Learn how to plot and pace your novel, then how to pitch it: upcoming Fictionfire day courses

Trinity College, where I hold my Day Courses

The current series of Fictionfire Focus Workshops is well underway, with Point of View, Dialogue and Style as upcoming subjects. In addition I've posted details on my website of the next two day courses I'll be running at Trinity College, Oxford - here they are:

How to Plot and Pace your Story (May 18th)

So, you've hooked your reader with a blindingly good opening to your novel. That was the easy part: the challenge lies in keeping that reader intrigued enough to read the rest of it! This day course is designed to help you structure your plot so that it hangs together well. We'll look at the typical elements of a satisfying storyline and discuss whether you should plan in detail or risk a more instinctive, less rigid mode of composition. We'll brainstorm ideas and try out methods of visualising the overall shape of the novel. We'll explore how to pace the narrative and how to troubleshoot it when the momentum falters. We'll consider genre-expectations and pitfalls to avoid. With exercises, discussion and analysis of examples throughout, we'll discover how to create a storyline that draws your reader in and makes them say 'I couldn't put it down!'

Thank you so much for a really informative day! Not a second was wasted and I learned heaps about plotting which let me see the shape of my own work more clearly. Also, I appreciated the relaxed atmosphere in the class - there really was no pressure. (E.G., writing about an earlier Fictionfire course on plotting)

A view of Trinity's beautiful lawns

Perfect Pitch: How to Craft your Submission and Land an Agent (May 19th)

You've completed your writing project - congratulations! Now you want to get it out there to readers. This day course is designed to help you meet the challenge of making your pitch in a focused, professional way. Practical exercises will guide you through crucial self-editing techniques so that you can hone your opening chapters. We'll look at the components of the pitch-package: those polished opening pages or chapters, the query or covering letter and - what everyone dreads! - the synopsis. Using exercises and examples, we'll discover how to make an agent - or editor - want to see more. You'll learn how the publishing industry works and how agents want to be approached, along with what puts them off. Even if you're not aiming to publish by the traditional route, the skills of creating a powerful opening and a compelling summary of your novel will help you to bring your work to your readers' attention. The marketplace is crowded: here's how to make yourself stand out!

Once I was ready to submit the novel to literary agents, I approached Lorna to help with my synopsis and covering letter. Again, the feedback I received was invaluable and I learnt a lot. Lorna's friendly professionalism meant that I felt comfortable throughout. and it obviously worked: I secured an agent and a publishing deal! (Katherine Clements, who now has a three book publishing deal with Headline)

In the beautiful Sutro Room where I hold the courses

To find out more about the course venue and how to book, visit the Fictionfire website www.fictionfire.co.uk. There is an early bird booking discount available until 28th February.

Meanwhile, currently only one place is left on the first of my Point of View workshops on February 23rd - for Focus workshop details, go to www.fictionfire.co.uk/page26.htm

In Memoriam

The best of people, the worst of times.

George Johnston Fergusson
Elizabeth Hay Findlay

21.1.72

New Year Writing Inspiration: Upcoming Focus Workshops

The new year - time for those fresh starts: TV adverts urge us to start new diets, leaflets come through the door advertising gym memberships. How many resolutions have you made - and perhaps already broken? For writers, a new year marks a fresh chance to get going on a planned project or complete one which has stalled. I wish you every success if you're starting out - or even if you're feeling bogged down and want to know how to rev up your self-belief and productivity.

Writing successfully means being open to ideas, being experimental, trusting yourself - but also learning from experience, whether it's your own personal experience or that of a writing buddy or teacher. My Fictionfire Focus Workshops have been running for some time now and what I love about them is how warm and relaxed yet how productive and inspiring they have proved to be, creating a small friendly community of regular attenders who are keen to share ideas and provide mutual support. I hope that sometime during 2013 you'll be able to join us!

