April was an interesting month for me, in part because I really focused on my writing more than I had the rest of the year, by participating in Camp NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, and happens every November – participants try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. I participated my senior year of high school and won (in only 19 days!), but November has been a pretty sh*t month every year thereafter given that I’ve been a college/grad student and things get pretty heated for school right around November.

Camp NaNo, then, happens in the spring and summer and is a lot more relaxed – you set your own goals for word count/hours of writing/pages, etc, and get sorted into cabins with other participants to chat and motivate one another. I started out April’s camp with a far too ambitious goal of 50,000 words (thinking my writing skills were more in practice than they are) and quickly lowered it to 35,000 words. But the end of April really took me by surprise, with research, classwork, friend and family obligations, and so I only ended up at around 20,000 words – still a remarkable number of words for a grad student to tackle in just one month, I think.

I have mixed feelings about how April’s camp went – on the one hand, I am 20,000 words deeper into a story than I was before and that is an amazing amount of progress for just one month while also taking classes and working on several research projects. What I’m less happy about, is how much else in my life fell to a standstill – namely, every household chore, my emotional health, and several friendships were under-served in this time “balance”. It feels like something is constantly being sacrificed – my health, my research, my coursework, my sanity, my house, my friendships, or my writing.

It’s this feeling of sacrifice, and the immense amount of weight of all the constantly undone things in my life, that seems to be dragging me down most of late. I no longer feel like an ‘impostor’ – I’m really hitting a stride in my research and have tons of ideas flowing. I love (and am annoyed by) how my story is flowing, and had fun working on it. But it’s all the papers unread, the brains unmeasured, the photos not taken, the emails unanswered, the homework undone, the laundry unfolded and dishes not cleaned, the games not made, the words not written, the calls not made, and the gifts not purchased that are paralyzing me. And each time I begin to feel really good about one or even two things, the other areas of my life start to pop up and burden me heavily with the weight of my neglect.

And paralyzing is an accurate word, I think. I come home at night and do nothing, in part because I am tired and in part because I cannot decide fully which problem most deserves my attention and suddenly nothing happens and it is time for bed. My typical strategies for dealing with stress and being overwhelmed no longer seem to work and I still can’t quite figure out if that’s because I’ve changed, or my life has changed, or both. Camp was, in many ways, lovely and encouraging (exciting and relieving to boot!) but in several senses it highlighted just how hard it can be to juggle my two big life goals at the same time and still maintain a creative, energetic flow in my life. And it certainly makes me appreciate how hard my favorite writers work to maintain their ‘day’ and writing careers at the same time.

Do you have any tricks for managing a difficult workload or schedule with several long-term projects? How do you adjust your mindset?

In the writing world, there’s a lot of talk about two kinds of people – the plotters, and the pantsers. There are the people who plot out every step of the novel from beginning to end, with scene cards and post its, while others sit down to write with almost no plan at all. And, of course, there are people in between.

Plotting is in my nature. I’m the kind of gal who wants to plan each meal she eats, who has to do lists about which to do lists to focus on each day, who wants to have her next ten years planned out by the hour (okay, not quite that bad). But plotting in writing, doesn’t seem to come naturally to me; in school, I detest writing outlines for my essays because I’d rather just finish the thing and reorganize as I go. For my story that I’m working on now, I’ve had the basic concept of the series idea in mind for at least three years and yet there’s only about fifteen post its on the wall to corral the material of four whole books – and most of those post its are about the historical context and not the story itself.

And maybe that’s because Pantsing is also in my nature, despite the fact that I want to be a plotter – I want to have control over (or at least know) where my story is going. While I certainly have a lot of lists and plans for my life, I do get distracted along the way, getting pulled towards plenty of shiny objects that aren’t my main goal. When that happens, I end up missing the mark of a lot of the plotted out ‘points’ or goals I’d been hoping to achieve. And yet, it’s these moments of ‘pantsing’ that make me real and spontaneous and human – a being that can’t be charted.

And the more I work on these continuously evolving stories, the more I realize how important ‘pantsing’ has become to my work despite my desire to plot. My characters are not going to follow the line I set for them if it’s not in their nature; instead, when I try to force them down a path I will encounter their resistance. And this resistance, while frustrating, has pointed me in the right direction now more than once.

Pantsing is frustrating because it means 30-50K words can go away like ‘poof’ when you realize something new about your plot or characters. It would be nice if I knew them well enough at the outset to plot their lives like they would actually live them; and yet this exploration is so fascinating, so decidedly not self-directed despite the fact that all the words and characters come from me, that I can’t quite find the will to be upset about it for long.

Are you a pantser or a plotter? Somewhere in between? What strategies do you use to keep your writing on track? Let me know in the comments below.

