4 Lies You Tell Yourself During NaNoWriMo

     With NaNoWriMo just eight days away, I decided to kick off my writing blog's re-activation with a post about the self-same!  Buckle your seatbelts kids, 'cause today I take off the training wheels and give you a taste of what it's like to be a big boy!  These are 4 lies you tell yourself during NaNoWriMo, and the reasons why they're full of shit.

1.  I'll Do It Later

     Mmmmmm no you won't.

     Listen, I know; I've been there myself.  You insist, "I'll do it later, I promise, I swear," and then it never gets done and you fall asleep and wake up the next morning and groan because oh great, now you've got twice as much to write today as you did yesterday!

     Do it now, while you're thinking about it.  You'll thank yourself later.

2.  I Don't Have Time Today

     Honey, it's November, ain't nobody got time for anything.  It's midterm season, it's holiday season, it's family drama season, everything goes crazy in November and you will never have time.

     So you have to make it.  Stick a knife into your day and carve out the time if you have to, even if it's just five minutes here and fifteen minutes there.  Use your lunch break to get some writing done, you can type or scribble or dictate between bites!  Install Dragon on your phone and talk it through your scenes while you're driving home from work, or walking to school, or tip-tap some paragraphs on your ipad while you ride the bus or train or magical flying kangaroo to whatever the hell it is your afternoon is full of.

     Even if you have to wake up at four in the morning to get those 1,667 words out, you do it.  Because the truth is, you're never going to have time, and life is always going to get in the way.  If you want to win this thing, you need to make your own time, and guard it with your life, the way a dragon hoards gold.  You are a word-dragon, and your story must be told.  ROAR.

3.  It Doesn't Matter/It's Not Important

     Maybe it doesn't matter to your neighbor, or your friends, or even your parents or your wife or your kids or your dog.  Maybe it doesn't matter to anyone else in the entire world, but it matters to you, doesn't it?  It certainly mattered enough for you to make the commitment.

     And you're the only one it has to be important to.  Newsflash:  No one's WIP is ever important to anyone except the person writing it until it's been published.  And once it's published it could be the most important gd book in the entire goddamn world, or at least a super important book to one person, which is just as good.  In fact, your book could be the catalyst that changes someone's entire life, and you just don't know it yet because we're three-dimensional beings passing through the fourth dimension as if it were a linear plane.

     But before that book is published, it needs to be written.  It can't be important if it never exists in the first place.  Except for inside you--you believe it's important, don't you?

     Then write it, damn it.

4.  I'm Too Tired/Hungry/Thirsty, etc

     Me too!  I mean fuck, why am I always tired, amirite?  Is it all my medications?  Or the drugs?  Or the alien probe lodged deep into my hypothalamus?  Who knows!

     But dude, my dude my friend my sweet Florida bucket of orange juice, you need to keep going.  Get those words out, comrade.  Pound them out of the keyboard like you never pounded a keyboard before--and I know about the summer of aught nine, so I have some high expectations from you.

     Seriously though.  I know you're tired, and you need your sleep, you're hungry and you need food, you're thirsty and you need thirty barrels of Irish coffee STAT or you won't be able to stand another second of staring at this too-bright screen and oh god now you've got a migraine and you absolutely cannot work in these conditions, can you?

     Only you can.  Get your food and drink and guzzle and chow down between word sprints--maybe you reward yourself with a bite every fifty words or something.  You can multitask.  As for sleepiness, you can write while you're tired.  It may not be the best thing that ever flew from out your fingers, but sure as heck by gosh by golly, words will appear!  And then you can edit them in January, after you've hit 50k.

     You can write tired, you can write hungry, thirsty, achey, breaky, keyboard-hatey, whatever your current mood and physical condition.  It doesn't have to be gold, it just has to be words.

     "I'm too ___" leads to "I'll do it later," and then we're back at square one and nothing gets done!  Just do what you have to do.  Keep writing, and don't stop; chances are good that no one's keeping track except for you, but you don't want to let yourself down, do you?

     Don't sabotage yourself, pally.  When the bomb drops, you don't want to be the only person you can blame--that one's a bitter pill to swallow, and very large, too.  Don't make me shove it down your throat!

     Just get the words out.  You can do it; I believe in you, and you should believe in you, too.

