NaNoWriMo 2017 | Writing Shenanigans

Hello, everyone! It's your favorite inconsistent blogger with another (inconsistent) post! This time it's all about NaNoWriMo. What's NaNoWriMo, you ask? Well, you fool, it's an event that takes place every year on November in which a bunch of writers decide to push their limits and write a novel in a month! Ha, while yes, this sounds insane and it kind of is*.

So, this year as I have been for the past six years I've decided to subject myself to this insanity and will be attempting to write 50,000 words** in a month while navigating school and life and the such. Am I brave or stupid, you can decide for yourself. So, I want to talk about what keeps me going and gives me inspiration and how I approach NaNo.

*If this is your kind of insane you can go and register for the madness here! Come join us, we're over caffeinated and slightly crazy
**Although, this is a project I've sort of already started and some of these words have already been written, but shhh.

What Keeps Me Going

The thought of all the cuteness to come. I mean, man, my NaNo project is a contemporary about a girl trying to find what in the heck she wants to do with her life post-university* and there's friendship and falling in love and it all promises to be very cute.

That's not all that fuels me, but also the fact that I hate losing and that I am motivated just by the thought of winning. So, on days when it all feels like too much the thought of winning just puts me right back on track. I find that telling everyone you know about your insanity also is a driver because come December they'll ask what about your novel and you'll have to tell them you've brought dishonor on your cow.

*this work is only slightly biographic and as a matter of fact this is where the similarities end.

What Gives Me Inspiration

As I mentioned, there's tons of cuteness in my story and also tons of internal conflict and while that's all fine and good I'm really all about the cuteness. So, a big source of inspiration for me is Pinterest. I have boards for every single relevant character in this story. It's also great for procrastination in the sake of inspiration, if you get what I mean. 

Can you feel the cuteness? I mean, there's a dog and someone's a Slytherin and the other person likes books and says darlin'

Another unexpected source of inspiration for me is k-dramas. Now, hear me out. I have little to no cuteness going on in my life. I've got the existential dread, no idea where my life is going thing down to a T, but I have none of the cuteness in my life. So, when I need a good (sometimes cringe-worthy) ole' fashioned cute and butterfly inducing feelings I turn to k-dramas. It's also great for procrastination. WAIT! I think I'm detecting a theme here. Oops. Well, anyway, they help greatly and the drama cycle that just started is so good, it's as if the writing gods have willed it so. 

I also draw inspiration from my day to day. It sounds boring, but it's true. The whole idea for this story came to me when I was at a bridal shower for a friend* and I started thinking what if... Obviously, the story has evolved and the characters have evolved in my head since the original idea came to me in like, February or April of this year, but an event in my daily life was the spark. Also, sometimes I have great conversations and to not draw inspiration from them would be a disservice to my wit. 

*I was only twenty-one at the time and WAY TOO YOUNG TO HAVE SUCH ADULT FRIENDS OMG

My Approach

I approach NaNo with wariness and armed with snacks. Also, I have a vague outline about the events that should happen and just adventure it from there. Because, where's the fun in a perfectly mapped novel, right? Also, I just like to give my characters room to do whatever the heck they like because forcing them into stuff has never worked for me and they're stubborn people. 

So, listen to your characters would be my first tip. You might think it's your story, but really it's theirs and they give no flying cucumbers about what you want. So, I listen to my characters and hope for the best. That being said, there are moments when I'm outlining that they just spring to life and I have to outline whole conversations. It's quite a magical thing.

I'm outlining on paper, mainly because it allows me to outline during class when I'm bored and because there's just something about pen to paper that I love way more than I love about fingers to keys. BUT, I am writing the actual novel itself on a word processor. I use Scrivener usually, but I'm thinking of maybe taking it old school this year and write on Word (the last time I actually finished a project was in Word, so maybe it'll give me some divine inspiration or something). I'm still thinking about that.

Since I have uni and November is going to be hectic (I'm looking at you Art History paper and Final English Project) and just very busy, I'm going to try and write as much as I can every day. That means I'll try to soar above the 1,667 daily goal and push it as much as I can every day. Will it work? Maybe. Will it maybe kill me? Yes. Is it worth it? I'd say yes.

So, armed with my tools and enthusiasm I'll embark on this crazy crazy journey this November.

Are you participating in NaNo this year? If so, what's your novel about? How are you doing it because I could use all the tips.

The Art of Pantsing | Writing Shenanigans

If you clicked on this because you thought I was going to teach you how to make pants, feel free to close the tab because I don't know the first thing about making pants. I do know a thing or two about the art of pantsing*, which is to just wing your way through a novel. Yeah, it sounds insane, doesn't it? "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?" Screeches every single planner out there in the writing world. The answer, my friends: because I can. Also because I'm a very pants-y person in real life.

*again nothing to do with making pants. WHY ARE YOU HERE FOR A GUIDE ON HOW TO MAKE PANTS ANYWAY?

The approach

I like to think of pantsing not so much as no plan at all, but rather as a very loose plan in which you kind of know the destination, but you're also kind of leaving room for adventure and some mayhem.

It's you taking your characters and the vague idea of where you want them to go and just going. No detail planning, no stressing. Just giving them and yourself the chance to explore and roam and maybe fall down a very unexpected plot line that you'll either end up loving or hating and throwing into the trash. BUT YOU WENT ON THE ADVENTURE! I like to think of pantsing as a huge giant unplanned adventure. So, when you think of it like that, it doesn't seem so crazy, right?*

*Please tune out the sounds of distress of every single person who loves to plan reading this post and pronouncing me absolutely insane. They'll be fine. I hope.

