And then life happens...

I love being a writer. There's nothing quite as exhilarating as spending hours pouring ideas from my head onto a blank page; watching a story unfold and characters running around doing things. I love to learn, and writing gives me ample excuse to research anything and everything for the sake of a believable story. Even sleep deprivation is worth it sometimes because as I drift off to sleep, plot holes will mend and plot points will fall into place. I love the "aha!" moment when a snag works itself out in my subconscious and bubbles to the surface. To quote one of my own characters: "The mind is an amazing thing."

The only trouble is...all of the aspects of writing - from the writing itself, to the research, to the obsessive-compulsive planning and plotting - are very time consuming. When you're not a professional writer, when it's a passion not a job, you have to sneak in time to write wherever you can cram it.

And life always seems to get in the way. I can only ignore housecleaning or errands or exercise classes or friends and family for so long before all of that violently reclaims my time and attention.

I was doing so well. I was on track to hit 50,000 words before August 31st for Camp Nanowrimo. But the past several days have been demanding my attention with a vengeance. I kept having to put off writing, and now I am about six thousand words behind.

To be honest, I could knock that out in maybe three or four hours. The trouble is, life not only kicked me in the ass, it then kicked me in the face while I was down. My head is filled with mucus and my nose/throat/eyes are burning, Wednesday is the dreaded year anniversary, my three days off this week where I was supposed to relax have somehow filled up with endless appointments and other commitments, I haven't slept more than 5 hours a night in over a week (and last night I slept maybe an hour), and there is a goddamn mouse living in my bedroom. He's not paying rent, so he's got to go. I just haven't figured out how yet.

I just can't seem to make myself care about writing with all of that going on. Even when I have the time to work.

All I can really do when this happens is hunker down and hope it passes quickly. My story has so much potential. I don't want it to go to the Nanowrimo graveyard like so many others.

Motivating the Muse

I thought I would try to do a fun post where I conduct an interview with one of the characters from my story, kind of like on a talk show or something, but it turned into an epic failure. One flat our refused, one didn't bother showing up, and then I got in an argument with my last resort (I honestly had no idea how upset he was about the whole love triangle thing). Unfortunately, that doesn't leave me with many other characters, so I might have to try that another day, or use a character from another story sometime. I suppose this is what I get for being so mean to them all the time. Give them a chance to talk to me out of the story and they let me have it.

So instead, I am going to talk about motivation. More specifically, my motivation. Every year I resolve to write more than just during National Novel Writing Month, but my muse is fickle. What it is about this past year that has kept me writing when in previous years my resolutions ended in epic failure?

The answer is this: meetings, deadlines, and tracking.

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Meetings - The Writing Buddy and I have been steadfast in our meeting schedule. We've been meeting at least once a week almost without fail since December, and while not all of those meetings were wildly productive, it kept us both in touch with our current project and constantly thinking about the next project. Some of this I think is accountability, but it is also actually scheduling time to write - setting aside that time in my week so I have no excuse not to do it.

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Deadlines/To Do lists - I've found the more specific the better with this, however they also have to be realistic and give me a bit of leeway. I set the goal to have my fanfic and my Sally Prescott adventure done by the end of the summer - they both got done. I set the goal to have my Rift story transcribed before I started the next story - it got done in record time. I've set the goal to write at least two blog entries a week, and so far I have. None of my past "write for at least an hour every day this entire year" or "type up every story you've ever written by hand as soon as possible" or even "you have to write a blog on Tuesday and Thursday by 5pm every day." I've discovered ways to set deadlines so that they work for me instead of against me.

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Wordcount bars/charts - I've had a chance during Camp Nanowrimo this month to analyze what makes Nanowrimo so effective for me. A lot of it has to do with the community: fellow writers who are fighting the same battles at roughly the same pace. That's why I am Municipal Liaison for my region - to help unify that community and offer support and encouragement. But I've discovered another part that keeps me motivated: I am obsessed with tracking. I track the books I read, the exercise I do, the food I eat, the money I spend, so when Nanowrimo rolls around and I can input the number of words I've written and see it come out in a neat little chart or graph, I am immediately hooked. I want to spend the month of September finishing the novel I started this month, so on my "Current Writing Projects" page I've implemented a word count bar, and I spent (probably too much of) yesterday morning creating a bar graph in Excel that has a trend line for each day's wordcount. It's not pretty, but it's functional and I'm excited to use it.

I am confident that in the years to come I will be able to use these strategies to get the words written. If I can keep up, or even increase, the amount of writing I did this year, I should be able to complete several novels over the next few years.

Now if I could just find some motivators for the editing aspect, I might actually end up with a novel I can query with someday. Advice?

Tools of the Trade

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This list will probably look different for every writer, but here are some of the tools that I can't write without. Many of these are linked on the right side of my page. In this post I'll explain why these resources are invaluable to me.

Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com
When I've been using a word excessively, or if I use a word but I'm not quite sure if it means what I think it means, or if there is a precise word that I know exists for what I'm trying to say but I can't seem to pull it out of the depths of my brain, I plug in variations until I find what I'm looking for.

Wikipedia
Probably not the most reliable source for information, but it gives me a starting point, a foundation, which I then build from. And actually, new scenes and plot twists have resulted from stuff I've read in Wikipedia articles.

Babynames.com
As I have mentioned before, I am abysmal at coming up with names. At my job, I see a lot of names, so I collect the ones I like, but sometimes I exhaust my list and need a fresh supply. I often use this site to find names based on what I want a character's name to mean, or if I know I want it to start with a particular letter. This site also has a brilliant section on Character Names, Tips for Writers, that I read through now and then to remind myself that not every one of my characters needs to have an exotic name.

Pandora
Sometimes I need mood music. And sometimes it's a nice distraction if it keeps playing crappy stuff I don't want - then I can spend time cultivating the perfect mood music station by disliking and skipping the stupid songs.

Goodreads
I include this because so much of what I write is influenced by what I read, and without Goodreads, I'd be lost in a sea of all the books I own, need to read, and have read.

Youtube
You can learn how to do anything on this site. Taught me how to pick a lock. I think I needed this information for a character once...honest!

Real life
No, that's not a website. Sometimes us writers get so wrapped up in the worlds that we are creating that we forget that there's a real one out there. When I step back and reflect, I realize how much material I can pull just from the experiences of one normal day. As I am writing, those things filter into what's going on in my story. Sometimes subconsciously. Sometimes very deliberately. On days that I get stuck, I go out into the world and pay just a little bit of extra of attention to the things going on around me. This always helps me find the piece I need to move the story along.

My People
Last but not least: my writing friends. All those blogs you see linked in the corner on the right? Yeah, them. And many more who don't have blogs. The Writing Buddy is especially wonderful to bounce ideas off of. Not just my writing friends, either. My brother and sister and my non-writing friends are great when it comes to talking through ideas.

I use a lot of other tools - anything from books about writing and editing to random  Google searches (the internet is a wonderful thing) - but these are the ones I consult the most often. This is my essential toolbox.

So, my writer-ly friends, what are your tools of the trade? Anyone have any other recommendations for good writer resources?