Here are the titles of the two upcoming blocks of workshops, starting later this month:

WINTER 2 BLOCK

WALK-ON PARTS (January 26th)
It's important that even minor characters are convincing - we'll explore how to bring secondary characters to life and what functions they can perform in your story.

LOVE IS IN THE AIR (February 2nd)
With Valentine's Day approaching, we'll look at how to portray love and romance in your fiction - whether that passion is unrequited or fulfilled, brief or everlasting, innocent or corrupt ...!

PLAYING WITH POINT OF VIEW 1 (February 23rd)
In the first of two workshops about point of view, we'll look at the advantages of the close perspective: using first or second person in your story.

SPRING BLOCK

PLAYING WITH POINT OF VIEW 2 (March 2nd)
We'll explore degrees of distance when it comes to perspective: how to use third person, multiple points of view and omniscience.

DYNAMIC DIALOGUE (March 9th)
This is a re-run of a popular workshop from last year. Writing convincing dialogue is an important skill to learn: it will make your characters spring to life and inject your plot with energy - but you need to do it right!

SHARPEN YOUR STYLE (April 6th)
In this workshop you'll be invited to bring samples of your own work as well as engage in exercises designed to make you look closely at how you express yourself. The ability to look dispassionately at your writing and refine it until it says precisely what you want it to say, is of crucial importance if you want to self-edit your work.

Each three hour workshop costs £25 and there are discounts for booking more than one within a particular block. You can find out more and make your booking by going to the Focus Workshops page on my Fictionfire website.

Later in the spring, I'll be running two day courses at Trinity College, Oxford. How to Plot and Pace your Story is on 18th May and Perfect Pitch - How to Craft your Submission and Land an Agent is on 19th May. Details are on the course dates and details page of the Fictionfire website.

Booking is open for all of these - I hope you can join us! In the meantime, a very happy and creative New Year to you all!

Rosy Thornton guest-posts on Landscapes of the Mind

Rosy with the East Anglian Book Award for Ninepins

I'm delighted to welcome Rosy Thornton to the blog - anyone who's read my work will know how strongly I believe that a writer's ability to create setting and atmosphere is a crucial element when it comes to drawing a reader into a book. Both of Rosy's recent novels do this: in Ninepins I was struck by how she uses the fenland setting to mirror and influence the characters' emotions - and through the rotation of the seasons, contribute to plot and experience too. In The Tapestry of Love, she transports her heroine to France (as I did in The Chase) and we share in the mixture of love, frustration, bewilderment and fascination any ex-pat feels in a new environment. She has a talent for including small details which convince you and make you share in the character's experience - in The Tapestry of Love, her central character, trying to settle into her new home in the Cevennes, feels the damp striking up from the stone floor in her farmhouse, because it's been built up against rock, the rain has been falling for days and damp-proofing isn't part of the deal! Rosy talks to Literascribe about writing about landscape:

Sometimes, when the idea for a novel has suggested itself to me, what has emerged first has been character: the figure of a woman, and snatches of her story. But recently - in the case of both of my last two books - it has been before anything else a landscape which has taken hold of my imagination.

For a writer - or for this writer, at least - no landscape ever stands alone, a static painting in a frame. It lives and breathes and is alive with possibilities. And for me, in particular, it is intimately linked with theme.

Take my latest book, Ninepins. It is set in the bleak, windswept flatlands of the Cambridgeshire fens. This is a land which should by rights be under water, reclaimed by man from a vast stretch of marsh which stretched south and westwards inland from the Wash until the seventeenth century. The water lurks constantly just below the surface of the black, peaty soil, waiting only for a prolonged spell of rain to rise up and take back its own. You couldn't set a light romantic comedy in the fens. This is the landscape of Graham Swift's Waterland and Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors: a country swirling with murky undercurrents. It is no coincidence that Ninepins is the darkest of my novels to date, nor that it is permeated by a sense of the elements: of fire and water, earth and air, of breath and breathing, of flooding and drowning.

