Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final. ~Roger Babson

As we approach the end of the challenge, I’m sure that some of us have dropped off, sure we aren’t ever going to reach our goals. Others have finished, and are relaxing (or feverishly doing edits, like me). Still others are striving for that brass ring.

No matter what camp you’ve fallen into, you’ve accomplished something. Maybe you’ve learned that writing marathons aren’t for you. Okay: check that off the list and find another way to achieve your goal.

Maybe you’ve found they work great. Fabulous! Now do it again.

And to those of your still working, huge hugs. Now scoot! You’ve got writing to do!

No matter what you’ve done (or haven’t done), it’s not over. There’s always another day, another page, another chance, another book. Keep your eye on that goal!

If you haven’t seen me around the Sven blog in the last few check-in posts, it’s because I finished my challenge book, and I’ve been recuperating and waiting for the edits to come in. Which they did. And now they’re due, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but typing “The End” (yes, I type “The End” on every one of my manuscripts, and I don’t care what the purists say!) is far, far from the actual end. It’s the first step, and a phenomenally important one, but there’s plenty more pain work fun to come.

It is often said, “Books are not written; they’re rewritten.” Also often said is, “Wanna knuckle sandwich, smart mouth?” I’m not one who loves revisions. I’m one who… has acquired a taste for them. I know they are necessary, and they make my book better, and they are to be appreciated with all my heart and soul. But it’s rarely “the fun part.”

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to figure out how to “write it right the first time.” I know I can do it on a small scale. There have been scenes in every one of my books that are never touched in any round of revisions. When I’m in the midst of editing, I live for those scenes, those precious little chunks I can glide right past on my way to the next tangle.

But they are a gift, and what is more, I don’t know if I’d even want something like that on a grand scale. Knowing that my drafts are not yet perfect, and that’s okay, is occasionally the only thing that keeps me going. Otherwise, I might get stuck in that need for first-time perfection, and never finish anything.

Sometimes, the answer can’t come until after I’ve moved past that scene or plot point, and can look on it from beyond, or even look at it as part of a whole.

It’s only recently that I’ve truly learned to appreciate Nora Robert’s adage, “You can’t fix a blank page.” Yeah, I used to mutter, but you can’t screw it up, either.

You know what else you can’t do? You can’t read it to friends, or sell it to a publisher. Don’t be afraid of imperfection. Keep writing. There are always edits.

You do not like them.
So you say.
Try them! Try them!
And you may.
Try them and you may, I say.

- Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss

My husband and I are house-hunting. (bear with me, folks, I swear it relates to writing!)

Our realtor is showing us massive lists of houses in our town that fit our search criteria. We’ve been scrolling through the lists, kicking out the ones in neighborhoods we don’t like, dismissing the ones with too few pictures or not enough curb appeal.

Yesterday we went to look at houses, and on the way home, we passed another house with a For Sale sign in the yard. Why wasn’t THIS house on our list? It was perfect! Perfect neighborhood, perfect price range. We went home and looked it up online — the inside was perfect too!

And guess what? It was under contract.

Well, we went back to the list and discovered that we’d zoomed right past it because the website picture didn’t do the house justice at ALL. So I spent several hours last night going through the list again and investigating every house in depth, even the ones that we’d ignored earlier. And I found some more possibilities.

Often in writing, when we hit a scene and we’re stuck, we dismiss ideas of where to go because it’s too outlandish or too extreme or too ugly or too [insert adjective here]. But maybe we should try it. It doesn’t hurt us to look at a house. It doesn’t hurt you to write a few hundred words and see if there’s any potential. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve wasted a twenty minutes, and you can delete it with a click of a button.

But maybe you should try it, because otherwise, you never know what you might miss.

Over at my personal blog today, we’re discussing various and sundry writing tips, particularly the ones about there being only X-number of plots.

Are there? Sure. There are only two, or seven, or twelve, or 39, or 69, or 142, or however elemental you choose to get with your analysis. The internet world is full of writing advice. It can get pretty daunting. I’ve received emails from folks who say they couldn’t have written their books were it not for my plotboard, and I’ve gotten desperate questions from folks wondering if they’re “still real writers” if they don’t.