Listening to your gut (and your characters)

I find that in the art of pantsing listening to your gut (and your characters) is of crucial importance. The only thing that takes more importance is having sufficient snacks for when nothing goes right and you want to burn everything.  If we are to think of pantsing as an unplanned adventure there's going to be moments in which nothing will seem to go the way we want it to* and inevitably that can mean that something just isn't working.

So, it's time to stop and smell the flowers or just run from that dangerous looking stranger in the woods and take a different road altogether. Either way, the best bet you have is to listen to either your gut or your characters and go where the story wants to go. It's important to recall that you're not the master of this situation and that the story will go where the story wants to go and if you try to force it YOU WILL STRESS EAT AND CRY AS WELL AS SCREAM AT YOUR SCREEN IN FRUSTRATION AND THEN JUST PROCEED TO FLIP YOUR DESK!**

*is this a flaw of not having a plan? Maybe. I like to think of it as the risks of exploring an uncharted territory

**not that I would know. Naturally pantsing comes very natural to me, so I'm just assuming this is true. I'VE GOT THIS OKAY

Be true to your story

You embarked on this magnificent adventure for a reason. With the pantsing it's kind of easy to take side roads that aren't really true to your story and explore them for no other reason that you can. So remember, when the lure of that city of gold or extraordinarily good cake appears, that it wasn't part of what you wanted and that even though you might really, really want to go down that avenue you can't. Going on an adventure doesn't mean following every single thing you want to do. So, stay true to your story, to your adventure and go forward to that kind of elusive destination you set out for in the beginning.

Are you more of a pantser or a plotter? Or are you a healthy mix of both?

Monolingualism Isn't the Rule, but How Do We Make Fiction Do the Thing? | #WritingShenangians

Hello, dear readers. I KNOW, I KNOW. I've been absent for too long and you miss me oh, so dearly. I'm sorry to have deprived you of my magnificent presence. However, here I am and I promise I will try and blog more regularly. Let's just say life got a little too intense for a sec there and my motivation was lost somewhere back in 2013.

Enough of my rambling. You're here because you want good content, dammit! So today to bestow the title of Writing Shenanigans upon this post we shall speak about a favorite topic of mine: language! I'm a linguistics major* in university and that just means I'm crazy about language and the intricate ways our minds work about it.

It's no secret I'm a big advocate for languages other than English being a prominent thing in books. I wrote a post all about this very thing back when I bothered to post regularly (you can check it out here) but it's basically about how most of the world speaks more than one language and how fiction should reflect that. It's all very personal to my excitable and often confused bilingual brain.

actual representation of a conversation with my friends

*this means I sit around with my classmates and make a bunch of weird sounds and write in weird symbols which sounds way cooler than it it.

You say, that is all good and well, Laura, but what the hell does that have to do with writing? Patience, little grasshoppers, all in good time. First, a little background on my magnificent word-weaving, since this is after all the first installment of Writing Shenanigans.

Yours truly is currently trying to write a book. A hopeful endeavor that has consisted mostly of amassing a small fortune of pins over at Pinterest and not much writing. WE ALL START SOMEWHERE, OKAY? However, two of my characters speak languages other than English* and I've found that incorporating that into the story has been a bit of a challenge.

I'm still playing around with POV, but I definitely want one of my bilingual characters as a POV character. Only problem is that she is Korean-American. I know a bit of Korean. Basic stuff, really. My other character speaks Spanish. Perfectly fluent in that, although my parents might beg to differ. They're wrong. Languages grow all the time and my syntax is a bit wonky sometimes, BUT THAT IS CHARMING! That little tirade, however, brings me to my point. How do we make fiction do the thing bilingual (or multilingual) people do in their heads all the time?

actual face my parents make when I say something weird

*they also speak English, but I guess that's pretty self-explanatory.

And at last we have gotten to the very heart of this post. The thing I found while trying to incorporate other languages into my work is that it's freaking hard. Specially when my other MC doesn't really understand either of these languages. Oh, and when I barely know some of the other language my MC logically thinks and speaks in. Not all the time, but some of the time.

So, how do we all go about doing this thing people have no problem doing in their everyday lives and not make it wonky and weird in fiction? I see why so many writers take the easy way out and just brush it over. But, my dudes, language is a big part of who we are as people. Some would argue it's kind of who we are, or at least how we express ourselves.

As such, here we are with a big problem in our hands. JUST HOW DO WE MAKE FICTION DO THE THING WHERE LANGUAGES OTHER THAN THE ONE WE ARE WRITING IN JUST EXIST INSIDE THE MIND AND OUT IN THE WORLD??????? Can you feel the frustration?

My first thought was, just have the character translate. That's lazy and wrong and I'm just not for it because as a bilingual person myself I know that I sometimes think in English and sometimes in Spanish and that I use these two languages interchangeably and it's all as comfortable as slipping into another pair of shoes. I don't really have to think about it much, my brain and my lips just do. Even more so when I'm drunk. * SO HOW DO I MAKE THIS COME ACROSS ON THE PAGE????

My second thought was... well just throw in some words here and there. Some pauses** and lag time for certain complicated words. But I wanted my characters to speak and think in their other languages. Not only randomly say stuff in them. What about when they're with family? They would probably be thinking and speaking in their other language or in a mix of both. It all felt very complicated. Because, well, language is a complicated thing.

Then I figured I would just try and incorporate language like I use it everyday. Keyword being try because sadly enough fiction can do things we don't do everyday, but has a hard time with things we do everyday. Is it going to be hard? Probably. Am I up to the challenge? Definitely. If other authors can incorporate other languages, even made up ones, I can find a way too.

*my friends and I have been known to hold a conversation in at least 3 languages when drunk
**we multilinguals are known to speak slower, even if we're balanced bilinguals or extremely fluent in both languages

What are some ways you can think of to incorporate other languages into your writing? Like seriously, I could use all the help I can get.