My previous novel, The Tapestry of Love, was set against quite a different backdrop, though equally untamed. Its narrative plays out amidst the rugged beauty of the Cevennes mountains in the French Massif Central. This is a landscape of wild, wooded uplands, split by deep valleys on whose slopes cling tiny settlements, almost as ancient as the rock from which they are cut. No coincidence again that the book I chose to set there explores themes of isolation and loneliness but also of belonging, and what it means to put down roots in an alien place; it is a story of the redemptive power of family and friendship and community.

If setting and theme are closely interwoven, there remains the challenge of conveying that setting, that pervading atmosphere of place, from the author's to the reader's mind. How is this to be achieved without describing the scene in compendious detail, itemising each leaf and blade of grass?

One technique is the broad brush approach: the application of bold, outline strokes to sketch out the overall shape of the landscape, to give a sense of its defining features. Here, from Ninepins, is a passage which shows the big picture: the sky, the banks and waterways and flat farmland between, and the distant city beyond.

'When she and Simon first came here - before the arguments, before Beth - they used to stand here side by side sometimes, neither speaking nor moving, and watch the sky slowly bleed from grey through mauve to black. There was so much sky at Ninepins. From here on top of the dyke, looking out across the lode, across the empty fields beyond, it seemed to dwarf the earth, vast and tall and toppling. On days like today, when cloud was sparse, it held a quiet luminosity which lingered even after the sun was gone; the lode and banks were lit by a soft, persistent glow which seemed to come from around and within as much as from above, outshadowing the orange smudge of Cambridge on the southern horizon.'

Less obvious, perhaps, but equally effective in my experience, is the opposite approach: working not from broad outline but from small, selected details. Switch the focus away from the general view and depict instead, at close quarters and minutely observed, some characteristic element from which the reader can infer the nature of the whole. Take this, again from Ninepins:

'It was a movement, now, that caught her attention; a sudden streak, low over the winter wheat, that was gone before she truly saw it. It was no more than a tick, a dash. Could movement have a colour? If so, she sensed that its shade was dark - though the field itself was dark, too, black soil between green shoots, so there was nothing to differentiate what she saw but the simple fact of motion. She knew at once what she had seen. That dizzy speed, that plunging arc, had been missing from the landscape since last summer's end. It was the swallows, back again; it was the spring.'

Rosy Thornton's website is here.

Ninepins is at Amazon here 

The Tapestry of Love is on Amazon here 

My novel set in France, The Chase, will be re-released on Kindle early in the New Year.

Booking is now open for my upcoming Fictionfire Focus Workshops and Day Courses see my website for details.

NaNoWriMo and Beyond - the Secrets of Success Part 2

So, here we are with one day of National Novel Writing Month to go. How's it been for you? Are you sitting under the glitterball of success as I mentioned in my previous post or has your forehead been in contact with your desk so often there's a dent in it (the desk, that is)?

Well, I've entered NaNo for three successive years now and I haven't hit the 50,000 word target once. And I'm totally fine with that - because I never intended to hit that target in the first place. For me, NaNo is all about cultivating the habit of writing every single day, because that's what works best, not some notional 1667 word goal. The thing to bear in mind about NaNo - as I also said in my previous post - is that it's your NaNo, not anybody else's.

Two years ago, when I entered for the first time, I wrote 36,228 words - which gave me such a thrill as I'd surpassed my self-set target of 35,000 words. I'd broken through the log-jam and created a significant body of work which simply hadn't existed 30 days previously. It was a great feeling.

Last year I entered again and I totally screwed up. I was in a bad place with my writing and was torn between projects. I even named two on my author detail page on NaNo, a sure sign there was trouble ahead. I swithered (a good Scots word for dotting to and fro in an undecided manner) anxiously between  the two and was master of neither. My confidence took a battering and I felt I'd never see my way clear again.

This year, the situation is different once again. This year I feel I've got a grip on my writing in the sense that I am now working lucidly on a project for which I have a strong passion. Yes, there are frustrations, doubts, episodes of sturm und drang - but at a deep level I have faith in this story and am relishing exploring its possibilities, even when there are so many possibilities I despair of ever managing them all!