Of course you are! These lists or interview sheets or plotboards or collaging techniques — these are just tools folks, no different than the handy-dandy kitchen gadgets. My friend is a chef, and he laughs at all the corers/peelers/slicers/shredders/choppers/etc. that they hawk on late night television (and that I have a kitchen filled with). He’s got a knife. (And an immersion blender, but that doesn’t fit my metaphor, so let’s just ignore it for a moment.) And with his knife, he can do all that other stuff.

So, if the Salad Shooter works for you, makes YOUR life easier, and is something that you like to use (I love my Salad Shooter), then use it. If not, take out your knife. You don’t need to cook like everyone else.

Whatever works for you.

Whenever I push through a big writing marathon, 10 or more pages in a day, I always have to have a few down days afterwards. I keep a running Excel spreadsheet to track my progress on my different writing projects: How many pages did I write today, this week, this month? A pattern emerges: I’ll write 10 pages, then three days of four or five pages a piece, or perhaps even one or two.

When you’re in the midst of something like Seventy Days of Sweat, it’s easy to look at these low-output days as “failures.” Why haven’t you written more? You were able to do ten pages yesterday with no problem at all. What happened?

But every page–every word– is forward motion. Maybe you only had one page, but you unraveled a knotty plot issue. Maybe you needed to refill the well. Maybe you needed to sleep more than four hours a night.

We’re in the second month of Sven now. Have you fallen off the wagon? Have you never gotten on? Are you worried as you see those days pass by while your numbers haven’t budged an inch? It’s okay! It’s not too late! Write now, today! We all have days, or weeks, or even months, where the well is empty. Where we have no words.

Take a deep breath. Smell that fresh breeze, filled with potential? It’s the second wind.

Write.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. ~Henry Ford

When I was in high school, my classmates on the swim team all had these stickers that they’d put on the cover of their notebooks, inside their lockers, on their textbooks, etc. And they’d have a number on them. It would say something like: 53:20. They were writing down their goals. As a teenager, I didn’t understand it. After all, if their faces were in the water, how could they see the clock?

I grew out of that when I realized that there was a certain magic in stating aloud what you wanted to accomplish.

That’s what we all did here: stated aloud that we’d write these books; wrote it up on our virtual locker doors.

But maybe you are saying to yourself now, “That was the easy part. I didn’t realize I’d have to BLANK BLANK BLANK, and my husband/kids/girlfriend/mother/dog BLANK BLANK BLANK…”

Shhhhhh…

Look at that number on your locker room door. For a moment today, just look at it. Do you want it? Then ask yourself what you have to do to reach it.

Good luck!

It’s important to be brave in your writing. You know the saying, “Faint heart never won fair maiden?” Well, think also that “Faint writing never won fair readers.” We read stories to be transformed, uplifted, entertained, affected. You can’t do that unless you write bravely.

Author Jim Van Pelt wrote a blog post called “New Year’s Resolutions for Writers” (the whole thing is worth reading, really), and the #4 resolution was:

Be brave. Take risks on the page. These can be risks with language, risks with plot, risks with theme. No matter what, don’t write stuff that feels “safe” because I want to avoid criticism or because I’ve been praised for telling that kind of story before. Remember Neil Young. He’s never done the same album twice.

I don’t know much about Neil Young, but I strongly believe the rest of that. Be brave while you write, and be confident in your bravery. Writers are often worried about pushing it too far, but that’s not the problem. The problem is always not pushing enough. Fiction is about creating an emotional response in the reader. Scare them, make them laugh, make them cry, turn them on. Be brave!

Harlequin editor Brenda Chin is famous for saying that if a writer goes to far, she can pull rein her in, but she can’t do the opposite. An editor can’t make a book funnier, sexier, more emotionally appealing. That’s up to us, the writers.

Today, be brave in your writing. Take a risk. You may find you like it.

Not to put a damper on everyone’s fun, but I’ve been a bit stuck recently. :-O I know, I know, it’s against Sven’s policy, “you can’t fix a blank page,” “just write crap,” and all those other fun “but in chair, hands on keyboard” aphorisms, but occasionally, you just get stuck.

My problem is that I’ve been rewriting a section, and I’m running into the same difficulties as I did the last time I wrote it, which of course, is negating the purpose of said rewrite. Very frustrating, eh? But I have two choices:

1) Figure it out.
2) Give up.

Two ain’t happening. So I dove into all my usual tricks. I brainstormed, I made lists of six things that could happen, I wrote it from another point of view, I read a book I really enjoyed to see if it would jumpstart my love of storytelling, I took a lot of long walks and hot showers, I did yoga, I meditated, I wrote five different versions, I read it out loud — in passing, I recommend all of these methods, which have worked for me at one time or another — and I whined to my friends.