4 More Basic Formatting Tips

     I spoke before about some formatting pet peeves of mine.  These aren't pet peeves so much as they are just tips that are important that I see a lot of people (especially newbies) overlooking.  It's eleven o'clock at night after a very full day, irritating stuff is on my twitter, my classmates, God love them, don't understand standardized writing structures, and I have a headache, so prepare for callous, good-natured aggression.  Enjoy.

1.  Indentations

     When you start a new paragraph, indent that bitch.
   
     Yeah, yeah, common sense, right?  Only it's not.  I see a lot of people overlooking this crucial step, or doing it wrong--my mother once told me that an indentation is five spaces on the space bar.  It's not; a proper indentation is one slap on the TAB button.

     But if you're on a website *coughcoughBlogspotcoughcough* that doesn't allow for tabing, five spaces will work fine.  In fact, online, indentation may not be necessary at all!  But it can help set each paragraph apart from the last.  However, if you're working on any MS you plan to submit to anyone, slap the tab button.  It'll save you a lot of reformatting later on.


2.  Apostrophes

     Apostrophes are used to denote possession (Mindy's cat) and missing characters ('ey kid!/you can't do this to me), and that's about it.  Often they're used to make a number or a shortening plural (ABC's/That 70's Show), which is a peeve of mine that I try not to let in the house--it's technically correct, at least in the sense that it's been used that way for decades if not centuries, and as a descriptivist it's my duty to bend with the tide of linguistic change.  Still, I try to show that such things are plural just by make the letters big and the "S" small (80s. ABCs).  I'll never change the world's mind, though, so if you do it the other way just keep doing what you're doing.

     Anyway, other than in these rare cases, an apostrophe is never, never to be used on a plural.

     If you're ever wondering whether an apostrophe fits or not, ask yourself if the sentence can be restructured to exclude the "S".  For example, "This house's the best!" can be restructured to, "This house is the best!" so the apostrophe fits.  "The house's door," can be restructured to "The door belonging to the house," so it fits.  But "The houses stood in a row" can't be restructured in any simple way that eliminates the "s" without eliminating the plural.  You'd have to change it to something silly, like, "The house and its compatriots stood in a row."  (and then you haven't eliminated the S, you've just moved it to the word "compatriots," though if there were only two you COULD say "the house and its compatriot stood in a row," but a row is usually more than two and now I'm just overthinking it oops)

     And speaking of "its," a pronoun--she, he, it, they--is the one exception to the "possession=apostrophe" rule.  The only time that a pronoun has an apostrophe is when it's part of a compound word--see the previous example, "it's," which can be broken into "it" and "is."

4.  Double space your shit

     Double-spacing is important, okay.  If you don't select "double" on your line spacing (or 1.5 at the BAREST minimum), it's going to be too cramped, your understanding of how long your work actually is will be thrown off, and your editor won't be happy.
   
     If you want to write it all in single-space and double-space after the fact, that's fine!  That's your prerogative!  But double-spacing needs to be done before you send it off for work--double-spacing helps you avoid massive text walls, makes people less likely to just skim your work, and allows anyone trying to edit or analyze the piece to make notes and corrections between lines, which is super important.

     Just ... double space, okay?  It's the standard submission convention, and single-spacing makes it difficult for others to take your work seriously, because it's one of the first things they teach (or should teach) in a high school English class.

5.  Twelve point TNR font

     Again, if you're looking to submit your work, you need to adhere to standard convention, and standard convention is twelve point Times New Roman font.  Create it in any font you want, but know that before you submit, 99% of the places you things off to are going to ask for 12pt TNR.

     Of course, some companies might prefer Arial or Verdana, or Courier New, or something else that's a little off-the-wall, so make sure you check the preferences of every agent/publishing company you submit to BEFORE you submit, and make any necessary revisions to format.

4 Basic (Novel/Short Story Writing) Formatting Tips

     I don't have a lot of time to just sit down and read anymore--it's one of the things I really really miss about being a kid.  I devoured It in maybe a week as a ten-year-old, and when I was twelve I once read eight 200 page books within twenty-four hours.  Watching that huge stack of library books lower book by book was so satisfying, and the books themselves were wonderful.

     My point there kids is, read while you're young.  Do as much as you can, because the older you get the tougher it's going to be to find that time and cultivate those skills.