This project began with a short story. The story was long-listed in the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize, which was very gratifying, of course. Then I had an epiphany: this story had the potential to be More, Much More! It was a complete rush of blood to the head. The Muse, who'd been off on a gap year, suddenly was knocking on my door with every intention of staying for more than a day or two.

The project is a historical novel. I signed up for the Historical Novel Society Conference in London in September (you'll have seen my five reports about the conference last month). The conference, apart from being hugely enjoyable in its own right, provided me with a Goal and a Deadline, for I was going to see how much I could write by the end of September - I was going to pitch to an agent while there.

On 14th July I started. I vowed I'd write every day, right up to the Conference. And I did. Yup, I'm bemused by that myself! I went to London with 67000 words under my belt. Damn, it felt good!


After positive encouragement, I prepared to take a month off from writing in October, so that I could reinforce my story with some necessary research. This didn't work out according to plan: real life barged in with work demands and so on - and I ended up neither researching very much nor writing anything. I dreaded all my hard work and enthusiasm fizzling out - it's happened before. I'm sure we've all been there. New ideas and projects are no problem - its keeping the momentum going that's the challenge.

So we come to NaNo. I knew I wouldn't be able to write anywhere near 50,000 words, because my Fictionfire work demands have been pressing this month. I also knew that if another month went by without my first draft making any forward progress I'd start to lose faith in it - and in myself.

So I set my target: 20,000 words. This, I felt, was doable. This could mean 300 words one night, 1200 words the next - whatever I felt capable of, as long as 20,000 words were produced by the end of the month.

Not only do I set an overall target, but here's the greatest secret of success for me, and it's one I discovered in 2010 - and it's thanks to Jerry Seinfeld! Here's what you do: you take a sheet from a calendar and on every writing day you put a big red cross on it to show you wrote something that day. It couldn't be simpler! What happens is that the line of crosses spreads across the page and it would be horrible to see a blank box interrupt that sweet line of success! Doesn't matter if the word count is low - the main thing is that something was produced. All those crosses line up, all those daily word counts start to rack up and they amount to a lot more than a hill of beans when you're done!

I also record on the calendar what the word count that day was, and my running totals for the month and for the project as a whole. I've had to write in the middle of the night, so I go to bed anything between 2.00 and 4.00 a.m. I've literally fallen asleep on occasion - and my fingers have kept typing! I often don't know the next day what it was I wrote the previous night, so am eager to read it! Every night I start with blankness and force myself - really force myself to get going. Most times it gets better once the first sentence or so is down. Some nights it doesn't get better at all, but I keep grinding on.

I'm delighted to say that I hit my 20,000 word target on November 23rd and tonight I'll be reaching 90,000 words for the project as a whole. There's a long long way to go. After that, the thing may never sell. I'm a realist.

But I'm also a writer - and feel I can say that, when sometimes in the past I haven't felt I deserved that label. If you've been doing NaNo, you're a writer - whether you wrote 50,000 words or 5,000. If you didn't do NaNo this year, consider it next year - or choose any month for your own personal NaNo. Make it your own. Try the chain of red crosses. Set achievable goals. Have faith!

Here are the links to my posts on NaNo back in 2010:
NaNo with a Twist
Post-NaNo Post: How to Keep Writing!

Remembrance Day 2012

I read today that we are now as far in time from Passchendaele as Passchendaele was from Waterloo. A salutary thought on this, the day devoted to remembrance. All the cliches of communal mourning are aired once more - yet so terrible was that conflict that its horrors maintain their capacity to shock. I'm reposting two previous entries here: the first, from last year, is on Owen, Sassoon and First World War poetry; the second, from 2008, is about Harry Patch the much-loved First World War veteran, still alive at that time, who fought in the mud of Passchendaele.

