writer’s block, as you can just skipped to an unblocked portion and return to the blocked portion when the block has dissipated.

• Know your genre– Read several books (or stories) within your genre to get a good feel for concepts that work and don’t work. For example, novels tend to describe events more richly than short stories – short stories typically have to get to the point much more directly, simply because they have less words with which to work. Here is an example of a scene, with one version written for a short story and another written for a novel.

  Short story: Kirsten walked across the room and turned on the lamp.

  Novel: Kirsten’s scarlet stilettos drummed out a melodic series of clicks as she strode purposefully across the marble floor. When she arrived at the mahogany table in the corner, she flipped the switch on the ancient lamp. The compact fluorescent bulb fluttered for a short moment before realizing its full potential and bathing the room in light.

  Clearly, this is an overly dramatic example, but you should see the point. If you consistently use “short story” descriptions in a novel, you’ll have difficulty achieving much length – and your readers will find your work a bit boring. On the other hand, if you’re trying to write a 500 word short story and drop in lots of “novel” descriptions, you’re going to run out of words long before you reach the climax. You just took 11% of your alloted words just to have a girl turn on a lamp!

  Additionally, concepts that work in mysteries may fall flat on their face in a romance novel. In general, familiarity with the genre will help you improve your writing style.

• Work on the technical aspects– There are a lot of tricky aspects to writing. Dialogue is one of the more difficult. Until recently, I have always punctuated dialogue incorrectly – and even now, I wouldn’t be surprised if you find a lot of errors in how I handle dialogue. It’s also important to avoid becoming repetitive. Once again, our friend dialogue pops up as a potential problem area. Let’s review a couple of examples.

  Bad:

  “Hi, Ted,” said Fred.

  “Hey, Fred,” said Ted.

  “The weather sure is nice today,” said Fred.

  “Yes, it certainly is,” said Ted.

  “Great game yesterday,” said Fred.

  Better:

  “Howdy, Ted,” said Fred.

  “Hey, Fred – how are you doing?”

  “Not so bad. The weather sure is nice today.”

  “Yes, it certainly is,” replied Ted.

  “Did you see the game yesterday? What an exciting finish,” exclaimed Fred.

  The first conversation suffers from a couple of problems. First, it is too name heavy. When you have two characters speaking to each other, it is not necessary to identify them every single time they speak. It is, of course, a good idea to to identify them periodically over the course of a longer conversation, to avoid having the reader lose track of who is speaking. The conversation also suffers from excessive said-itis. There are a lot of ways to describe someone speaking. Exclaimed, replied, questioned, squeaked, whispered, and shouted are the tip of the iceberg.

  Paying close attention to the writing of others can assist you greatly in writing better dialogue and handling other technical issues. You can also check the self-help section of the book store for grammar, usage, and style guides.

• Names – It can be difficult for a lot of writers to generate names for their characters. For my short stories, I often grab the names of my friends. I am careful to not use a full name – only a first or last. This allows me a lot more flexibility with my characters – I can have a character go on a murderous rampage without causing my friend’s name to pop up on a Google search for serial killers. There are actually books on the market devoted to how to develop characters, and some of them include names for characters. A good book of baby names will also work quite nicely. If you want a really good free source, you can always utilize the census data, which lists first names (broken out by gender) and last names in order of popularity. You probably don’t want to print the entire list though – the last name list has nearly 90,000 names.

• Share – Share your writing with others. This might meant showing a couple of close friends, or it might mean broadcasting to a potential audience of millions via the internet. Not only will this give you a stronger feeling of accomplishment, but many people will offer constructive criticism. Constructive criticism is a great tool to indentify strengths and weaknesses in your writing.

• Have fun – The vast majority of you are not going to become world famous writers. I’m not trying to burst your bubble; this is an unfortunate statistical truth. (For those of you who do become world famous writers, could you signed me a signed first edition?) Thus, if your only goal is to make millions off your writing, you might want to shift your focus. The journey is more important than the destination.

And we are off!

Today is the first day of November, and that makes it the first day of National Novel Writing Month. The goal is 50,000 words towards a novel captured over the thirty days of November. So how do you start? If you want to be part of the official challenge, then visit NaNoWriMo.org. Create an account and start writing. That site is filled with helpful suggestions and provides a word count tool as well as goodies if you succeed.

There are many parts of writing to address, and there is no specific order to do them in. Each writer will find this or her own comfort zone. What is the type of story (short story or novel), genre (romance, adventure, science fiction, historic), characters and title? Sometimes choosing one item creates one of the others. Choosing a genre, say adventure, drives character names such as Rock or Hunter. You may not even know what kind of story you are writing until you get into it. Last year, I ended up with a romance, definitely not what I started with.

This year, I am attempting a science fiction effort. I have a good idea about character names and personalities from ideas I have had in the past. Now I have to put those personalities together. I do not have a complete plot idea, just a rough outline in my head.

Now the idea is not to get a complete novel written, although that would be great. The idea is to write. The distractions will be significant. There is work, family, an election and all of the other every day events that keep us from writing. So the true challenge is to push all of this aside and write. I don’t suggest sacrificing your career or ignoring your children, on the contrary, use your specialties to make your story more complete, talk to you kids about what you are writing, they may ask the questions that give you your breakthrough. Every experience can lead to an idea.

I do not just encourage you to write, I also encourage you to let us know how you are doing right here on TheSoapBoxers.com. The only limitation is to remember that this is a family friendly site.

50,000 words is about 1667 words per day. Good luck!