     Anyway, now that I'm an Adult™ I have trouble finding time to read--so most of my reading on a day-to-day basis consists of plays I have to read for class or, most voluminous, fanfiction.  Some fanfiction is really really good.  Other fanfictions are really, really bad.  

     The vast majority are okay.  But there are a lot of good fanfictions that get a total pass from me just because of the formatting--the ideas are solid, the writing is fine, maybe it's not the best work in the world but I'd read a couple thousand words if the formatting just weren't so nonstandardized.

     And I get it--schools don't teach you things like this anymore.  No teacher ever told me to do any of these things--with the exception of indentations when starting new paragraphs, I had to teach myself how to write and format by extensive reading on my own.

         So in the interest of helping writers, new and old, fanfiction or original content, here are some of my formatting pet peeves.


1.  One Paragraph, Many Speakers

     Make sure that when a new character starts speaking, you switch paragraphs.  Even if this means having several one-sentence paragraphs, do it.  It'll make the work more streamlined and less cluttered, it increases the white-space-to-text ratio, and it very clearly indicates that someone new is speaking, meaning you can use fewer dialogue tags, and your audience doesn't have to put in too much brainpower.

     Your audience sometimes needs to be able to work things out on their own, it's in the contract, but when it comes to formatting, don't make them work any harder than they absolutely have to.

2.  "  " or '  ' Used For Thoughts

     This gets me.  This gets me really hard.  I'm sitting there, reading a fic or short story online, doo doo da loo, la la la, and I see the character starts speaking, and I get into character speech mode.  "Dorothy Anne should be shot," she thought.

     And I always have to double-take--thought?  Thought?  What?  Quotation marks indicate speech, not thought, that's why they're quotation marks, because we're using them to quote a person's speech.

     Almost as bad are the using of 'apostrophes' to indicate thought, which just irks me on a level I don't completely understand.  It's a thing, okay, we've all got them, and this thing is that these tactics confuse the reader--even if it's just momentary, that's still a moment that the reader is taken out of the story, that they have to double-back and approach from a different angle, and the goal of a writer is to minimalize those moments as close to completely as possible.

     To avoid this confusion, there are two ways to indicate thought that aren't intrusive--you can just state it;         She thought this was a really bad idea; he thought about the cat on the roof, and wondered how it got there.

     That method is quick and simple, though it creates a little more distance, and summarizes more than it shows exactly what a character is thinking.  If you're looking to quote the exact thought, I recommend the second method; italics:       Thus is ludicrous, she thought, climbing into her car.  "Hand me a Kleenex."  There's no way Jonathan could have done any of this.

     This way the thought is clearly separated from typical narration, and when the character does speak aloud, the audience can tell what's being said aloud and what's being privately pondered upon.

3.  '  ' For Speech Spoken Aloud

     Again, quotation mark drama will be the death of me.  Here's a quick rundown of what kind of quotation signifier to use in different situations:

Speech:  Quotation marks.  Always quotation marks.
     Ex,  "Hey Mom," Jenny called, "Can you help me with this?"
Exceptions:  I really need to punch someone in the face, Jenny thought, and didn't realize she'd spoken aloud until every eye in the room was on her./He asked his mother for a tissue and she told him to go fuck himself.

Quotations outside of speech:  Quotation marks.
     Ex.  He took the "pencil box" and buried it deep beneath the ground.

Quotations within speech:  Double apostrophe
     Ex.  "Your 'pencil box' is really starting to unnerve me," she said, backing away slowly.

4.  Massive Blocks Of Text

     A paragraph that goes on for an entire page isn't one most people are likely to sit through--not unless you are really, superbly, extremely  skilled, but if that's the case you're unlikely to do this.  Big paragraphs in and of themselves are fine in moderation, and sometimes necessary.  But many many big paragraphs can, and should, be broken up into smaller bite-sized chunks.

     Sometimes, especially online, an author breaks up their paragraphs into perfectly manageable bits, but due to the lack of a double-space option, the paragraphs clump together to form a massive text wall nonetheless, which drives off prospective readers.  In this situation, make sure you press "enter" twice between paragraphs; this will serve in the place of the double-space option and help your readers break the text up.  Plus, it helps them avoid losing their place.

     ... I should probably stop forgetting to do this on my own blog.  Whoops.  Well, I never said I was perfect, did I?

     If you have any formatting or fanfiction pet peeves you'd like to share, feel free to drop them in the comments section below!