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

Wilfred Owen

I'm writing this a few minutes after 11.11.11 - and like many others, feeling the need to acknowledge the significance of the day and the hour. I'm currently teaching Wilfred Owen's poetry and remember as a fifteen year old schoolgirl encountering war poetry for the first time. I reacted as we all do to the absurd hubristic nonsense of human aggression and its justifications. The poem that struck me then more than any other was Owen's 'Futility'. More than the visceral horrors of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' or the plaintive Keatsian melancholy of 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', 'Futility', in its simplicity, brought home that essential message of WWI. The waste. Owen said that his subject was war and the pity of war, that the poetry was in the pity: well, it's here, in a poem that questions the purpose and meaning of individuals coming into the world, being nurtured to maturity - only to be slaughtered. He even questions the cosmic purpose of the sun in warming a planet into organic life - if all that results is pointless destruction.

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France.
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.


Think how it wakes the seeds -
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Owen's poetry is famous for its superbly shocking images: the soldier floundering in the 'green sea' of gas, the sentry reeling from the blast, his eyes 'huge-bulged like squids'', the God's eye view of the battlefield where lines of men are like 'caterpillars' and he sees how they 'ramped' on one another. His sensory language is muscular and gripping: the gassed soldier is 'guttering, choking, drowning', the weapons of war are spiteful and gleeful - 'How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood:/Blue with all malice'. The sounds of blast and gunfire echo over the decades to us with their 'rapid rattle' and 'whizz-bangs' through the 'shrieking air'. In 'Exposure' he shares with us the bone-aching cold and long suspense, waiting for the signal for battle:

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us ...
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent ...
Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient ...
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
     But nothing happens. 

He haunts us, as he was haunted, in the halls of hell in 'Strange Meeting', where he encounters the dead German he has killed and listens to the lesson we hear now, and every year, and yet never act upon:

For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

He also, like his mentor Sassoon, lets us know how angered and bitter he feels, how nothing back in Blighty can match the camaraderie of the Front, how no immature concepts of romantic love and fleeting beauty can compare with the fellowship he has found: in 'Apologia pro Poemate Meo' he lists the paradoxes of finding exultation in the berserkr mood of battle, the 'passion of oblation' on the faces of his fellow soldiers, how he:

heard music in the silentness of duty;
Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.


Nevertheless, except you share 
With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,
And heaven but as the highway for a shell,


You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

It's ironic that when he died, one week before the Armistice, he was little known (ironic, but not unusual - so many times the long trajectory of fame only starts to climb after the artist's death) - and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke would have been better known back then. Nowadays, it's Wilfred who is the poster boy for the Great War - it's his words that are most familiar to us. This should not devalue them. I've taught these poems so many times but still somehow there's the shock of the new.

Siegfried Sassoon

I want to include in this post, however, one of my other favourite WWI poems - Sassoon's 'The General'. It's a wonderfully spiky little verse, dealing with one of the themes of the literature of war - that soldiers are 'lions led by donkeys':

"Good morning, good morning!" the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.


But he did for them both by his plan of attack.


In our current conflicts, conflicts which we neither seem to understand nor see a way out of once embroiled, conflicts where all sorts of moral muddiness is stirred up in what seemed to be the clear pool of heroism,  the poets of nearly a century ago still have much to say. And it's sad that they still have to say it.

Harry Patch

Here's a link to the post I wrote in 2008 about the wonderful Harry Patch, who was one of the last survivors of the Great War. Now Claude Choules, who had emigrated to Australia, is gone too - and there's no one left to bear witness with living breath to what was done and seen and lost. But we have archive film and audio recordings and the printed word.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, 

We will remember them.

