Writing Methods

I am trying Novel in a Month once more. I think this is the third year. My goal isn't to get up to 50K words -- if it was, I would be pretty discouraged right now (though if I counted in all the word-intensive blogging I've been doing recently, I might be closer than I think). Rather, I am on my never-ending, quixotic quest to keep up with our family Story Society.

I don't want to publish the story. I just want to write it, adequately enough to not be disgraced in comparison to my three oldest children who are all better story-writers than I am, though as a teenager myself I used to pride myself on my fairly decent fiction writing skills.

My oldest son is home from college right now, along with a stack of stories he is annotating from his college story club. He also asked me to comment his story in progress, and I gave him some of my story to critique, as well. We are to have our traditional story meeting tomorrow, before he returns to college. This has inspired me and I actually got some more of my story written, so I thought I would quickly write out what is working right now. Maybe I can finally vanquish the dreaded Writer's Block Dragon (or find out it is a windmill, or something).

• First of all, it seems to help to plan to spend some time "wasting time" -- not really, but sitting down and dinking around with my story as it presently exists, changing a word here and there, thinking about different ways to make that scene happen, even annotating someone else's story (if I run out of stories in my own family, maybe I'll start rewriting Muriel Spark or Walter Van Tilburg Clark -- hee hee, not really, but you get the picture).
• Second, it seems to help to give myself permission to try different things out and "see if they work".
• Third, if I write down plot possibilities and ideas for techniques on a side page while I'm writing the story, it helps me remember them. Otherwise I forget.
• Fourth, it is not really essential to have a completely free block of time. Anyway, that never exists in my household of nine. Yesterday I sat and wrote on the sofa with Aidan bouncing all over me. I can honestly ignore any amount of chaos -- I learned to do this in 17 years of formal schooling. In college, I always used to go to a cafe to write my essays because I could think so much better that way. I am training my children to do this even better than I could -- they can do algebra with toddlers running around and their dad reading aloud from the sports page and the dog barking at the UPS man, and so on.
• Fifth, it helps to keep a writer's notebook and jot down things as I think of them. I don't even really have to look at the notes again. Just writing them down helps.
  
• Sixth, it helps to have some plan, but not invent it ahead of time... rather, work my way into it by the practices listed above. So that's what I'm doing right now : ).
  

I guess that's all for now, but I noticed while writing out the notes for this that this is my preferred method for almost everything I do. It works for housekeeping (though you'd never know it from the way the house looks now); it works for figuring out parenting issues and personal issues; it works for lesson planning; it works for blogging. It even works for things spiritual -- devotions. I think Ignatius refers to something similar as remote, median and proximate preparation; then considerations, affections, and resolutions.

Just in case it helps someone else! I know I'm not the only one out here who brings their novel out of the closet every November.