For the past few months, I’ve been participating in the Collaborative Writing Challenge – this project asks a group of around fifty authors to write a novel together, in some predetermined genre. Fifty authors! You say (I said). One book! Impossible!

Here’s how it works. The CWC puts out a call for authors to sign up for the project, a novel of a particular genre, and accepts first chapter submissions from all authors for a novel in that genre. The story coordinator, who oversees the writing of the book, chooses their four (or so) favorite submissions and sends them out to all the authors who have signed up for that project, asking for votes. The winning chapter becomes the first chapter of the project.

Meanwhile, the story coordinator is busy setting up a thirty-chapter writing schedule where all authors can sign up to try writing up to three chapters in that thirty-week schedule. No matter what happens in the book, it’d better be wrapped up by chapter 30! Each chapter gets assigned three different authors to attempt writing it within a week, using summaries of all previous chapters prepared by the story coordinator and the full chapter that comes right before theirs. The story coordinator picks a winner, to send on to the next group of writers and the process repeats. An example of how this works:

John, Taylor, and Monique are signed up to write Chapter 23; on Wednesday, they each receive the chapter summaries and reference notes for all twenty-two preceding chapters, and the full text of chapter 22. They have until Tuesday of the following week to each submit their version of Chapter 23 to the story coordinator. The story coordinator chooses Monique’s as the best submission, which is summarily is sent on to the people writing Chapter 24, and a chapter summary is prepared for all future writers.

I signed up last July when I had ‘nothing to do’ and when, in the middle of my winter quarter of graduate school, the email came that my turn to participate in the challenge I said some not-so-nice words while looking at my schedule for the week. My first attempt was a bust where I opened too many cans of worms without leaving any clues for my next-chapter authors – but my second attempt, chapter 27, for the fantasy novel Esyld’s Awakening – was chosen to be included in the final work. The blurb for Esyld’s Awakening is:

In a land of direwolves and dragons, the Abdita or “Hidden” are a species devoted to maintaining the balance between man and the earth. Guardians by nature, their powers are misunderstood.

When a dark force rises, the balance of life is unsettled. Blight and sickness spread.

Desperate for answers, King Rouaix Godfrey XVII turns to the mysterious Prime Order. He sets his knights – led by the unequaled Ser Pagaene – on the Abdita.

But the High Priestess of the Adbita summons a different kind of champion; Esyld, a guardian with wisdom on her side.

Thrown together, each tests the patience and fortitude of the other. But both sides have secrets, and it may take more than nature or man alone to stop what is coming. Can enemies work together to save all?

The project was interesting for me, as an exercise, because it forced me to write outside my comfort zone (let’s face it, almost all writing is outside my comfort zone but this was even MORE so). First, it forced me to let go of control – something I struggle to do in many areas of my life. You can’t choose what happens to the characters once they leave your chapter – your super-elaborate secret plan to solve all the plot holes may go awry after your pen leaves the page. A character you were counting on between your chapters to save the day may die (well, crap) and there’s not much you can do about it but stare at the chapter summary in frustration, shaking your head, before moving on. And because you can’t control everything, it forces you to be adaptable – perhaps, just like your characters at times are painted into a corner and must worm their way out via inventive solutions that you never would have considered were your back not against the wall. As a bit of a plotter, being forced to write by the seat of my pants in less than a week stretched my writerly talents. I also can’t control every comma placement or image description in the book; I know Esyld’s Awakening (despite our truly fantastic story coordinator) will have mistakes. But CWC is about the process, the growth for the writers, more than about the final finished product.

The CWC also forced me to write with incomplete information, something I don’t like to do which then stalls my writing progress. I’ve been thinking about some of my characters for years without ever really making an effort to put pen to paper for them. Why? Because I ‘don’t know them well enough’ or ‘haven’t researched the time period enough’ or ‘haven’t built up their world enough’. These are all valid concerns, don’t get me wrong; nothing makes for a worse book than one with huge anachronisms, poorly developed characters, and bad world building. But sometimes, you have to let go of your hesitation – of not knowing every detail – and just put words on the page. This process leads to important discoveries about characters and worlds, that would never have been made without writing it out. During CWC, you don’t have every word of every previous chapter – in particular, character development is tough. But you have to write anyway.

I’m signed up to try project 8, a romance novel (time period not stated but it seems likely to be a contemporary) and will enjoy the chance to flex my writing muscles again. CWC does play into one of my strengths very well – writing for a deadline! #sprinter – and has given me the motivation to keep up some writing even when grad school gets tough.

Would you try a project like CWC? Why or why not? Have you ever tried a collaborative writing project – with much or little success? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.