The Last Fighting Tommy - 21 November 2008

Well, you could argue that, as with all anniversaries the media lock onto, we've had overload - over the past few weeks the First World War has featured everywhere. It's certainly been useful to me professionally, as I'm currently teaching it as a literature topic. During the week I've been collecting The Guardian's series of booklets on the war and they've been fascinating. I paid more attention than usual to Sunday's Remembrance service and was so moved by the three surviving veterans, Bill Stone (108), Henry Allingham (112) and Harry Patch (110), visiting the Cenotaph on Tuesday with their wreaths of poppies. On Sunday I watched the programmes about Wilfred Owen and about Vera Brittain, who lost all the men she loved during the war, including her brother Edward, towards the very end of it. On PoemRelish, my other blog, I mentioned her memoir, 'Testament of Youth' among other books worth reading about WW1. On Sunday I found myself wondering why, among this plethora of 1914-18 nostalgia and analysis, the Beeb wasn't repeating the excellent serial version of 'Testament of Youth' first broadcast in the 1970s. It starred Cheryl Campbell as Vera and it was a truly powerful and poignant piece of television drama which brought me to the book, before I ever had to teach it. Now I've found out that, apparently, they're remaking it, so that's why the original was not shown. Hmn. Mixed feelings: it's good in a way that they are, as hopefully it will bring more people to awareness (and we have to rely on the TV screen more than the written word for this these days). There's no reason to assume they won't make a good job of it second time round. But on the other hand, there's that old saying 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' The original was brilliant - why not just re-show it?

I've just finished reading 'The Last Fighting Tommy', the biography of Harry Patch, who is the last man in Britain who actually fought in the trenches. He fought - and was wounded - at Passchendaele. Harry Patch featured on the BBC a few years back and has become famous for his longevity and his memories; his fame has grown as the number of survivors has declined and we all find ourselves unnerved at the prospect of the First World War sliding inevitably out of living memory. He is a man of immense spirit, who didn't really talk about his experiences until he was in his nineties. His eyes still fill with tears when he recalls what he saw and felt. At first I felt a slight disappointment with the book as the war experience (the thing that, essentially, is used to sell the book) doesn't take up all that much space. He undergoes training, he goes over there, he sees the bad stuff, he's wounded by shrapnel, he's invalided home, all in a matter of months. Is that it, then? Well, no. It dawned on me that that's the point: this is the story of an immensely old man, on whom those few months made a great and terrible and lasting impression. His memories lurked within him all through the decades that followed and they have never left him, though all the friends and fellow soldiers, two wives, two sons, and a whole way of life have departed. The book is worth reading because not only does it tell you about that war, it tells you of a century of British life and culture. Harry's childhood was Edwardian: no running water, little awareness of the outside world, little material wealth, harmony with nature. He was a child for whom news of the sinking of the Titanic was of little interest - it took place beyond the narrow limits of his West Country life. After the First World War and during the Second, where he served as a member of the local fire crew during the bombing of Bath, Harry was the sort of Englishman who just got on with life: he is and was, essentially, a decent man, uncomplaining, raising his family, going to work to earn his crust as a plumber, a man who believed in a right way of doing things, who has no patience with pretentiousness or self-indulgence. Bless you, Harry, and even longer life to you: we don't want to lose you, our twentieth century Everyman.

NaNoWriMo - the Secrets of Success Part 1

Tomorrow, National Novel Writing Month – NaNo for short – starts again, and during the next 30 days hundreds of thousands of writers all over the world will attempt to write 50,000 words at a rate of 1667 a day. (In fact, they’ve started in New Zealand already …). They’ll join Forums, upload word counts, forget the housework and walking the dog. They’ll laugh crazily, weep tears of exhausted despair, stare at the screen, hit the keyboard, hit the screen, hit the wall … They’ll overdose on caffeine and triumph – and in all likelihood they’ll have difficulty remembering their own names by November 21^st.

So here you are, on October 31^st, wondering whether to join in with the creative insanity. Look, you’ve got a To Do List as long as a giant’s arm already – why do this? Why put yourself through it? What will you get out of it? If, on November 30^th the magic 50,000 word mark has been reached, you get a certificate. Big wow, you might say. But there’s so much more to it: there’s an enormous sense of pride. You’ll have put 50,000 words on the hard disk, on paper – that simply weren’t there before. They may be raw, rushed and clumsy words, but they’re words plucked out of your brain and sent down the neural pathways to that paper or screen – ultimately to make their way into the brains of your readers. You’ve gone beyond the idle ‘I’d like to write a novel sometime …’ You’ve cut the tree down, chopped it into planks and staves and masts, nailed most of it together – you can now trim and hone, carve and plane, shaping your ship of dreams and sending it out onto the ocean … OK, enough of the seafaring metaphor!