Oh, how I whined.

And my friends, being writers themselves, whined back. One was having trouble with her revisions. One was having trouble balancing her deadline and what the family expected from the impending holidays, and one had just lost his job. (We drank our lunch that day.) This, by the way, also sometimes gets me going. Reflecting on how much harder other people have it and still produce is often the metaphorical bitchslap I need to get me going again.

And finally, a few nights ago, one friend told me about a time that she had been in the same situation as my character. And I started thinking about it as not a scene from my the book, but as part of my character’s mindset. I’ve never been much of one for character questionnaires or interviews — I tried one once and when I asked my character what her favorite ice cream flavor was, she threatened to knock my front teeth in — but hey, I’ll try anything once twice, and this character isn’t the type to knock anyone’s teeth in. So I tried it. I tried thinking about (i.e. “asking her”) how my character felt, beyond what she felt about the things happening to her in the story.

She’d been raised by a single mom, in very reduced circumstances. They had a rocky relationship — Lorelais Gilmore they were not — and the teen angst and parental embarrassment was hitting my protag pretty hard. And yet, you can’t grow up like that without having a whole host of memories of you and your mom against the world. No matter how angry you are now. That’s just the way it works.

And finally, she let me know. She told me a whole bunch of memories. And even though none of them will be in the book, and very little of their flavor actually made it into the text, it colored all of her reactions for the whole section that was giving me fits.

What are your tried and true methods of bringing yourself past the blocks? And what do you always say will never work for you? Think you ought to try it?

Sadly, I’m unable to embed this, but it’s a great inspirational video blog from author Meg Cabot, about the importance of BICHOK.

Since that’s what I’m doing right now, I thought it was especially fitting.

How do you write? Do you, like Meg, need to know where you are headed? (I do.) Do you write on paper or on plastic? Do you need a long stretch of time or a short one? I find that “how I write” is not so important as that I write. I’ve written on computers, at desks in quiet libraries, in internet cafes filled with gamers and loud techno music, in coffee shops with a notebook and a latte, on the metro on the backs of tiny slips of paper, and on an alphasmart in the outback, sitting in a tent, surrounded on all sides by kangaroos.

Right now, I’m wearing my favorite pajama pants (black flannel, with robots all over them), a t-shirt that was a gift from my friend, Cecil Castellucci (and has an expletive on it), a purple cardigan, and fuzzy socks. I’m sitting at my kitchen table, tapping away at my laptop, Pantalaimon, and sipping a cup of wild berry tea. Doesn’t necessarily sound like I’m readying myself for a bloody, adventure filled chapter of killer unicorns, but in my head, I’m girded for battle.

So, how do you write?

Confession: Next Monday I’m starting in with the sweating. I know I’ve been late, but between getting married, finishing an anthology, and doing the revisions for my last book, the timing wasn’t right for me. I’m so looking forward to getting back into the actual writing. For me, the writing is the fun part (almost as fun as the “going into the bookstore and seeing my books on the shelves” part). Editing is no fun at all for me. And yet, none of these things can be neglected. They all work hand in hand.

I’ve been so happy these past few weeks to know that I have friends and colleagues who have been available to dispense advice, help out when things got too hectic (thanks, Alison!), and just hold my hand when I got whiny. (Which was a lot.)

Writing can be a very lonely profession, even when you’re doing the “fun part.” It’s just the writer, alone in front of her computer or her pad and pen. I love writer communities, like this one, where the participants have a common goal. It makes me feel less alone, as if we’re all working toward something together. It was amazing to come back from my wedding and see my inbox crammed with congratulations from my fellow Sven sponsors, many of whom I haven’t even met in real life!

Even though we each have our own goals (our own books, our own speed, our own little problems with the project), a group like this makes me feel like we all have a common goal, as if writing books is somehow adding to the bulk of story in the universe.

And that is undoubtedly a good thing.

So as I sat down to Thanksgiving dinner last night, and reflected on what it was that I was thankful for, one of the things on my list was that I was friends with so many other writers — people just like me, who loved stories and wanted to see more storytellers out there. People who truly understood the nature of my profession, and can help me when I get tangled in some part. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

What is your support system for your writing? Is it the Sven check in group? Someone else? Who do you turn to when your work flags?