In this and the next blogpost or two, I’m going to explore NaNo and how to make it work for you, with an honest discussion of the benefits and the pitfalls. I’ll talk about my past experience and what I’ve learned from it – and whether I’ve decided to join in this year (still dithering at this point, with eleven hours to go!)

So, what’s the first lesson in making it work for you?

Make it your own.

Even though this is a huge collective endeavour, make it your own personal NaNo.

It’s wonderful to have the structure of Nano behind you, with the sense of that global community – but this is your Nano. You don’t need to write 50,000 words.

You should set your own goals. Make them challenging – yes. Make them aspirational enough to give you a sense of satisfaction when you rise to the challenge. Don’t make them impossible – don’t set yourself up for a fall and for that horribly familiar feeling that you can’t do this writing thing.

At midnight on November 30^th I want you to be sitting in a golden glow of Serene Self-Satisfaction or under the glitter-ball of Total Triumph – not weltering in a grey miasma of Despair.

Today’s the day to consider joining. Today’s the day to consider your writing project –

• Is it a project that’s been on your mind and now you feel ready to start it?

• Do you have several projects on the go? If so, pick one for NaNo.

• If you’re just setting out, try to block out the rough shape of it and decide how much of it you’re going to tackle in the coming month.

• If you’re midway, where in the arc of your story have you reached? My bet is, you’re in that difficult mid-section. If so, you might use NaNo to hammer your way through this tricky bit, gritting your teeth all the way if need be, knowing that you’ll have the pleasure of coasting to the denouement later on.

• Is this a project that is well-advanced but which has beached itself? Now’s the time to refloat it (drifting into seafaring metaphors again, sorry!) Use NaNo to finish the thing, for good or ill.

• You don’t even need to write new stuff if you don’t want to – you can use NaNo for concentrated editing of your manuscript.

Be honest with yourself: if NaNo is not for you, whether this year or ever, don’t do it! There’s no law saying you should. Be a rugged individualist, stand back and watch other people suffer in that peculiar NaNo way. Don’t guilt-trip about it. Writers have a strange talent for finding oh so many triggers for feeling guilty – don’t let non-participation be one of them.

The secret of NaNo, then, is to know whether to join in and how to make it work for you: I’ll talk some more about the latter in my next post.

In the meantime, pop over to the NaNoWriMo website, run by the delightfully-named Office of Letters and Light, at www.nanowrimo.org – you’ll find loads of inspirational advice and enthusiasm there. Sometimes it’s a bit cheerleader-y, but hey, in the gloom of November we need all the sunny positivity we can get …

Upcoming Fictionfire Focus Workshops - a reminder

WINTER BLOCK

VILLAINS WITH RELISH (November 10th - booking closes November 7th)
Everybody loves a baddie - but how do you describe a really good baddie? In this workshop we'll set about creating villains who are memorably nasty in all sorts of ways.

SHORT STORY WRITING (November 24th - booking closes November 21st)
In this workshop we'll explore the constraints and advantages of the genre and the writing skills you need to craft effective short fiction.

FESTIVITIES AND FROST (December 1st - booking closes November 28th)
As the festive season arrives, we'll explore how you can use Christmas and winter settings to create powerful scenes in your fiction which will resonate with your reader - whether the tone is 'Bah, humbug!' or 'God bless us, every one!'

There are discounts for booking more than one workshop. You can find out more and make your booking by going to the Focus Workshops page on my  Fictionfire website. I hope you can join us!

Fictionfire:
fire up your imagination
fuel your self-belief